Toward a Pacific Community?
Such an effort at
co-evolution must deal with three levels of relationships. The
first concerns problems that arise in the normal interactions of
major power centers. The consultation system evolved over three
decades has proved largely adequate to that task. Common
interests—such as trade ties and diplomatic cooperation on discrete
issues—are pursued professionally. Crises, when they arise, are
generally resolved by discussion.
The second level
would be to attempt to elevate familiar crisis discussions into a
more comprehensive framework that eliminates the underlying causes
of the tensions. A good example would be to deal with the Korea
problem as part of an overall concept for Northeast Asia. If North
Korea manages to maintain its nuclear capability through the
inability of the negotiating parties to bring matters to a head,
the proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout Northeast Asia and
the Middle East becomes likely. Has the time come to take the next
step and deal with the Korea proliferation issue in the context of
an agreed peaceful order for Northeast Asia?
An even more
fundamental vision would move the world to a third level of
interaction—one that the leaders prior to the catastrophes of the
First World War never reached.
The argument that
China and the United States are condemned to collision assumes that
they deal with each other as competing blocs across the Pacific.
But this is the road to disaster for both sides.
An aspect of
strategic tension in the current world situation resides in the
Chinese fear that America is seeking to contain China—paralleled by
the American concern that China is seeking to expel the United
States from Asia. The concept of a Pacific Community—a region to
which the United States, China, and other states all belong and in
whose peaceful development all participate—could ease both fears.
It would make the United States and China part of a common
enterprise. Shared purposes—and the elaboration of them—would
replace strategic uneasiness to some extent. It would enable other
major countries such as Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and
Australia to participate in the construction of a system perceived
as joint rather than polarized between “Chinese” and “American”
blocs. Such an effort could be meaningful only if it engaged the
full attention, and above all the conviction, of the leaders
concerned.
One of the great
achievements of the generation that founded the world order at the
end of the Second World War was the creation of the concept of an
Atlantic Community. Could a similar concept replace or at least
mitigate the potential tensions between the United States and
China? It would reflect the reality that the United States is an
Asian power, and that many Asian powers demand it. And it responds
to China’s aspiration to a global role.
A common regional
political concept would also in large part answer China’s fear that
the United States is conducting a containment policy toward China.
It is important to understand what one means by the term
“containment.” Countries on China’s borders with substantial
resources, such as India, Japan, Vietnam, and Russia, represent
realities not created by American policy. China has lived with
these countries throughout its history. When Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton rejected the notion of containing China, she meant
an Americanled effort aimed at creating a strategic bloc on an
anti-Chinese basis. In a Pacific Community effort, both China and
the United States would have constructive relations with each other
and all other participants, not as part of confronting
blocs.
The future of Asia
will be shaped to a significant degree by how China and America
envision it, and by the extent to which each nation is able to
achieve some congruence with the other’s historic regional role.
Throughout its history, the United States has often been motivated
by visions of the universal relevance of its ideals and of a
proclaimed duty to spread them. China has acted on the basis of its
singularity; it expanded by cultural osmosis, not missionary
zeal.
For these two
societies representing different versions of exceptionalism, the
road to cooperation is inherently complex. The mood of the moment
is less relevant than the ability to develop a pattern of actions
capable of surviving inevitable changes of circumstance. The
leaders on both sides of the Pacific have an obligation to
establish a tradition of consultation and mutual respect so that,
for their successors, jointly building a shared world order becomes
an expression of parallel national aspirations.
When China and the
United States first restored relations forty years ago, the most
significant contribution of the leaders of the time was their
willingness to raise their sights beyond the immediate issues of
the day. In a way, they were fortunate in that their long isolation
from each other meant that there were no short-term day-to-day
issues between them. This enabled the leaders of a generation ago
to deal with their future, not their immediate pressures, and to
lay the basis for a world unimaginable then but unachievable
without Sino-American cooperation.
In pursuit of
understanding the nature of peace, I have studied the construction
and operation of international orders ever since I was a graduate
student well over half a century ago. On the basis of these
studies, I am aware that the cultural, historic, and strategic gaps
in perception that I have described will pose formidable challenges
for even the best-intentioned and most far-sighted leadership on
both sides. On the other hand, were history confined to the
mechanical repetition of the past, no transformation would ever
have occurred. Every great achievement was a vision before it
became a reality. In that sense, it arose from commitment, not
resignation to the inevitable.
In his essay
“Perpetual Peace,” the philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that
perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two
ways: by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a
magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a
juncture.
When Premier Zhou
Enlai and I agreed on the communiqué that announced the secret
visit, he said: “This will shake the world.” What a culmination if,
forty years later, the United States and China could merge their
efforts not to shake the world, but to build it.