EPILOGUE
Does History Repeat Itself?
The Crowe Memorandum
The Crowe Memorandum
A NUMBER OF COMMENTATORS, including some in China,
have revisited the example of the twentieth-century Anglo-German
rivalry as an augury of what may await the United States and China
in the twenty-first century. There are surely strategic comparisons
to be made. At the most superficial level, China is, as was
imperial Germany, a resurgent continental power; the United States,
like Britain, is primarily a naval power with deep political and
economic ties to the continent. China, throughout its history, was
more powerful than any of the plethora of its neighbors, but they,
when combined, could—and did—threaten the security of the empire.
As in the case of Germany’s unification in the nineteenth century,
the calculations of all of these countries are inevitably affected
by the reemergence of China as a strong, united state. Such a
system has historically evolved into a balance of power based on
equilibrating threats.
Can strategic trust
replace a system of strategic threats? Strategic trust is treated
by many as a contradiction in terms. Strategists rely on the
intentions of the presumed adversary only to a limited extent. For
intentions are subject to change. And the essence of sovereignty is
the right to make decisions not subject to another authority. A
certain amount of threat based on capabilities is therefore
inseparable from the relations of sovereign states.
It is possible—though
it rarely happens—that relations grow so close that strategic
threats are excluded. In relations between the states bordering the
North Atlantic, strategic confrontations are not conceivable. The
military establishments are not directed against each other.
Strategic threats are perceived as arising outside the Atlantic
region, to be dealt with in an alliance framework. Disputes between
the North Atlantic states tend to focus on divergent assessments of
international issues and the means of dealing with them; even at
their most bitter, they retain the character of an interfamily
dispute. Soft power and multilateral diplomacy are the dominant
tools of foreign policy, and for some Western European states,
military action is all but excluded as a legitimate instrument of
state policy.
In Asia, by contrast,
the states consider themselves in potential confrontation with
their neighbors. It is not that they necessarily plan on war; they
simply do not exclude it. If they are too weak for self-defense,
they seek to make themselves part of an alliance system that
provides additional protection, as in the case with ASEAN, the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Sovereignty, in many cases
regained relatively recently after periods of foreign colonization,
has an absolute character. The principles of the Westphalian system
prevail, more so than on their continent of origin. The concept of
sovereignty is considered paramount. Aggression is defined as the
movement of organized military units across borders.
Noninterference in domestic affairs is taken as a fundamental
principle of interstate relations. In a state system so organized,
diplomacy seeks to preserve the key elements of the balance of
power.
An international
system is relatively stable if the level of reassurance required by
its members is achievable by diplomacy. When diplomacy no longer
functions, relationships become increasingly concentrated on
military strategy—first in the form of arms races, then as a
maneuvering for strategic advantage even at the risk of
confrontation, and, finally, in war itself.
A classic example of
a self-propelling international mechanism is European diplomacy
prior to World War I, at a time when world policy was European
policy because much of the world was in colonial status. By the
second half of the nineteenth century, Europe had been without a
major war since the Napoleonic period had ended in 1815. The
European states were in rough strategic equilibrium; the conflicts
between them did not involve their existence. No state considered
another an irreconcilable enemy. This made shifting alliances
feasible. No state was considered powerful enough to establish
hegemony over the others. Any such effort triggered a coalition
against it.
The unification of
Germany in 1871 brought about a structural change. Until that time,
Central Europe contained—it is hard to imagine today—thirty-nine
sovereign states of varying size. Only Prussia and Austria could be
considered major powers within the European equilibrium. The
multiple small states were organized within Germany in an
institution that operated like the United Nations in the
contemporary world, the so-called German Confederation. Like the
United Nations, the German Confederation found it difficult to take
initiatives but occasionally came together for joint action against
what was perceived as overwhelming danger. Too divided for
aggression, yet sufficiently strong for defense, the German
Confederation made a major contribution to the European
equilibrium.
But equilibrium was
not what motivated the changes of the nineteenth century in Europe.
Nationalism did. The unification of Germany reflected the
aspirations of a century. It also led over time to a crisis
atmosphere. The rise of Germany weakened the elasticity of the
diplomatic process, and it increased the threat to the system.
