The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, 219–250
doi: 10.1093/cjip/pov007
Advance Access Publication Date: 30 July 2015
Article
Article
The Imminent US Strategic Adjustment
to China
Peter Harris†,*
†
Peter Harris is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Colorado State
University.
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Abstract
How can leaders in the United States and China ensure that future relations between
their two countries are marked by peaceful cooperation and not conflict over the
organization of world politics? Whereas most scholarly writing on the topic of
China’s ‘peaceful rise’ has dwelt upon the ways and means by which Chinese leaders can steer their ship of state towards harmonious relations with the outside
world, this article attempts to shift the focus onto foreign policy-making by the
United States. The argument is that established states preside over a range of
options when it comes to deciding how to respond to rising states during periods of
shifting power and how they choose to adjust to an adverse alteration in relative
power has dramatic consequences for the subsequent evolution of any given
power-transitional dyad and, by extension, for the course of world politics more
broadly. The author provides a conceptual framing of this function for established
great powers during episodes of shifting power and seeks to elucidate in particular
the domestic–political components of the role. The primary policy implication is
to suggest that decision makers in the United States ought to be ready—much
more ready than they currently are—to assume a hefty slice of responsibility for
the ensuing power transition with China that most observers anticipate to be in
the offing.
‘Our two nations are trying to do something that has never been done in history’, declared
Hillary Clinton during a 2012 trip to Beijing, ‘which is to write a new answer to the question of what happens when an established power and a rising power meet’.1 With these
remarks, the US highest ranking diplomat evoked an enduring puzzle in the study of
1
William Wan, ‘Hillary Clinton, Top Chinese Officials Air Some Differences’, The Washington Post,
5 September, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/hillary-clinton-top-chineseofficials-air-some-differences/2012/09/05/78487e86-f746-11e1-8253-3f495ae70650_story.html.
C The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Institute of Modern International Relations,
V
Tsinghua University. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
220
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
international history and world politics. Scholars have debated the implications of power
shifts in the international system at least since Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian
War chronicled the rise of ancient Athens, and the consternation that this aroused in
Sparta. What are the general dynamics that underpin major shifts in power between states?
Must the rise in power of one state lead to covetousness, fear, enmity, and conflict,
as Thucydides claims was the case in antiquity? Or can rising and established states
accommodate each other on the international stage? Answers to these questions are of
fundamental importance for understanding how world politics have evolved over time, and
how international relations will unfold in the future.
Indeed, Clinton’s choice of a frame for Sino-American relations serves as a powerful
reminder that, far from being a question confined to international history, the puzzle of
power transitions is pregnant with implications for contemporary and future international
politics, especially with regard to US foreign policy.2 The future of US–China relations is
often held to be the critical juncture upon which international diplomacy in the 21st
century will hinge, and how the United States plays its part within this relationship will
have significant consequences for the whole international system.
Clinton’s pessimistic first breath (‘trying to do something that has never been done in
history’) conjures a conventional wisdom that China’s rise ultimately will lead to hostilities
with the United States, plunging East Asia and perhaps the rest of the world into conflict.
According to this view, Thucydides was right: rising powers like China spell trouble
for dominant or declining states. Shifts in power are preludes to competition between
rival hegemons, and so the correct response to rising states is to balance against them—
economically, diplomatically, and militarily—in hopes of blunting, stunting, or outright
reversing their growth in power.3
Yet the clear intention of Clinton’s statement was to convey optimism that the United
States and China might avoid such a fate and evince lasting cooperation instead of conflict
(‘a new answer to the question of what happens when an established power and a rising
power meet’). If mutually beneficial cooperation between established and rising states is
possible then a different type of strategic adjustment perhaps is in order: the United States
would be shrewd to prepare itself for a fruitful period of wide-ranging accommodation
2
3
According to John Kerry, Clinton’s successor at the State Department, ‘[t]he U.S.-China relationship is the most consequential in the world today, period, and it will do much to determine the shape of the 21st century’. Quoted in Zachary Keck, ‘Kerry: US-China Ties “Most
Consequential in the World”’, The Diplomat, 5 November, 2014, http://thediplomat.com/2014/
11/kerry-us-china-ties-most-consequential-in-the-world/.
Realist scholars of international relations tend to be the most vocal advocates of balancing
as the prudent US response to China’s rise. See, for example, John J. Mearsheimer, ‘The
Gathering Storm: China’s Challenge to US Power in Asia’, Chinese Journal of International
Politics, Vol. 3, No. 4 (2010), pp. 381–96; John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014), chapter 10; Aaron L. Friedberg, A Contest for
Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (New York: W.W. Norton,
2011); and Sebastian Rosato and John Schuessler, ‘A Realist Foreign Policy for the United
States’, Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 9, No. 4 (2011), pp. 803–19. Even so, there are cleavages
within the realist school of thought. See, for example, Charles Glaser, ‘Will China’s Rise Lead
to War? Why Realism Does Not Mean Pessimism’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 90, No. 2 (2011), pp.
80–91.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
221
with China, instead of trying forlornly to rally a global balance of power nearing the end of
its shelf life. Assuming the continued rise of China—and the (re)emergence of other global
powers such as Brazil, India, and Russia—which of these two outcomes is more likely:
prolonged conflict or mutually beneficial peaceful coexistence with the United States?
Perhaps more to the point, what can leaders in Washington, Beijing, and other world
capitals do to ensure that peaceful outcomes prevail in the context of shifting power?
In this article, I approach these and related questions from the perspective of US foreign
policy, arguing that the United States faces an impending strategic adjustment vis-à-vis
China. This coming adjustment will pose major political challenges for US leaders, and
therefore demands serious planning and preparation. Too often, scholarly discussion on
power transitions portrays the intentions of rising states as paramount for understanding
how and why shifts in power will pass off peacefully or not. Particularly, the focus has been
upon whether rising powers such as China today are ‘status quo’ or ‘revisionist’ in their
orientation towards the prevailing global order.4 From this perspective, the onus is on rising
states to refrain from upending international security.
Established states are conspicuously absent from the analysis. Even commentators in the
United States tend to ignore the decision-making calculus of extant great powers in the
context of shifting power.5 Yet established great powers deserve considerable attention
from those who seek an understanding of global power transitions. For established states
have options when it comes to deciding how to respond to rising states during periods of
shifting power, and how they choose to adjust has significant consequences for the subsequent evolution of any given power-transitional dyad and, by extension, for the course
of world politics more broadly.
In what follows, I make a descriptive inference to this effect—that great powers wield
considerable agency when responding to rising states, and that their strategic choices are
meaningful in terms of international political development—and draw out policy implications for contemporary US foreign policy. While I do not suggest that established great
powers are anything close to omnipotent in the context of major shifts in power—certainly,
it is not wholly within their gift to determine whether or not a rising state will emerge in a
peaceful fashion—I do propose that they play an important role in shaping the opportunity
4
5
See, for example, Alistair Iain Johnston, ‘Is China a Status Quo Power?’, International
Security, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2003), pp. 5–56; Jeffrey W. Legro, ‘What China Will Want: The Future
Intentions of a Rising Power’, Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2007), pp. 515–34; Barry
Buzan, ‘China in International Society: Is “Peaceful Rise” Possible?’, Chinese Journal of
International Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2010), pp. 5–36; Scott L. Kastner and Phillip C. Saunders,
‘Is China a Status Quo or Revisionist State? Leadership Travel as an Empirical Indicator of
Foreign Policy Priorities’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 1 (2012), pp. 163–77;
and Dingding Chen, Xiaoyu Pu, and Alistair Iain Johnston, ‘Debating China’s Assertiveness’,
International Security, Vol. 38, No. 3 (2014), pp. 176–83.
There are exceptions, of course. See, for example, Thomas J. Christensen, ‘Fostering
Stability or Creating a Monster? The Rise of China and U.S. Policy toward East Asia’,
International Security, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2006), pp. 81–126; and Lyle J. Goldstein, Meeting China
Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging U.S.-China Rivalry (Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press, 2015).
222
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
structures open to rising states.6 I provide a conceptual framing of this mantle for established great powers—a function that I label ‘global gatekeeping’—and seek to elucidate in
particular the domestic-political components of the role. I buttress the argument with
an historical analysis of British and American responses to rising states over the past 150
years. The primary policy implication is to suggest that decision makers in the United States
ought to be ready—much more ready than they currently are—to assume a hefty slice of
responsibility for the ensuing power transition with China that most observers anticipate to
be in the offing.
