Since the end of the Cold War, big strategic thinkers have been longing for an enemy worthy of their big strategic brains. Many have tried hard to turn China into one. In the late '90s, Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon's near-legendary chief of "net assessment" and the last of the Truman-era Cold Warriors, directed a study that called for a wholesale reallocation of military assets away from Europe and toward Asia. In the view of Pentagon planners, the new Fulda Gap"”the region where Soviet troops were poised to invade Western Europe during the Cold War"”would be the South China Sea, a key "chokepoint" that the Chinese might some day seek to control. The prominent realist scholar John Mearsheimer argued that if China continued "modernizing at a rapid pace," it "would surely pursue regional hegemony, just as the United States did in the western hemisphere during the nineteenth century." His potted prescription: America should not only withdraw from engagement but slow down China's growth. (Click here to follow Michael Hirsh).
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Outsourcing Old Glory
A Chinese factory makes American flags for President Barack Obama's first visit to Asia
The debate, fortunately, has moved somewhat beyond those simplistic, stuck-in-the-last-war views of the U.S.-China relationship. But it hasn't moved far enough. Today's grand strategic critiques tend to focus on economics"”the staggering imbalances between China's capital surpluses and America's deficits"”while still using Cold War terminology. That's why, in 2004, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, described the relationship between America and China and Japan, the largest holders of U.S. debt, as "a kind of balance of financial terror." New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, in the latest iteration of this approach, urged President Obama to talk tough to Beijing about currency during his first visit to China this week in order to avoid "a potentially ugly confrontation." Krugman said the Chinese were deliberately keeping their currency weak as part of a strategy of "beggar-thy-neighbor devaluation" that would allow China to maintain its export might. Beijing's aim is to appease its own population with continued high economic growth while doing nothing to help ease America's double-digit unemployment, and that's a "dangerous game," Krugman warned.
My Ordeal Ai Weiwei
An artist explains why Barack Obama should be talking about human rights during his first visit to China this week.
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