Where once there had been thirty-seven small states and two
relatively major ones, a single political unit emerged uniting
thirty-eight of them. Where previously European diplomacy had
achieved a certain flexibility through the shifting alignments of a
multiplicity of states, the unification of Germany reduced the
possible combinations and led to the creation of a state stronger
than each of its neighbors alone. This is why Prime Minister
Benjamin Disraeli of Britain called the unification of Germany an
event more significant than the French Revolution.
Germany was now so
strong that it could defeat each of its neighbors singly, though it
would be in grave peril if all the major European states combined
against it. Since there were only five major states now, the
combinations were limited. Germany’s neighboring states had an
incentive to form a coalition with each other—especially France and
Russia, which did so in 1892—and Germany had a built-in incentive
to break the alliances.
The crisis of the
system was inherent in its structure. No single country could avoid
it, least of all the rising power Germany. But they could avoid
policies that exacerbated latent tensions. This no country
did—least of all, once again, the German empire. The tactics chosen
by Germany to break up hostile coalitions proved unwise as well as
unfortunate. It sought to use international conferences to
demonstratively impose its will on the participants. The German
theory was that the humiliated target of German pressure would feel
abandoned by its allies and, leaving the alliance, would seek
security within the German orbit. The consequences proved the
opposite of what was intended. The humiliated countries (France, in
the Moroccan crisis in 1905; and Russia, over Bosnia-Herzegovina in
1908) were reinforced in their determination not to accept
subjugation, thereby tightening the alliance system that Germany
had sought to weaken. The Franco-Russian alliance was, in 1904,
joined (informally) by Britain, which Germany had offended by
demonstratively sympathizing with Britain’s Dutch settler
adversaries in the Boer War (1899–1902). In addition, Germany
challenged Britain’s command of the seas by building a large navy
to complement what was already the most powerful land army on the
continent. Europe had slipped into, in effect, a bipolar system
with no diplomatic flexibility. Foreign policy had become a
zero-sum game.
Will history repeat
itself? No doubt were the United States and China to fall into
strategic conflict, a situation comparable to the pre–World War I
European structure could develop in Asia, with the formation of
blocs pitted against each other and with each seeking to undermine
or at least limit the other’s influence and reach. But before we
surrender to the presumed mechanism of history, let us consider how
the United Kingdom and German rivalry actually
operated.
In 1907, a senior
official in the British Foreign Office, Eyre Crowe, wrote a
brilliant analysis of the European political structure and
Germany’s rise. The key question he raised, and which has acute
relevance today, is whether the crisis that led to World War I was
caused by Germany’s rise, evoking a kind of organic resistance to
the emergence of a new and powerful force, or whether it was caused
by specific and, hence, avoidable German policies.1 Was the crisis
caused by German capabilities or German conduct?
In his memorandum,
submitted on New Year’s Day 1907, Crowe opted for the conflict
being inherent in the relationship. He defined the issue as
follows:
For England particularly, intellectual and moral kinship creates a sympathy and appreciation of what is best in the German mind, which has made her naturally predisposed to welcome, in the interest of the general progress of mankind, everything tending to strengthen that power and influence—on one condition: there must be respect for the individualities of other nations, equally valuable coadjutors, in their way, in the work of human progress, equally entitled to full elbowroom in which to contribute, in freedom, to the evolution of a higher civilization.2
But what was
Germany’s real goal? Was it natural evolution of German cultural
and economic interests across Europe and the world, to which German
diplomacy was giving traditional support? Or did Germany seek “a
general political hegemony and maritime ascendancy, threatening the
independence of her neighbours and ultimately the existence of
England”?3
Crowe concluded that
it made no difference what goal Germany avowed. Whichever course
Germany was pursuing, “Germany would clearly be wise to build as
powerful a navy as she can afford.” And once Germany achieved naval
supremacy, Crowe assessed, this in
itself—regardless of German intentions—would be an objective
threat to Britain, and “incompatible with the existence of the
British Empire.”4
Under those
conditions, formal assurances were meaningless. No matter what the
German government’s professions were, the result would be “as
formidable a menace to the rest of the world as would be presented
by any deliberate conquest of a similar position by ‘malice
aforethought.’”5 Even if moderate German statesmen were to
demonstrate their bona fides, moderate German foreign policy could
“at any stage merge into” a conscious scheme for
hegemony.