Established States and Rising Challengers
With some exceptions, the academic literature on power-transitions tends to predict that
established states ought to respond with hostility towards rising challengers. The logic is
that powerful states—and hegemonic states in particular—should cherish their positions at
the pinnacle of the global order, because only with preponderant power are they able to
mould the international system in self-interested ways. Ceding power to rising states would
be tantamount to losing control over the structure of world order. In turn, this would mean
negative repercussions for the established state in terms of global economic access and
national security. Meanwhile, rising powers are assumed to chafe at an extant international
settlement that they had no role in creating. Given the chance, rising states can be expected
to seize any opportunity to topple a reigning hegemon and implement a new international
system in place of the old, one that more accurately reflects the rising state’s own national
interests.
As such, great power confrontation is inevitable under conditions of shifting power:
both established and rising states are bent on shaping the international order in their own
image, and care deeply enough about the issue to go to war over the spoils of hegemony.
Indeed, the prediction of power-transition theorists from ‘A. F. K. Organski to Robert
Gilpin to Aaron Friedberg has remained fairly consistent: that shifts in material capabilities
among great powers—especially those that threaten to eliminate disparities in power
between the leading state and its nearest challenger(s)—create rational incentives for rising
and established states (who invariably will disagree over how international society should
be structured) to resolve their inevitable disagreements through force.’7
The main conclusion of traditional power-transition theory when it comes to devising
foreign policy prescriptions for established and declining great powers, then, is that established states should be wary of rising states and, ideally, should work to halt their rise in
power. This insight is shared by other realist theories of international politics. Offensive
realism, for example, suggests that powerful states ought to prioritize maintaining hegemony in their own region and, furthermore, should actively seek to prevent others from
6
7
On this point, see Thomas J. Christensen, The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a
Rising Power (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015).
Peter Harris, ‘Problems with Power-Transition Theory: Beyond the Vanishing Disparities
Thesis’, Asian Security, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2014), pp. 253–54. For the earliest and most influential
works in the power-transition theory tradition, see A. F. K. Organski, World Politics (New
York: Knopf, 1958); A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
223
achieving hegemony in more distant regions—let alone on a global scale.8 From this perspective, international politics is a zero-sum business where one state’s increase in power
unavoidably creates insecurity for others; rationally self-interested states can do nothing
other than contain rising challengers if they value their own security. While defensive realism is more tolerant of shifts in power, holding that system-wide stability (as opposed to an
individual state’s security) can be preserved if rising states are balanced against by a sufficient coalition of extant powers, it nevertheless implies conflict between rising states and
defenders of the old world order if a given shift in power is too large or too rapid to be
accommodated seamlessly.9 Again, the most prudent and sure-fire form of behaviour on
behalf of established states is to forestall, delay, halt, or reverse the rise in power of potential incendiaries.
To be sure, there are nuanced accounts of power-transitions that place caveats on this
broad contention that hegemonic war is a likely outcome of shifting power. For one thing,
there might be different ‘types’ of dyadic power-transition, with each type prone to different levels of conflict and, as a result, different probabilities of war.10 Others point to variation in the domestic-level properties of rising states. If China democratizes its political
system and liberalizes its economy, for example, then conflict between it and the United
States could be averted.11 The argument here is that regime types (e.g. liberal democracies)
tend to share the same vision of world order and so, by deduction, a rising state that bore
significant resemblance to the United States would pose no threat to the US-led liberal
world order.12 In addition, democracy at home is argued to institutionalize restraint in
international affairs, which makes it easier for rising democracies to engage in cooperative
patterns of behaviour and reassure their peers that shifts in power are not preludes to conflict.13 Even the most prominent proponents of power-transition theory accept that some
rising states will be ‘satisfied’ with the international status quo and thus will not need to be
balanced against (attacked) in the same way that a ‘dissatisfied’ or revisionist rising state
would have to be.14
8 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
9 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
10 Instances of dyadic power-transition might vary by rate of the power shift in question, patterns of conflict, the prevailing military balance between adversaries, and conditions of bior multi-polarity, for example. See Kelly Kadera, The Power-Conflict Story: A Dynamic
Model of Interstate Rivalry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); and Dale C.
Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
11 Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy.
12 Daniel M. Kliman, Fateful Transitions: How Democracies Manage Rising Powers from the
Eve of World War I to China’s Ascendance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2014).
13 It is worth noting that democracies might not have a monopoly over institutionalized
restraint. See Charles A. Kupchan, How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable
Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
14 See Organski and Kugler, The War Ledger. Robert Gilpin, too, seems to hold out the prospect of canny statesmen being able to defy the structural factor of a shift in power and
‘build’ conditions for peaceful international change. Gilpin, War and Change in World
Politics, p. 244.
224
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
A number of policy prescriptions flow from these proposed caveats to power-transition
theory’s central claim about shifting power and war. Especially if peace (defined narrowly
as the mere absence of war) between rising and declining states is the goal, then the literature can be commended for suggesting several changes that the leaders of rising states could
implement in order to bring about this outcome. Rising states should foster political and
economic liberalization at home while pursuing strategic restraint abroad, for example.
They ought to profess their satisfaction with the international status quo and take measures
to convince others that this satisfaction is genuine. They should also take care to avoid
minor crises with established states lest such spats mushroom into broader conflagrations,
instead seeking to foster tit-for-tat patterns of international cooperation. To be sure, all of
these prescriptions might well be useful towards the end of promoting peace in the context
of shifting power. But what is the role of established great powers when it comes to safeguarding peace? Is it solely the rising powers that have adjustments to make in the context
of their material ascent?
In fact, it is possible to deduce few recommendations for established states from the
extant literature on power-transitions. First, established great powers would probably do
well to encourage certain domestic reforms in rising states—democratization and economic
openness, for example—in hopes that their rising competitors can be tamed or ‘satisfied’ in
some way. Even so, most power-transition and realist scholarship would hold that established great powers should be wary of a rising state even when that state publicly undertakes to uphold the status quo. This is because rising states suffer from a commitment
problem—that is, they cannot credibly commit to abstain from seizing more benefits in
international society as long as their power is on the increase.15 As a result, prudent great
powers will always view rising states as potential wolves in sheep’s clothing; as inherent
revisionists biding their time under the guise of professed satisfaction. From this perspective, the overriding policy prescription to be gleaned from the extant power-transition
literature is that established states should prepare for the possibility of conflict: they should
balance against rising states in order to blunt their challengers’ growing influence and, if
need be, to win the war that will most likely ensue if power continues to migrate.16
Global Gatekeeping: Conciliation versus Containment
I argue that power-transition theory has overstated the empirical likelihood and the normative necessity of containment. To be sure, power-transitions are episodes in international
15
16
On commitment problems as a cause of war, see James D. Fearon, ‘Rationalist Explanations
for War’, International Organization, Vol. 49, No. 3 (1995), pp. 379–414; and Robert Powell,
‘War as a Commitment Problem’, International Organization, Vol. 60, No. 1 (2006), pp. 169–
203.
Although balancing behaviour against rising challengers is the optimal outcome from the
perspective of most power-transition and realist perspectives, scholars in this tradition recognize that impediments might exist to states following such courses of action.
Neoclassical realists, for example, document how domestic-level pathologies within established states can hinder balancing behaviour. See Randall L. Schweller, Unanswered
Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance on Power (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006); and Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Norrin M. Ripsman, and Steven E. Lobell, eds., The
Challenge of Grand Strategy: the Great Powers and the Broken Balance between the World
Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
225
politics during which new power differentials between states call into question old allocations of benefits among them.17 Moreover, as noted above, major shifts in the distribution
of power are events that entail a form of response from the existing great powers of the
international system. Having ‘suffered what they must’ under old distributions of power,
rising states can be expected to seek more favourable international settlements as their
material capabilities increase relative to those of extant powers. Pursuant of such ends,
rising states will seek to alter the organization of international society in some way—
revising old treaties and insisting on new ones, pressing for open markets abroad or closing
domestic markets to foreign entry, demanding recognition of greatness or reparations for
past injustices, and so forth.18 Ignoring the fact of an adverse shift in power is thus not an
option for established great powers. However, that rising states have a likely (even if latent)
interest in revising the international status quo does not mean that established states must
automatically move to check their increases in power.
At the most basic level, there are actually two ideal-type strategies that an established
great power can adopt in response to another state’s rise in power. Crucially, each has the
potential to produce stable and peaceful outcomes, both from a dyadic and a systemic
perspective. First, an established state can assist in bringing a rising state’s allocation of
international benefits into alignment with the new distribution of power, whether actively
or passively. These are strategies of conciliation, aimed at sating a rising state’s appetite in
order to remove potential grounds for dissatisfaction and enmity both in the short- and the
long term.19 Second, an established state can work to halt any adverse redistribution of
power or even bring the distribution of power back into alignment with the pre-existing
distribution of benefits. These are the strategies of containment favoured by powertransition theorists and realists, and involve proactive measures to check or reverse a rising
state’s increase in power so as to avoid revisions to the international status quo.
