Getting China Wrong. Aaron L. Friedberg
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foundations on which the policy of engagement had come to rest. The killing of over one thousand unarmed students in Beijing’s central Tiananmen Square in June 1989 served as a brutal reminder of the CCP regime’s continued, repressive character and cast doubt on facile assumptions about the inevitability of liberalizing reforms. Five months later, the Berlin Wall was reduced to rubble by another group of peaceful protestors, unleashing a wave of pent-up demand for change that would overturn Communist regimes across Eastern Europe, culminating in December 1991 with the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union. The primary justification for two decades of engagement – the claim that the United States needed China to help it balance Soviet power and win the Cold War – had suddenly been rendered obsolete.
It would not take long for an entirely new set of rationales to take shape, sustaining most, though not all, aspects of previous US policy and eventually gaining widespread, if not universal, acceptance. These rationales and the expectations derived from them will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2. In order to understand the logic that underpinned them, and to appreciate their emotional appeal and enduring persuasive power, it is necessary first to describe the unique set of historical circumstances, the distinctive confluence of events, ideas, and material interests, out of which they emerged.
Ideology: the American vision of a liberal international order
With the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States was suddenly the sole remaining superpower, with economic resources, military capabilities, and political prestige far exceeding those of any potential rival. What this meant to American policy-makers was not only that their own country was more secure, but also that for the third time in a century they had an opportunity and, as they saw it, an obligation to reshape the world in ways that would make it more peaceful and prosperous for generations to come. Their thinking about how to do this, and their vision of the ideal international system that they hoped to build, reflected principles deeply rooted in the nation’s founding.
In 1919, and again in 1945, the United States had taken the lead in trying to construct what would today be described as a “liberal international order”: a system made up of democratic states, bound together by trade, multilateral institutions, agreed norms of behavior, and a shared commitment to the protection of certain universal human rights. This vision was essentially an outward projection of the principles on which the American domestic political regime had been built: a belief in the primacy of individual liberty, and a set of rights and institutions meant to protect it, including representative government, private property, and the rule of law. The American design for an ideal international order also reflected the claims of the eighteenth-century philosophers of liberalism: that self-governing republics were less warlike than monarchies; that nations whose economies were organized around free markets and private property were more inclined to trade freely with one another than those pursuing the mercantilist schemes of powerful princes; and that trade itself was conducive to peace.
At the end of World War I, with Europe in ruins, Woodrow Wilson had tried to use the unmatched material strength and, in his view, the superior moral authority of the United States to reshape the entire international system along liberal lines. Wilson’s plan called for overturning the autocratic regimes that he blamed for starting the war and replacing them with democracies, dividing Europe’s multi-ethnic empires into self-governing nation states, breaking up imperial trading blocs, and instituting a world order based on free trade, freedom of navigation, open diplomacy, and mutual arms reductions. The entire system would be capped by a new kind of international institution, a League of Nations whose members would pledge to defend one another against aggression, regardless of the source.21
This scheme, sweeping in its scope and ambition, was quickly rejected as impractical and even dangerous, both by America’s wartime allies and by Wilson’s domestic political opponents. Nevertheless, as Henry Kissinger has pointed out, with the United States finally coming into its own as a world power, Wilson had managed to define a distinctive, liberal vision for its foreign policy objectives that “grasped the mainsprings of American motivation” and, in particular, the belief that the nation’s “exceptional character resides in the practice and propagation of freedom.”22 Indeed, Kissinger writes: “Wilson’s principles were so pervasive, so deeply related to the American perception of itself, that when two decades later the issue of world order came up again … America turned once more to … Wilsonian principles.”23
At the start of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt self-consciously echoed Wilson’s rhetoric, declaring his intention to build a post-war world on the principles of self-determination, free trade, freedom of the seas, and a commitment to “life, liberty, independence … religious freedom,” and “the preservation of human rights and justice.”24 Like Wilson, Roosevelt also believed that, once the war was over, some kind of multilateral, collective security mechanism would be essential to keeping the peace. Hoping to strengthen the original design of Wilson’s League, the president and his planners proposed that a new United Nations grant special authority to Britain, China, the United States, and the Soviet Union, the “Four Policemen” that had worked together to defeat fascism and which were supposedly united, as FDR said of Stalin at one point, in their desire “for a world of democracy and peace.”25 This claim, however, required an obfuscation of the true character of the Soviet regime that became impossible to sustain as the war drew to a close.
With the breakdown of the wartime alliance and the onset of the Cold War, the United States was forced again to abandon the dream of a truly global liberal order. This time, however, instead of withdrawing in disappointment and disgust, the nation set out to build what a 1950 strategic planning document described as a “successfully functioning political and economic system in the free world.”26 Although it would take some time fully to take shape, what emerged from this effort was a partial rather than an all-encompassing liberal international order; a sub-system of democratic states, organized and operating on liberal principles, that would eventually come to include the advanced democracies of Western Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. These nations were joined together by expanding flows of goods, capital, people, and information, by military alliances and other multilateral mechanisms for consultation and policy coordination, and by shared political values. The resulting loose coalition (often referred to with some lack of geographic precision as “the West”) proved to be enormously successful in generating both wealth and power. Over a forty-year period of intense rivalry, its members were able to out-produce, out-innovate, and ultimately outlast their Communist competitors.
As the Cold War wound down, US officials sought once again to outline their preferred vision for the world. It should come as no surprise that they did so by describing a liberal international order using language and concepts virtually identical to those deployed by their forebears. “What is it we want to see?” asked newly elected President George H.W. Bush in the spring of 1989. “It is a growing community of democracies anchoring international peace and stability, and a dynamic free-market system generating prosperity and progress on a global scale.”27
Despite the president’s well-known aversion to “the vision thing,” as he rallied the nation to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein, Bush indulged in flights of Wilsonian rhetoric of a sort that had been largely absent from public discourse for most of the preceding half-century. What was at stake, he told a joint session of Congress in January 1991, was nothing less than “a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind – peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.” This supposed convergence of values, signified by the Soviet Union’s willingness to vote in favor of intervention in the UN Security Council, meant that it might finally be possible to implement a working system of collective security: “[F]or the first time since World War II, the international community is united,” Bush declared. “The leadership of the United Nations, once only a hoped-for ideal, is now confirming its founders’ vision.”28 By the spring of 1992, a few months after the final collapse of the Soviet Union, even a hard-nosed pragmatist like Secretary of State James Baker could describe the administration’s