Thus structural
elements, in Crowe’s analysis, precluded cooperation or even trust.
As Crowe wryly observed: “It would not be unjust to say that
ambitious designs against one’s neighbours are not as a rule openly
proclaimed, and that therefore the absence of such proclamation,
and even the profession of unlimited and universal political
benevolence, are not in themselves conclusive evidence for or
against the existence of unpublished intentions.”6 And since the stakes
were so high, it was “not a matter in which England can safely run
any risks.”7 London was obliged to assume the worst, and
act on the basis of its assumptions—at least so long as Germany was
building a large and challenging navy.
In other words,
already in 1907 there was no longer any scope for diplomacy; the
issue had become who would back down in a crisis, and whenever that
condition was not fulfilled, war was nearly inevitable. It took
seven years to reach the point of world war.
Were Crowe to analyze
the contemporary scene, he might emerge with a judgment comparable
to his 1907 report. I will sketch that interpretation, though it
differs substantially from my own, because it approximates a view
widely held on both sides of the Pacific. The United States and
China have been not so much nation-states as continental
expressions of cultural identities. Both have historically been
driven to visions of universality by their economic and political
achievements and their people’s irrepressible energy and
self-confidence. Both Chinese and American governments have
frequently assumed a seamless identity between their national
policies and the general interests of mankind. Crowe might warn
that when two such entities encounter each other on the world stage
significant tension is probable.
Whatever China’s
intentions, the Crowe school of thought would treat a successful
Chinese “rise” as incompatible with America’s position in the
Pacific and by extension the world. Any form of cooperation would
be treated as simply giving China scope to build its capacities for
an eventual crisis. Thus the entire Chinese debate recounted in
chapter 18, and the question of whether China might stop “hiding
its brightness,” would be immaterial for purposes of a Crowe-type
analysis: someday it will (the analysis would posit), so America
should act now as if it already had.
The American debate
adds an ideological challenge to Crowe’s balance-of-power approach.
Neoconservatives and other activists would argue that democratic
institutions are the prerequisite to relations of trust and
confidence. Nondemocratic societies, in this view, are inherently
precarious and prone to the exercise of force. Therefore the United
States is obliged to exercise its maximum influence (in its polite
expression) or pressure to bring about more pluralistic
institutions where they do not exist, and especially in countries
capable of threatening American security. In these conceptions,
regime change is the ultimate goal of American foreign policy in
dealing with nondemocratic societies; peace with China is less a
matter of strategy than of change in Chinese
governance.
Nor is the analysis,
interpreting international affairs as an unavoidable struggle for
strategic preeminence, confined to Western strategists. Chinese
“triumphalists” apply almost identical reasoning. The principal
difference is that their perspective is that of the rising power,
while Crowe represented the United Kingdom, defending its patrimony
as a status quo country. An example of this genre is Colonel Liu
Mingfu’s China Dream, discussed in
chapter 18. In Liu’s view, no matter how much China commits itself
to a “peaceful rise,” conflict is inherent in U.S.-China relations.
The relationship between China and the United States will be a
“marathon contest” and the “duel of the century.”8 Moreover, the
competition is essentially zero-sum; the only alternative to total
success is humiliating failure: “If China in the 21st century
cannot become world number one, cannot become the top power, then
inevitably it will become a straggler that is cast aside.”9
Neither the American
version of the Crowe Memorandum nor the more triumphalist Chinese
analyses have been endorsed by either government, but they provide
a subtext of much current thought. If the assumptions of these
views were applied by either side—and it would take only one side
to make it unavoidable—China and the United States could easily
fall into the kind of escalating tension described earlier in this
epilogue. China would try to push American power as far away from
its borders as it could, circumscribe the scope of American naval
power, and reduce America’s weight in international diplomacy. The
United States would try to organize China’s many neighbors into a
counterweight to Chinese dominance. Both sides would emphasize
their ideological differences. The interaction would be even more
complicated because the notions of deterrence and preemption are
not symmetrical between these two sides. The United States is more
focused on overwhelming military power, China on decisive
psychological impact. Sooner or later, one side or the other would
miscalculate.
Once such a pattern
has congealed, it becomes increasingly difficult to overcome. The
competing camps achieve identity by their definition of themselves.