Both of these ideal-type options are viable—albeit opposite—responses to the stimulus
of a shift in power but, contrary to most of the extant literature, I argue that it is impossible
to deduce which one an established state will adopt with reference to fact of a power shift
alone. Instead, leaders in established states will decide upon a strategic response with reference to a variety of international and domestic-level factors. What both types of strategy
have in common, however, is implied recognition of the fact that, from an international
17
18
19
Robert Powell, In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Relations
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), chapter 4.
Again, it is worth emphasizing that onlookers have compelling reasons to assume that rising
states will be revisionist in some shape or form even when they seem to be muted in their
demands for international redress. For how long can a rising state be trusted not to seek
benefits commensurate with its newfound stature? What leader of a rising state could resist the temptation to convert growing power into expanded influence? Even if a rising state
were to profess absolute and total satisfaction with the international status quo today, there
is no telling what its foreign policies might be tomorrow. Faced with such uncertainty over
a rising state’s long-term intentions, prudent leaders of established great Powers face a
compelling exigency to respond in some way to the rising state’s ascent.
Several scholars have documented how adroit diplomacy on behalf of established states
can play a significant role in lessening the chance of conflict between rising and established states. See, in particular, Kupchan, How Enemies Become Friends; and Goldstein,
Meeting China Halfway.
226
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
security perspective, the basic problem of shifting power is that of the de-synchronization
of power and benefits among states. In other words, the potential for dissatisfaction that
exists on behalf of a rising state is caused by the increases in its aggregate national power
not being matched by increases in its allocation of benefits. A successful strategic response
to the stimulus of a rising state, then—whatever form it takes—will be aimed at putting
power and benefits back into alignment. For only when there is no discrepancy between
power and benefits will international relations under conditions of shifting power
be peaceful.
Of course, this crude stylization of the choice facing established states as being between
conciliation and containment masks a much greater variety of potential responses to rising
states. In practice, there is a continuum of foreign policy options open to decision makers in
powerful states. Sometimes, leaders will choose full-throttled policies of containment or
will acquiesce in the wholesale conciliation of a potential rival. But often, statesmen will
invest in strategies that mix elements of these two approaches—in other words, they will
hedge. The conceptual point being made here, however, is that the choice always is whether
or not to manipulate the pre-existing distribution of benefits in international politics in
favour of the rising state; to halt or reverse the changing distribution of power in order to
keep power aligned with the pre-existing distribution of benefits; or to put together a package of foreign policies towards the rising state that successfully blends a mixture of the
two—conciliating the rising state in some areas while containing its ambitions in others.
In this sense, both containment and conciliation (and hedging strategies) aim at essentially
the same thing: the successful management of the distributions of power and benefits in
international society.
My argument is that great powers exercise strategic choice over which rising states to
usher into the great power club (and in what respects) and which to hold in abeyance. I call
this function for established great powers ‘global gatekeeping’. I suggest that international
order is not a monolithic construct to be either had or lost in its entirety, but rather comprises a bundle of discrete issue areas over which multifarious bargaining is possible. While
their power is still preponderant, extant great powers have some leeway to pick and choose
which aspects of international order they will seek to compromise on and which they will
commit to defend. The goal is to sculpt the international political topography that rising
states will be forced to navigate; to tilt the landscape in a way that will induce rising powers
to produce certain behaviours. Again, the point is not that established states can make
authoritative decisions over how a rising state’s ascent should unfold; no hegemon is so
powerful as to have effective control over their rising challengers’ foreign policies. Instead,
established great powers must content themselves with more subtle instruments of influence. Rising states will still wield the power, interests, and agency to forge their own paths
on the world stage, but adroit decision-making on behalf of established great powers can
ensure that not all paths are equally enticing to them.
This conceptualization of the role of established states under conditions of shifting
power lends itself, in effect, to a foreign policy analysis of decision-making by established
great powers.20 This is something of a deviation from most of the literature on power
transitions, which tends to model strategic interactions between both states of the
20
Again, the analytic task at hand is essentially one of descriptive inference of establishing
that a recognizable and meaningful role does exist for established states in the sense that I
have described.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
227
power-transition dyad. However, abstracting away from strategic interactions between rising and established states and focusing instead on the decision-making calculus of established great powers has two distinct analytic advantages.
First, a foreign policy analysis allows for sharp focus on a particularly critical phase in
interstate power transitions—that is, the phase in which an extant great power decides
whether to support or reject a challenger’s rise, and how to go about either. Secondly, by
clarifying which factors are important for explaining decision-making by established great
powers, my approach allows for an analysis of how domestic- and international-political
circumstances can be manipulated by political actors in order to bring about desired outcomes. The goal is thus not just to understand how great powers act towards rising states,
but to explain how they could possibly be influenced to act differently—an important step
towards providing public policymakers with useful insights when it comes to managing
international power transitions.
Global Gatekeeping as Strategic Adjustment
In one sense, global gatekeeping is a proactive endeavour—a set of purposeful choices
made by the leaders of established states. Yet global gatekeeping must also be considered
an inherently reactive exercise—that is, a calculated response to an already changing geostrategic environment. As such, global gatekeeping can be characterized as a particular
form of strategic adjustment, ‘an enduring and significant change (although not necessarily
a permanent change) in the ends and means of statecraft’.21 In general terms, states must
undertake strategic adjustments when shifts in their external environment or internal
circumstances require them to do so—for example, when one or more peer competitors
emerge (or disappear) to render obsolete erstwhile foreign policies; when a state’s own
power-projection capabilities undergo fluctuations, whether because of booms in material
strength or declines in national capabilities; or when technological changes upend previous
strategic orthodoxies.
The United States has undertaken several such strategic adjustments over the course of
its history. Major adjustments took place in the 1890s, when the nation first emerged as a
truly global great power and sought to settle upon how best to wield the country’s growing
influence on the international stage;22 in the 1920s and 1930s, when deciding how to
exploit (or not) a post-WWI international context that seemed to afford great leeway to
America’s leaders;23 in the late 1940s, when the burgeoning Soviet threat to Western
Europe and East Asia galvanized the United States to develop and implement the
21
22
23
Bartholomew H. Sparrow, ‘Strategic Adjustment and the U.S. Navy: The Spanish-American
War, the Yellow Press, and the 1990s’, in Peter Trubowitz, Emily O. Goldman, and Edward
Rhodes, eds., The Politics of Strategic Adjustment: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 141.
Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign
Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), chapter 2; Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth
to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1998).
Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chapter 3; Peter Trubowitz, Politics and
Strategy: Partisan Ambition and American Statecraft (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2011), pp. 114–28; Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest, chapter 3.
228
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
grand-strategic doctrine of containment;24 in the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet
Union;25 and after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, 2001.26 Each episode required a dramatic
overhaul of the nation’s foreign policy posture, along with important changes to domestic
politics and society necessary to sustain the chosen foreign policy superstructure.
Indeed, it is worth emphasizing this point that strategic adjustments have both external
and internal components to their execution—that is, successful strategic adjustments
require changes in both foreign and domestic policy. In contemporary debates over how the
United States should adapt itself to emerging 21st century realities, discussion of foreign
policy options has overshadowed consideration of the domestic arena. The presumption
made by all sides—from liberal internationalists, who call for the retention and even a
deepening of US overseas engagement, to neo-isolationists, who argue that international
commitments must play second fiddle to domestic renewal—seems to be that implementing
strategic adjustment is simply a matter of diktat.27 If this were true—if the president or
Congress were able to order changes in US grand strategy with the stroke of a pen or the
simple passage of legislation—then a focus on the foreign policy components of strategic
adjustment might be justified.
In fact, however, all successful foreign policies—especially those that involve the requisitioning and reallocation of wealth, as all major foreign policies do—rest upon solid domestic-political foundations. This is perhaps especially true when the issue at stake is one of
global gatekeeping, when the nation is being asked to countenance the rise of another great
power (along with the loss of national power and prestige—and, potentially, concrete
material benefits—that such a course might entail) or else commit scarce resources to the
potentially mammoth task of defeating a rising challenger in international politics.
The domestic-political foundations for ambitious foreign policies seldom exist by
chance. Instead, they must be put in place by assiduous foreign policymakers. Those close
to the foreign policy apparatus observe leaders to be involved in foreign policymaking in at
least three ways. First, elected leaders formally are responsible for sanctioning (enacting)
agreed upon policies and ordering and overseeing (executing) their implementation.
Secondly, leaders are often able to control the process by which such policies are made,
24
25
26
27
Benjamin O. Fordham, Building the Cold War Consensus: The Political Economy of U.S.
National Security Policy, 1949–1951 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); John
Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security
Policy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Dueck, Reluctant
Crusaders, chapter 4.
Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders, chapter 5. Whether or not the 1990s represent an episode of
successful strategic adjustment or a failure to adjust to the end of the Cold War is a matter
of debate.
Colin Dueck, ‘Ideas and Alternatives in American Grand Strategy, 2000–2004’, Review of
International Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4 (2004), pp. 511–35.
For a microcosm of this debate, see Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William C.
Wohlforth, ‘Lean Forward: In Defense of American Engagement’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 92,
No. 1 (2013), pp. 130–42; and Barry Posen, ‘Pull Back’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 92, No. 1 (2013),
pp. 116–28.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
229
whether through exercising their formal powers of office or through investing their (usually
considerable) political capital in ways such as agenda setting.28
Finally, powerful (and savvy) political leaders are well placed to manipulate the antecedent factors that cause, shape, or restrict foreign policy: events, public opinion, fiscal realities, elite perceptions of external threats, and so forth. In this way, leaders can put in place
the structural building blocks—the heresthetics—required to make desired outcomes more
likely to obtain.29 Without attention to domestic politics, leaders often find themselves
forced to pursue suboptimal strategic responses to external stimuli.30 It is only through the
adroit management and leadership of domestic-political forces that statesmen can be
assured that their preferred course of action will stand a chance of success.
As I argue below, a failure to recognize the domestic aspects of the coming US strategic
adjustment represents a major lacuna in the current literature on power-transitions, one
that begets significant policy implications.
British and American Responses to Rising States
In this section, I offer some illustrative case studies of how great powers have discharged
the function of global gatekeeping in international history. The cases, combined with some
counterfactual scenarios, demonstrate how global gatekeeping has operated in practice.
I focus on Britain and the United States as the two states that have had the most influence
on membership of the great power club during the past 150 years. This history also helps to
shed light on how strategies of conciliation and containment have fared in the past, thus
offering some potential (if necessarily limited) insights into how the United States would be
well-advised to respond to China’s contemporary rise.
Back to the Future: Global Gatekeeping under Pax Britannica
What does global gatekeeping look like in practice? In the 21st century, the United States is
the global gatekeeper par excellence. More than any other world capital, Washington has a
decisive—although by no means undiluted—role to play in deciding how shifts in power
will transpire. In order to illustrate fully the concept of global gatekeeping, however, a brief
discussion of Britain’s varied responses to rising states during the late 19th and early 20th
century is warranted.
28 In its quest to find a cassus belli for war with Saddam Hussein, for example, the George W.
Bush administration went to great lengths to frame the post-9/11 national security debate as
one in which Iraq featured prominently; there was nothing inevitable about a link being drawn
between 9/11, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the need for regime change—but political will on behalf of the Bush administration ensured that such a link was not only made but was acted upon.
See Jon Western, ‘The War over Iraq: Selling War to the American Public’, Security Studies,
Vol. 14, No. 1 (2005), pp 106–39. See also David Domke, Erica S. Graham, Kevin Coe, Sue Lockett
John, and Ted Coopman, ‘Going Public as Political Strategy: The Bush Administration, an
Echoing Press, and Passage of the Patriot Act’, Political Communication, Vol. 23, No. 6 (2006),
pp. 291–312; and Chaim Kaufmann, ‘Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas:
The Selling of the Iraq War’, International Security, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2004), pp. 5–48.
29 William H. Riker, The Art of Political Manipulation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
30 Schweller, Unanswered Threats; Taliaferro, Ripsman, and Lobell, eds., The Challenge of
Grand Strategy.
230
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
The British Empire widely is regarded as having been hegemonic for most of the 1800s
and, as such, represents a workable (albeit imperfect) analogue for the United States
today.31 At least after the dispatch of Napoleonic France, Britain led the world in geopolitical terms. London played an animating role in the Concert of Europe diplomatic system
by acting as a balancer to keep its nearest rivals perennially in check and adopting a preeminent position during the most important multilateral conferences of the age.32
Militarily, Britain was able to muster the arms and the allies necessary to achieve
decisive wins in several critical land-based conflicts in Europe, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere
across the globe. Britain’s naval strength was particularly pronounced: the Royal Navy
dominated the world’s oceans and major sea lanes just as the US Navy commands mastery
of the seas in the contemporary era.33 Economically, too, Britain (‘the workshop of the
world’) led its peers—outstripping them in terms of technological innovation, industrial
output, and share of international markets.34 All told, the British Empire came to rule
10 000 000 square miles of territory and over 400 million people.35 While it would be
wrong to characterize Victorian Britain as omnipotent in world affairs during the long 19th
century, London was at least primus inter pares vis-à-vis the other great powers of the era.
Pax Britannica was firmly based upon robust and multifaceted material foundations.
During the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, however,
Britain was confronted with the rise in power of several potential challengers to its global
supremacy.36 The United States, a newly unified German Empire, and post-Meiji
31
32
33
34
35
36
Nevertheless, there is debate on the question. William Wohlforth, for example, argues that
British hegemony never was complete: ‘The nineteenth century was not a “Pax
Britannica”’, he argues. ‘From 1815 to 1853, it was a Pax Britannica et Russica; from 1853 to
1871, it was not a pax of any kind; and from 1871 to 1914, it was a Pax Britannica et
Germanica.’ See William C. Wohlforth, ‘The Stability of a Unipolar World’, International
Security, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1999), p. 39. For a forceful riposte against those who have doubted
the substance of British hegemony, see Rebecca Berens Matzke, Deterrence through
Strength: British Naval Power and Foreign Policy under Pax Britannica (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2011).
As Walter Russell Mead puts it, ‘The Britons who laid the foundation of the most powerful
global empire ever created saw the rivalries of Europe less as a game to play than as a
strategic asset. Let France and Prussia duke it out on the Rhine; let Austria and Prussia batter one another bloody over Silesia, an irregular, slightly sausage-shaped territory now part
of Poland that is roughly equal to the combined area of Connecticut and Massachusetts.
While they were busy with one another, England would build a global economic system that
would leave all rivals in the dust.’ Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and
the Making of the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 94–95.
Matzke, Deterrence through Strength.
Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution (London:
Penguin, 1999); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and
Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 151–58.
Timothy H. Parsons, The British Imperial Century, 1815–1914: A World History Perspective
(London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
For a good overview of British foreign policy during much of this period, see George W.
Monger, End of Isolation: British Foreign Policy, 1900–1907 (London: T. Nelson, 1963). For a
diplomatic history of the era with less of an Anglo-centric focus, see John Albert White,
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
231
Restoration Japan, in particular, rapidly rose to become great powers for the first time in
their histories37 to take up positions alongside the prevailing great powers of the era:
France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Italy.38 Britain’s leaders
crafted different responses to each of the rising states that posed a challenge to its international preponderance.
In the Western Hemisphere, Britain pursued a policy of conciliation towards the United
States, giving its diplomatic assent to Washington’s pre-eminence in the Americas.39 In East
Asia, an initially cautious policy towards Japan gave way to a firm Anglo-Japanese alliance
designed to contain Russian (later, German) influence in the region.40 With Germany, however, there could be little compromise. Despite some attempts to make concessions to
Berlin in light of its rapid growth in power, London’s policy eventually became one of containment and deterrence, of preventing Germany from establishing the kind of power that
would threaten Britain’s mastery of the seas and its national security.41
Conciliation of the United States can be said to have begun with the Treaty of
Washington of 1871, which settled a range of issues that had marred Anglo-American relations for decades: disputes over fishing rights, questions surrounding navigation of the St
Lawrence, outstanding claims arising from the US Civil War (particularly the Alabama
claims), British demands for redress over the Fenian Raids, and disagreements over international law regarding maritime neutrality. In estimating the impact of the Washington
Treaty, historians concur that the compact ‘was largely to America’s satisfaction . . . this
was a treaty that, by and large, Americans liked much and the British accepted grudgingly,
37
38
39
40
41
Transition to Global Rivalry: Alliance Diplomacy and the Quadruple Entente, 1895–1907
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Prussia had been a regional great power at previous times in its history, but the newly unified (post-1871) German Empire was the first German state (excluding the Austrian monarchy, perhaps) poised to assume truly global great power status.