The essence of what Crowe described (and the Chinese triumphalists
and some American neoconservatives embrace) is its seeming
automaticity. Once the pattern was created and the alliances were
formed, no escape was possible from its self-imposed requirements,
especially not from its internal assumptions.
The reader of the
Crowe Memorandum cannot fail to notice that the specific examples
of mutual hostility being cited were relatively trivial compared to
the conclusions drawn from them: incidents of colonial rivalry in
Southern Africa, disputes about the conduct of civil servants. It
was not what either side had already done that drove the rivalry.
It was what it might do. Events had turned into symbols; symbols
developed their own momentum. There was nothing left to settle
because the system of alliances confronting each other had no
margin of adjustment.
That must not happen
in the relations of the United States and China insofar as American
policy can prevent it. Of course, were Chinese policy to insist on
playing by Crowe Memorandum rules, the United States would be bound
to resist. It would be an unfortunate outcome.
I have described the
possible evolution at such length to show that I am aware of the
realistic obstacles to the cooperative U.S.-China relationship I
consider essential to global stability and peace. A cold war
between the two countries would arrest progress for a generation on
both sides of the Pacific. It would spread disputes into internal
politics of every region at a time when global issues such as
nuclear proliferation, the environment, energy security, and
climate change impose global cooperation.
Historical parallels
are by nature inexact. And even the most precise analogy does not
oblige the present generation to repeat the mistakes of its
predecessors. After all, the outcome was disaster for all involved,
victors as well as defeated. Care must be taken lest both sides
analyze themselves into self-fulfilling prophecies. This will not
be an easy task. For, as the Crowe Memorandum has shown, mere
reassurances will not arrest the underlying dynamism. For were any
nation determined to achieve dominance, would it not be offering
assurances of peaceful intent? A serious joint effort involving the
continuous attention of top leaders is needed to develop a sense of
genuine strategic trust and cooperation.
Relations between
China and the United States need not—and should not—become a
zero-sum game. For the pre–World War I European leader, the
challenge was that a gain for one side spelled a loss for the
other, and compromise ran counter to an aroused public opinion.
This is not the situation in the Sino-American relationship. Key
issues on the international front are global in nature. Consensus
may prove difficult, but confrontation on these issues is
self-defeating.
Nor is the internal
evolution of the principal players comparable to the situation
before World War I. When China’s rise is projected, it is assumed
that the extraordinary thrust of the last decades will be projected
into the indefinite future and that the relative stagnation of
America is fated. But no issue preoccupies Chinese leaders more
than the preservation of national unity. It permeates the
frequently proclaimed goal of social harmony, which is difficult in
a country where its coastal regions are on the level of the
advanced societies but whose interior contains some of the world’s
most backward areas.
The Chinese national
leadership has put forward to its people a catalogue of tasks to be
accomplished. These include combating corruption, which President
Hu Jintao has called an “unprecedentedly grim task” and in the
fight against which Hu has been involved at various stages of his
career.10 They involve as well a “Western
development campaign,” designed to lift up poor inland provinces,
among them the three in which Hu once lived. Key proclaimed tasks
also include establishing additional ties between the leadership
and the peasantry, including fostering village-level democratic
elections, and enhanced transparency of the political process as
China evolves into an urbanized society. In his December 2010
article, discussed in chapter 18, Dai Bingguo outlined the scope of
China’s domestic challenge:
According to the United Nations’ living standard of $1 per day, China today still has 150 million people living below the poverty line. Even based on the poverty standard of per capita income of 1,200 yuan, China still has more than 40 million people living in poverty. At present, there are still 10 million people without access to electricity and the issue of jobs for 24 million people has to be resolved every year. China has a huge population and a weak foundation, the development between the cities and the countryside is uneven, the industrial structure is not rational, and the underdeveloped state of the forces of production has not been fundamentally changed.11
The Chinese domestic
challenge is, by the description of its leaders, far more complex
than can be encompassed in the invocation of the phrase “China’s
inexorable rise.”