Of these, France and Russia also can be considered rising states. France rebounded precipitously following its defeat by Prussia (1870–1871) and Russia was a growing threat to
British interests in the Eastern Mediterranean, Central Asia, and Far East throughout the
period, although it suffered a significant military and geopolitical setback following its
defeat by Japan in 1905. Unified Italy was a rising state in the sense that it represented a
new amalgamation of power on the Italian peninsula, but it never wielded the kind of economic or military power commensurate with the United States, Germany, or Japan. AustriaHungary and the Ottoman Empire were in decline. For assessments of the great Powers of
this era, see Richard Ned Lebow, Why Nations Fight (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010); and Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 202–49.
Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895–1914
(New York: Atheneum, 1968); Ritchie Ovendale, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth
Century (London: St Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 4–10; Kagan, Dangerous Nation, pp. 373–74;
Duncan Andrew Campbell, Unlikely Allies: Britain, America, and the Victorian Origins of the
Special Relationship (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), pp. 171–99.
Ian Nish, The Anglo-Japanese Alliance: The Diplomacy of Two Island Empires, 1894–1907
(London: Athlone, 1966).
Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War
(New York: Random House, 1991).
232
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
as the price to be paid for easing into the new geopolitics of American dominance in North
America and a greater American role in the wider world’.42
But British appeasement of the United States would continue for decades afterwards,
from London’s acceptance of international arbitration to resolve the Venezuela Dispute
(1895) to the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty (1901), whereby Britain relinquished its effective veto
over the construction of a US-controlled trans-isthmian canal, to the settlement of the
Alaska Boundary Dispute (1903) on terms favourable to the United States at Canada’s
expense.43 Britain lent tacit support to the United States during the War of 1898 and, by
1907, had effectively withdrawn all of its troops (save for locally raised garrisons) from the
Western Hemisphere.
‘The reduction of imperial garrisons and naval squadrons in Canada and the West
Indies between 1904 and 1906 was one of the major results of the Anglo-American
accord’,44 writes S. F. Wells, who sums up the significance of the military drawdown as
follows: ‘While there was some hesitation at first to admit this reliance on the United
States, the crucial debates on the defence of Canada forced the government leaders to recognize the principles on which they had been acting.’ He goes on: ‘Today we can see this withdrawal as the final step in accepting American domination in the western hemisphere. It is
the conclusion of the trend which began with the Hay-Pauncefote treaties, was strengthened by the Venezuelan furore and tacit British acceptance of the Monroe Doctrine, and
was virtually concluded in the Alaskan boundary settlement.’45
For its part, Japan announced its arrival as a great power with an emphatic military
victory over China in 1895. As Ian Nish notes, it was at this moment that ‘they
(the European powers, including Britain) became aware how far Britain’s position of
ascendancy in the far east had declined’.46 For although Britain had not been directly
involved in the conflict, Japan’s newly demonstrated maritime strength clearly portended a
challenge to the British Empire—one that could not easily be dealt with.47 The war ended
in Japan’s annexation of Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula in Manchuria, and a nominal
42
43
44
45
46
47
Jeremy Black, Fighting for America: The Struggle for Mastery in North America, 1519–1871
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), p. 376. British parliamentarian William Kepple
(the Viscount Bury, later the 7th Earl of Albemarle), tried to quantify the gains made and
losses sustained by Britain and her colonies upon the conclusion of the treaty. His report,
for the Royal Colonial Institute, broadly anticipated the conclusions of later generations of
historians. America reaped handsome rewards in material terms, while Britain’s chief victory was ‘renewed and increased amity with the United States’. See William Coutts Keppel
Albemarle, Balance Sheet of the Washington Treaty of 1872, in Account with the People of
Great Britain and Her Colonies (London: Edward Stanford, 1873), p. 27. For a contemporary
American viewpoint, see Caleb Cushing, The Treaty of Washington: Its Negotiation,
Execution, and the Discussions Relating Thereto (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873).
Paul Kennedy, ‘A Time to Appease’, The National Interest, Vol. 8, No. 6 (2010), pp. 7–17.
Samuel F. Wells, ‘British Strategic Withdrawal from the Western Hemisphere, 1904–1906’,
Canadian Historical Review, Vol. 49, No. 4 (1968), p. 335.
Ibid., p. 356.
Nish, Anglo-Japanese Alliance, p. 19.
‘Following Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War, Japan doubled the size of its army,
significantly expanded its naval fleet, and sought to enlarge its political and economic influence in Korea, Manchuria, and China.’ Kupchan, How Enemies Become Friends, p.135.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
233
declaration of independence for Korea, which now came under Japan’s sway, making
Japan a veritable imperial power in its own right.
Via the so-called ‘Triple Intervention’ of 1895, France, Germany, and Russia opposed
Japan’s occupation of Liaodong and insisted that the Japanese withdraw. Britain could
have united with the other great powers to force Japan into an even more humiliating climb
down. Yet Britain stayed aloof, refusing to join the Triple Intervention and making no suggestion of disapproval regarding Japan’s expansive demands.48 Instead, a formal alliance
was signed between Britain and Japan in January 1902, whereby Britain acknowledged
Japan’s legitimate sphere of influence over Korea and agreed to intervene should Japan find
itself at war with two great powers at any one time.
The alliance gave Japan vital status and recognition in world affairs49 and effectively
provided a green light to Japanese expansionism by deterring France from opposing Japan
during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). The alliance, then, worked much to Japan’s
advantage and facilitated a sizeable redistribution of benefits towards her. Even so,
Britain’s strategy towards Japan during the first half of the Edwardian Era was a relatively
cold policy of appeasement in contrast to the warmer embrace offered to the United States;
Britain tolerated and sanctioned the geopolitical gains Japan made but stopped somewhat
short of promoting the wholesale burgeoning of Japanese influence.
While the United States and Japan represented challengers to Britain’s overseas empire,
the rise of Wilhelmine Germany affected Britain much closer to home. German unification
radically altered the balance of power in Europe and, combined with the Kaiser’s insistence
on expanding the Imperial Navy, came to represent a national security threat to Britain
itself. It was not preordained that Britain would embark upon a policy of containment
towards Germany, however.
At least initially, the international system appeared to offer ample opportunity for conciliation. The prospects for concord were especially good given that cross-Channel economic ties were flourishing and that mutual cultural fondness was prevalent. In 1890, the
two states reached an agreement over Heligoland and German claims in East Africa; in
1900, there was an Anglo-German agreement on China;50 and in the first decade of the
20th century, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain embarked upon a vigorous diplomatic offensive to persuade Berlin that alignment with Britain was in Germany’s interests.
In the event, however, Chamberlain found himself to be rebuffed at every turn. Perhaps
because of an unprofessional and inexperienced diplomatic corps in the post-Bismarckian
period, or more likely because of the powerful influence on Kaiser Wilhelm of the German
navy and industrial sector, Germany was resolved to embark upon a massive naval programme to project German power abroad.
Although many in Britain were keen to conciliate Germany, few could sanction Berlin’s
construction of a formidable fleet that could only be intended for war with Britain.
In 1889, Parliament passed the Naval Defence Act to codify into statute the so-called ‘twopower standard’, which called for Britain’s naval forces to be maintained at a level that
exceeded its next two competitors combined. In 1894, the Spencer Programme of ship
building was initiated in direct response to the German navy. Aggressive spending on and
48
49
50
Nish, The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, pp. 26–35.
‘It was Japan’s first alliance with a European power and therefore a token that she had
reached the ranks of the world powers.’ Ibid., p. 1.
Ibid., pp. 104–105.
234
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
modernization of the navy would continue into the 20th century,51 and eventually Britain
entered into the Triple Entente with France and Russia in hopes of containing Germany
through the construction of a stable balance of power in Europe.
Each of these varied British responses to rising states had a huge impact upon the policies of the rising powers themselves, as well as the subsequent course of world-historical
events. The point is not that the foreign policies of the United States, Germany, Japan,
France, and Russia did not matter in these equations. They did. Yet it is no exaggeration to
say, for example, that British policy hastened the rise to great power status of the United
States and Japan, or that London’s opposition to Germany’s rise in power influenced both
the outbreak and the outcome of WWI (and even, by extension, the events leading up to
WWII in Europe).52
American expansionism across North America into the Caribbean and across the Pacific
was made much easier by the demilitarization of the US–Canadian border, Britain’s willingness to cede contested territory in the Pacific Northwest, the friendship of the Royal Navy,
and London’s critical diplomatic support in 1898. Similarly, Japan’s victory over Russia in
1905 was arguably only possible because Britain deterred French intervention on Russia’s
behalf, rejected French overtures to bring hostilities to an early conclusion, prevented
Russia from acquiring new warships, and denied the Russian fleet replenishment on its way
to the Far East.53 As the Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne informed King Edward VII,
The Anglo-Japanese alliance . . . although not intended to encourage the Japanese Government
to resort to extremities, had, and was sure to have, the effect of making Japan feel that she might
try conclusions with her great rival in the Far East, free from all risk of a European coalition
such as that which had on a previous occasion deprived her of the fruits of her victory.54
Meanwhile, Britain’s inability (or unwillingness) to cement friendly relations with
Wilhelmine Germany certainly played a key role in laying the foundations for WWI.
Indeed, some historians suggest that, during the early 20th century, Germany was amenable
to the idea of reaching some kind of a modus vivendi with Britain. Yet because Germany’s
primary motivation for an alliance was to guard against the prospect of entering into a
two-front war with France and Russia, Berlin’s terms for a rapprochement with Britain
were that London should join the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and
Italy—the extant means by which Germany was attempting to balance against the FrancoRussian axis.55
51
52
53
54
55
The House of Commons, including many within the governing Liberal Cabinet, watered
down overly ambitious targets for naval expenditure in 1906. See Martin Farr, Reginald
McKenna 1863–1916: Financier Among Statesmen (New York: Routledge, 2007).
It is also possible that Britain’s spurning of Japan in the 1920s contributed to that country’s
diplomatic isolation and ultimate turn towards militarism and the pursuit of autarky—itself a
primary cause of WWII in the Pacific.
Kupchan, How Enemies Become Friends, p. 137.
Lansdowne to King Edward VII, quoted in Gregory D. Miller, The Shadow of the Past:
Reputation and Military Alliances Before the First World War (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2012), p. 77, citing George P. Gooch, Before the War: The Grouping of the Powers
(London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1936), p. 75.
See, for example, Monger, End of Isolation, p. 66.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
235
The problem was that entering into such a multilateral alliance was not attractive to
British statesmen; doing so would undo recent British diplomatic achievements vis-à-vis
France and Russia, and would risk entangling Britain in a European contest that, at the
time, Britain saw itself as somewhat aloof from. Just as Berlin rejected naval cuts as the
price of conciliation with Britain, then, London was responsible for rejecting membership
of the Triple Alliance as a workable alternative for conciliation. The result—whether
because of poor statesmanship or tragic structural conditions—was to keep Germany on
the path of naval expansionism that would ultimately drive Britain into a balancing coalition against it. There can be few instances of historical global gatekeeping that portended
graver repercussions.
Consider, also, the counterfactual cases. What if, during Spanish–American War,
Britain had opposed US intervention in Cuba, instead organizing a coalition of European
powers to insist upon no territorial revisionism in the Caribbean and, in the war’s East
Asian theatre, denying the use of Hong Kong to Commodore Dewey’s warships and allowing the Spanish access to vital underwater communications cables? The result could easily
have been changes in US foreign policy with regard to overseas expansion, particularly as
the threat of conflict with Britain and other European powers would have strengthened the
hand of anti-interventionists and outright isolationists in the United States (among whom
ranked prominent citizens such as ex-president Grover Cleveland, the writer Mark Twain,
the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, as well as a vocal contingent of US
senators).56
What if Britain had joined with France, Germany, and Russia to curtail Japan’s territorial gains following the Sino-Japanese War, or had reneged on its 1902 agreement with
Japan to allow French forces to help Russia win the war of 1904–1905? Given that Britain
would later enter into a strategic entente with both France and Russia, such an outcome
was hardly beyond the realms of possibility.57 Or what if Britain had conciliated the
German Empire instead of acting to contain it, as was advocated by Chamberlain and other
arch-imperialists like Cecil John Rhodes? The Royal Navy and the Kaiserliche Marine
could feasibly have hammered out arms control treaties or agreements on spheres of influence;58 London and Berlin could have continued to make common cause regarding colonial
56
57
58
Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898-1900 (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1968); Philip S. Foner and Richard C. Winchester, eds., The Anti-Imperialist
Reader: A Documentary History of Anti-Imperialism in the United States (New York: Holmes
& Meier, 1984). On the broader theme of internal dissent against US expansion, see David
Allan Mayers, Dissenting Voices in America’s Rise to Power (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007).
Historian Keith Neilson argues that a modus vivendi with Russia was, in fact, the preference
of British officials up until around 1898. See Keith Neilson, ‘Anglo-Japanese Alliance and
British Strategic Foreign Policy’, in Phillips Payson O’Brien, ed., The Anglo-Japanese
Alliance, 1902–1922 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), p. 50; and Keith Neilson, Britain and
the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia, 1894–1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),
pp. 178–237. Ian Nish similarly notes that India, not China, was Britain’s biggest preoccupation in Asia, and that a strategy of turning Russia’s attention away from Central Asia and
towards East Asia would have been the most appropriate diplomatic move according to a
strict realpolitik logic. See Nish, The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, p. 17.
In 1921–1922, Britain formally acceded to naval parity with the United States.
236
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
issues, as they did at several points during the late 19th century; and an Anglo-German pact
might even have guaranteed stability on the European continent, deterring both France and
Russia from grandstanding over Austria’s involvement in the Balkans. As even these few
counterfactual scenarios suggest, how great powers respond to rising states has the potential, at least, to determine the opportunity structures available to their challengers and thus
to shape the subsequent development of major world-historical trends.
The American Experience
Today, it is the United States that must discharge a global gatekeeping function with respect
to the rise of China and the other so-called BRICS nations. Yet the United States is no stranger to global gatekeeping as a particular form of strategic adjustment. Indeed, although
Britain was the foremost gatekeeper of global order between 1815 and 1914, the United
States has been pivotal in determining the basic contours of world politics at least since
WWII, after which conflict the United States emerged as the most powerful nation in the
history of the world. Like Britain at its height, the United States since 1945 has discharged
its global gatekeeping role unevenly, alternately welcoming the rise in power of rival states
and acting to contain their growth in power. Taking stock of America’s experience of
global gatekeeping can offer some powerful lessons for the present and for the future of US
foreign policy towards rising states.
America’s experience of global gatekeeping began in 1944–1945. Even before a
decisive victory in WWII was assured, Franklin D. Roosevelt, his closest advisers and
America’s allies set about planning for the post-war settlement. Although historians disagree over just how detailed Roosevelt’s roadmap really was, certain principles to underpin
the post-war world were enunciated with some clarity. For one thing, it is clear that
Roosevelt preferred broad multilateralism over outright US primacy when it came to global
governance: his concept of the so-called ‘Four Policemen’ (the United States, Britain, the
Soviet Union, and China) envisaged a pseudo-concert system for managing world politics,
one that would ultimately find expression in the multilateral institutions such as the United
Nations (especially the UN Security Council) and other post-war international organizations created to replace and upgrade the failed collaborative efforts of the interwar
period.59
At least in part, such multilateral efforts were aimed at binding to America’s side the
massively expanded Soviet Union, the waning yet still powerful British Empire (and France)
and the perilously fragile Republic of China. Ever the optimist, Roosevelt believed that the
United States could come to a modus vivendi with the world’s other great powers—
including Moscow—and moreover, that doing so would be in the America’s long-term best
interests. American grand strategy after the defeat of fascism would be one of liberal internationalism, collective security, and collaborative order-building. The United States would
greet other great powers with magnanimity and friendship, the goal being to diffuse power
among the world’s leading states as a mechanism of ensuring global security and reassuring
Americans that the costs of policing international society would not be borne by them
alone.
59
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 389, 482, 542–43.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
237
After FDR’s death in office, President Harry Truman initially carried on FDR’s broad
multilateralism with regard to world order.60 The United Nations was launched as a major
dispute resolution forum and an epicentre of multilateral global governance. The institutions agreed upon at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference were also made real: the
International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (now the World Bank). Britain and France were helped, albeit grudgingly at
times, to re-establish control over their expansive overseas empires. Chiang Kai-shek was
invested in to anchor a US-led security order in the Far East even as a communist victory in
China came to appear inevitable. Moscow was left in control over most of Eastern Europe
as per the terms discussed at Yalta. Piece by piece, an international system anchored by
multiple great powers began to take shape.