Amazing as Deng’s
reforms were, part of China’s spectacular growth over the initial
decades was attributable to its good fortune that there existed a
fairly easy correspondence between China’s huge pool of young, then
largely unskilled labor—which had been “unnaturally” cut off from
the world economy during the Mao years—and the Western economies,
which were on the whole wealthy, optimistic, and highly leveraged
on credit, with cash to buy Chinese-made goods. Now that China’s
labor force is becoming older and more skilled (causing some basic
manufacturing jobs to move to lower-wage countries such as Vietnam
and Bangladesh) and the West is entering a period of austerity, the
picture is far more complicated.
Demography will
compound that task. Propelled by increasing standards of living and
longevity combined with the distortions of the one-child policy,
China has one of the world’s most rapidly aging populations. The
country’s total working-age population is expected to peak in
2015.12 From this point on, a shrinking number of
Chinese citizens aged fifteen to sixty-four need to support an
increasingly large elderly population. The demographic shifts will
be stark: by 2030, the number of rural workers between the ages of
twenty and twenty-nine is estimated to be half its current level
.13 By 2050,
one-half of China’s population is projected to be forty-five or
older, with a full quarter of China’s population—roughly equivalent
to the entire current population of the United States—sixty-five
and older.14
A country facing such
large domestic tasks is not going to throw itself easily, much less
automatically, into strategic confrontation or a quest for world
domination. The existence of weapons of mass destruction and modern
military technologies of unknowable ultimate consequences define a
key distinction from the pre–World War I period. The leaders who
started that war had no understanding of the consequences of the
weapons at their disposal. Contemporary leaders can have no
illusions about the destructive potential they are capable of
unleashing.
The crucial
competition between the United States and China is more likely to
be economic and social than military. If present trends in the two
countries’ economic growth, fiscal health, infrastructure spending,
and educational infrastructure continue, a gap in development—and
in third-party perceptions of relative influence—may take hold,
particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. But this is a prospect it
is in the capacity of the United States to arrest or perhaps
reverse by its own efforts.
The United States
bears the responsibility to retain its competitiveness and its
world role. It should do this for its own traditional convictions,
rather than as a contest with China. Building competitiveness is a
largely American project, which we should not ask China to solve
for us. China, fulfilling its own interpretation of its national
destiny, will continue to develop its economy and pursue a broad
range of interests in Asia and beyond. This is not a prospect that
dictates the confrontations that led to the First World War. It
suggests an evolution in many aspects of which China and the United
States cooperate as much as they compete.
The issue of human
rights will find its place in the total range of interaction. The
United States cannot be true to itself without affirming its
commitment to basic principles of human dignity and popular
participation in government. Given the nature of modern technology,
these principles will not be confined by national borders. But
experience has shown that to seek to impose them by confrontation
is likely to be selfdefeating—especially in a country with such a
historical vision of itself as China. A succession of American
administrations, including the first two years of Obama’s, has
substantially balanced long-term moral convictions with
case-to-case adaptations to requirements of national security. The
basic approach—discussed in previous chapters—remains valid; how to
achieve the necessary balance is the challenge for each new
generation of leaders on both sides.
The question
ultimately comes down to what the United States and China can
realistically ask of each other. An explicit American project to
organize Asia on the basis of containing China or creating a bloc
of democratic states for an ideological crusade is unlikely to
succeed—in part because China is an indispensable trading partner
for most of its neighbors. By the same token, a Chinese attempt to
exclude America from Asian economic and security affairs will
similarly meet serious resistance from almost all other Asian
states, which fear the consequences of a region dominated by a
single power.
The appropriate label
for the Sino-American relationship is less partnership than
“co-evolution.” It means that both countries pursue their domestic
imperatives, cooperating where possible, and adjust their relations
to minimize conflict. Neither side endorses all the aims of the
other or presumes a total identity of interests, but both sides
seek to identify and develop complementary interests.15
The United States and
China owe it to their people and to global well-being to make the
attempt. Each is too big to be dominated by the other. Therefore
neither is capable of defining terms for victory in a war or in a
Cold War type of conflict. They need to ask themselves the question
apparently never formally posed at the time of the Crowe
Memorandum: Where will a conflict take us? Was there a lack of
vision on all sides, which turned the operation of the equilibrium
into a mechanical process, without assessing where the world would
be if the maneuvering colossi missed a maneuver and collided? Which
of the leaders who operated the international system that led to
the First World War would not have recoiled had he known what the
world would look like at its end?