As the 1940s progressed, however, the concert system envisaged by Roosevelt and
Truman was frustrated in spectacular fashion. Stalin’s tardy withdrawal from northern
Iran, his failure to hold democratic elections in Poland, and the 1948 Czechoslovak coup
all seemed to reveal that the Soviet Union was keener to exploit Allied goodwill rather than
reciprocate it—a sentiment crystallized most effectively by George Kennan in his now
legendary Long Telegram. Before long, this mistrust was replaced with a veritable sense of
emergency following the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb, the eventual ‘fall of
China’, and the outbreak of the Korean War.61
As the Cold War set in, the Truman Administration was forced to undertake a rapid
strategic adjustment to the worsening geopolitical context. In place of seeking to conciliate
the Soviets, the Truman Doctrine was promulgated and US foreign policy was organized
accordingly towards the end of denying Moscow and its allies any further increases in
power and influence. A massive mobilization of US military resources and national resolve
was undertaken, marking the beginnings of a gargantuan commitment to (in Kennan’s
words) meeting Soviet malfeasance ‘with the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce’,62 whenever and ultimately (contrary to Kennan’s prescriptions) wherever that might
occur. Containment, as this grand strategy would later be known, became the cornerstone
of US foreign policy throughout the Cold War—the overriding goal for over four decades
being to deny the Soviet Union any significant increases in power and the greater share of
international spoils that such an increase in power would entail.
In contrast, other rising states during the Cold War were warmly welcomed by the
United States into the great power club. West Germany and Japan, in particular, were
recipients of massive US investment and favourable trade relations, the unambiguous aim
of US policymakers being to get these centres of military-industrial power back on their feet
as soon as possible. Far from wanting to maintain strict bipolarity, US leaders confided that
they desired an integrated Western Europe to be a ‘third force’ in world politics—a geopolitical unit that would be able to stand firmly against Soviet aggression, even though it was
60
61
62
For an excellent, if necessarily limited, overview of the period, see Dean Acheson, Present
at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969). See also
Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 3–15.
Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 15–124.
X [George F. Kennan], ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 25, No. 4 (1947),
p. 576.
238
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
not envisaged that Europe would become a true superpower in its own right.63 It is instructive to recall that, during the early phase of the post-WWII period, Japan and Germany were
earmarked to become agrarian societies, permanently neutered and prevented from ever
again attaining true great power status.64 It was only when geopolitical conditions worsened in the 1940s and 1950s that US plans for both states changed: Bonn and Tokyo came
to be cherished as nodes of the global capitalist order; each was encouraged to (re)industrialize and (re)militarize in order to buoy the health and vitality of the US-led Free World.
Meanwhile, efforts were made to prop up the ailing British Empire well into the 1960s and
1970s—particularly in the Indian Ocean and the Far East (incidents such as the 1956 Suez
Crisis notwithstanding).
In short, the United States during the Cold War found it strategically advantageous to
promote the rise in power of some states—namely, Japan and West Germany (and Western
Europe more broadly)—while seeking to stymie the rise of others—the Soviet Union, the
People’s Republic of China, and their satellites. America’s global gatekeeping function was
discharged unevenly, with US leaders discriminating between the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’
sort of candidates for membership of the international premier league.
Managing these relationships with the world’s (rising) great powers was no simple task
for America’s Cold War presidents. Public opinion and the US political economy had to be
rewired to ensure a domestic balance in favour of continued use of national resources to
maintain global order. Consider the containment of the Soviet Union. While US leaders
were clear-eyed about the security threat posed by Moscow, persuading the US public to
buck the American tradition of returning to ‘normalcy’ after a major war was not easily
done. In the 1940s, prominent politicians and large sections of the country were implacably
opposed to a permanent military footing, and thus constituted formidable stumbling blocks
along the road to implementing containment. Initiatives such as the Marshall Plan and aid
to Asia were hard sells, involving as they did the direct transfer of US tax dollars to foreign
countries—including those that US troops had recently died fighting against. In order to
secure these controversial foreign policies, vigorous public relations campaigns and astute
political logrolling were required.65
As such, while the 1947–1951 move to contain Soviet expansionism is a classic instance
of strategic adjustment—and, in particular, global gatekeeping—in action, it is also an
instructive lesson in just how much political ‘work’ is required to secure a successful such
adjustment. Under Truman and his successors, US political and economic elites waged a
purposive and purposeful domestic-political campaign in support of their international
grand-strategic goals. It was far from inevitable that the American polity would acquiesce
in the massive investment that was required to bankroll Washington’s Cold War foreign
63
64
65
Geir Lundestad, The United States and Western Europe Since 1945: From ‘Empire’ by
Invitation to Transatlantic Drift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 86.
William I. Hitchcock, The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe
(New York: Free Press, 2008), chapter 5; Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of
Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), chapter
1.
Gaddis, Strategies of Containment; Thomas J. Christensen, Useful Adversaries: Grand
Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947–1958 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996); Fordham, Building the Cold War Consensus.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
239
policies,66 and it is a testament to the potential of shrewd political leadership that containment was implemented at all, let alone maintained (fluctuations notwithstanding) for the
next four decades.
After the Cold War, US leaders stuck to the course of diffusing power globally yet selectively. Instead of exploiting unipolarity to keep all other states in a permanent state of inferiority, the United States has consistently sought to promote the cause of a united Europe
and a rich and powerful Japan—and even a nuclear-armed India—while seeking to isolate
and slow the growth in power of regional incendiaries such as Iran and Venezuela.
Again, however, America’s global gatekeeping policies have not gone unchallenged
within the United States itself. Calls for protectionism, disengagement, or isolationism have
abounded with some frequency. Why, critics ask, should the US offer plum economic terms
and security guarantees to economic rivals who exploit US generosity and, worse still,
threaten to eclipse America on the world stage? Why should the United States spend its
own national resources on containing potential aggressors (e.g. Russia) while other states
(e.g. European members of NATO) preside over paltry defence budgets?
Nevertheless, America’s post-Cold War leaders have managed to maintain a critical
mass of the foreign policy establishment (even if not the US public at large) in favour of
broad overseas engagement, diffusing power among America’s allies, and acting to contain
potentially dangerous peer competitors. As a result, Washington’s track record when it
comes to global gatekeeping has remained impressive, one of successfully seeking to buttress a liberal, capitalist, and roughly multilateral—even if necessarily exclusionary—
international order.
Evaluating Strategies of Global Gatekeeping
In sum, the modern international history of British and American responses to rising states
reveals the presence of both ideal-type strategies discussed above—that is, conciliation and
containment—as well as some instances of hedging. As the long 19th century came to a
close, Britain pursued the conciliation of the United States and Japan, but determined,
albeit reluctantly, upon the containment of Wilhelmine Germany. Later in the 20th century,
Britain would infamously seek to conciliate Hitler’s Germany, before shifting to a belated
strategy of containment and war.67 The fateful attempt to appease Nazi Germany notwithstanding, it is clear that strategies of conciliation can be successful, both in terms of preserving peaceful (and mutually beneficial) relations between established and rising states and in
terms of system-wide stability. Indeed, Britain’s ability to bring ‘its resources and commitments into balance’ when faced with rising challengers is often lauded in the powertransition and realist literature.68 While British statesmen sometimes judged defensive wars
against rising states to be necessary, history shows that these have been costly and
66
67
68
On some of the obstacles that existed to implementing the militaristic policies of containment, see Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the
National Security State 1945–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Peter Trubowitz and Peter Harris, ‘When States Appease: British Appeasement in the
1930s’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2 (2015), pp. 289–311.
Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, p. 194. See also Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the
Great Powers; Jack L. Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International
Ambition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Kennedy, ‘A Time to Appease’.
240
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
destructive endeavours—successful, perhaps, in the long-term goal of preserving a just and
stable world order, but certainly not projects to be embarked upon lightly.
These lessons are borne out by the American experience. For the United States, too, has
adopted a variety of responses towards rising states. The containment of the Soviet Union
was one of the major triumphs of 20th century US foreign policy, to be sure, but the
successful transformation of Japan and (West) Germany into powerful—and peaceful—
liberal democracies must also be considered historically extraordinary achievements. It was
only through major US economic, military, and diplomatic investment that America’s erstwhile rivals were able to grow to become such powerful actors on the world stage. They
were brought into the great power club partly as a function of US foreign policy.
Again, the lesson is that not all rising states must be viewed with hostility by the leaders
of established great powers; sometimes, power in world politics can be diffused peacefully
and to the general betterment of all concerned. It is the job of foreign policy decision makers to discern whether rising states should be considered threats to national security and
international order or whether they can peacefully be incorporated into the prevailing system. Sometimes, leaders will determine that redistributing benefits towards a rising state in
the context of a changing distribution of power would be folly or else too costly to countenance. At other times, they will decide against trying to buoy the extant distribution of
power and be in favour of accepting peaceful international change. This is the essence of
established states’ gatekeeping function—a strategic choice of whether or not to conciliate
a rising state by acquiescing in the redistribution of benefits towards it; to contain a rising
state by fighting to restore the pre-existing distribution of power; or to devise a mixed strategy that contains elements of both. History would suggest that there is no one ‘right’
answer, only difficult and portentous decisions to be made.
America’s China Challenge
Today, global gatekeeping is most pertinent when it comes to US foreign policy vis-à-vis
the rise of China. This is not the first time that the United States has exercised a gatekeeping
role vis-à-vis China, of course. In the 1950s, the United States went to great lengths to contain Beijing and deny it a seat at the top table of international diplomacy (literally, in the
sense that Taipei occupied China’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council until 1971).
In large part, vehement opposition to Chinese communism and the warm embrace of
Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists (which commentators then and now have argued flew in the
face of hard-headed, strategic analysis) were part and parcel of wider endeavours to galvanize domestic support for the unprecedented US strategy of containing Soviet-sponsored
communism as a world phenomenon.69
Yet Americans also feared Maoist expansionism in its own right. President Eisenhower
took decisive measures to deter Beijing from attacking Taiwan during the 1950s,70 while in
the 1960s escalation of the US war effort in Vietnam was partly an attempt to deny the
People’s Republic of China a sphere of influence in Southeast Asia. In the 1970s, however,
this policy of containment was largely (although not entirely) reversed, with first President
69
70
Christensen, Useful Adversaries.
H. W. Brands, ‘Testing Massive Retaliation: Credibility and Crisis Management in the Taiwan
Strait’, International Security, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1988), pp. 124–51.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
241
Nixon (and Ford) and then President Carter overseeing the opening of official diplomatic
channels with China and, ultimately, the virtual normalization of US–China relations.71
During the Cold War, gatekeeping decisions towards China were nested within an overall decision-making calculus that privileged the US–Soviet rivalry. Whether or not Beijing
was held in abeyance or tacitly accepted as a way to balance against Moscow did little to
alter the overall bipolar structure of the international system. China mattered, but not in
the sense that US policy towards it could truly redefine the contours of the international system; containing the Soviet Union remained the paramount consideration, and US policy
towards China was always formulated in service of broader Cold War objectives.
The contemporary rise of China, however, represents a qualitatively different challenge
from the perspective of the United States. China is no longer a pawn in a struggle between
other great powers. Rather,21st century China is the first great power since the Soviet
Union (and even the Soviet case is arguable) to seriously threaten to overtake the United
States in terms of gross economic and military power—at least eventually.
Like the Soviet Union, China is a non-democratic and non-liberal polity. China thus has
the potential to remake world politics in a way anathema to US interests. There are therefore compelling reasons to implement a strategy of containment towards China akin to that
devised and implemented in response to the Soviet Union’s bid for hegemony in the 20th
century—or, at least, to plan to implement such a strategy if China reveals itself in the
future to be bent on hegemonic expansion.
Yet it is also possible that China’s growth in power can be made to work to America’s
advantage: like Europe and Japan—and decidedly unlike the Soviet Union—China has the
potential to be a reliably capitalist anchor to the US-led economic system, a loadbearing
pillar of the open international-economic order that the United States has a strong interest
in maintaining.72 Countries (including great powers) with different political and social
systems have co-existed for millennia; it is not unthinkable that the United States and China
can overcome their differences to pursue mutually beneficial cooperation where it counts
most. How, then, should the United States respond to the rise of China? What form of strategic adjustment is required? And what has been done to date?
Arriving at ‘Congagement’
In fact, American foreign policy towards China’s rise has been a mixture of strategic
engagement (conciliation) and containment ever since Richard Nixon’s ‘opening to China’
in the 1970s. In essence, this hybrid strategy of ‘congagement’73 has meant encouraging
China to become a ‘responsible stakeholder’ of the international system (and particularly
71
72
73
Robert S. Ross, Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969–1989 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1995); Chris Tudda, A Cold War Turning Point: Nixon and China,
1969–1972 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012).
Some scholars point to the Anglo-American power transition as an example of peaceful
rise to be emulated by the contemporary United States and China. See, for example, Feng
Yongping, ‘The Peaceful Transition of Power from the UK to the US’, Chinese Journal of
International Politics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2006), pp. 83–108.
The label was first used in Zalmay Khalilzad, ‘Congage China’, RAND Issue Paper, Vol. 187
(1999). It has been popularized by others since. See, for example, Friedberg, A Contest for
Supremacy.
242
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
the international economic order) even as a string of US alliances (tacit and formal) have
emerged to encircle China from Central Asia to the South and East China Seas.
The ‘engagement’ half of congagement has allowed for some notable successes. Chinese
markets for goods and services have been integrated into the world economy in rapid fashion,74 and Beijing is now a major creditor nation. China is a member of the World Trade
Organization (WTO) and a host of other multilateral institutions. Its military forces are
engaged in peacekeeping missions around the world and even assist in policing important
maritime trade routes.75 Moreover, Chinese cooperation is becoming increasingly important to securing multilateral agreements on important global issues such as climate change.76
By enmeshing China in a web of multilateral institutions and international agreements and
by incentivizing its leaders to help manage the global order, instead of playing the role of
‘spoiler’, the hope in Washington has been that the American-made international system
will be able to withstand the migration of power from west to east; China will be given
such a mighty stake in the current world system that Beijing will never see fit to change any
major aspect of it.77
On the other hand, policymakers in Washington, DC, and across East Asia (especially in
Tokyo, Taipei, and Seoul; and also in Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Canberra, and even
New Delhi) evince obvious misgivings about the multiplying military wherewithal of the
People’s Republic. Growing Chinese power has created concern that many of the territorial
disputes that plague the countries of the East and South China Seas will be resolved through
coercion rather than compromise. Although Chinese leaders might profess their keen interest in ‘peaceful rise’ (or ‘peaceful development),78 neighbouring states fear that modern
China will begin to act like the Middle Kingdom of old, placing itself at the heart of a Sinocentric regional order organized to serve Chinese interests at the expense of smaller regional
players.
Even the (economic and militarily) powerful states of the region such as Japan, South
Korea, and India worry that China’s growth in power will threaten their vital interests,
including their national security. Almost uniformly, this anxiety about China’s rise has
translated into a demand for a deeper US commitment to the containment of China.79
74
75
76
77
78
79
For an overview of China’s economic integration into the global order, see John Whalley,
ed., China’s Integration into the World Economy (Singapore: World Scientific, 2011).
Miwa Hirono and Marc Lanteigne, eds., ‘Special Issue: China’s Evolving Approach to
Peacekeeping’, International Peacekeeping, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2011), pp. 243–362; Andrew
Erickson and Austin Strange, ‘Sunk Costs: China and the Pirates’, The Diplomat, 26
September, 2013, http://thediplomat.com/2013/09/sunk-costs-china-and-the-pirates/.
Guoguang Wu and Helen Lansdowne, eds., China Turns to Multilateralism: Foreign Policy
and Regional Security (New York: Routledge, 2008); Joanna I. Lewis, ‘China’s Strategic
Priorities in International Climate Change Negotiations’, The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 31,
No. 1 (2007–2008), pp. 155–74.
G. John Ikenberry, ‘The Rise of China and the Future of the West: Can the Liberal System
Survive?’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 1 (2008), pp. 23–37.
Jia Quingguo, ‘Peaceful Development: China’s Policy of Reassurance’, Australian Journal of
International Affairs, Vol. 59, No. 4 (2005), pp. 493–507.
Geunwook Lee, ‘Between Multilateralism and Bilateralism’, in T. J. Pempel and Chung-Min
Lee, eds., Security Cooperation in Northeast Asia: Architecture and Beyond (New York:
Routledge, 2012), pp. 80–81.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
243
In response, the hub-and-spoke East Asian security architecture put in place by the United
States and its allies in the 1950s has been augmented over recent years, updated to hedge
against a burgeoning Chinese military establishment that threatens to upend the strategic
balance of the Asia-Pacific and plunge the region into conflict.80
For the most part, the United States has stumbled into accepting congagement as a
de facto strategy towards China. The selective engagement of China is a relic of Nixon’s
rapprochement with China, which was a calculated policy pursued primarily for geopolitical reasons as a way to triangulate the Soviet Union in the context of the Cold War.81 The
Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations developed and maintained the policy of détente
with China out of a likeminded appreciation for the security implications that the
US–China rapprochement created for Moscow.
In the post-Cold War era, however, this principal rationale for conciliating China
evaporated. While the promise of fruitful trade relations with China was substituted as the
primary driving force behind US acquiescence in China’s unprecedented economic growth,
this impetus for rapprochement paled in comparison to the original geostrategic rationale
for conciliating China. As described above, economic cooperation with China has become
coupled with overt and tacit military balancing against China—partly the legacy of the
early Cold War attempts to contain ‘Red China’, partly a result of more recent regional nervousness about China’s contemporary rise—which understandably has led to doubts in
Beijing about the sincerity of America’s professed commitment to China’s peaceful rise.
Chinese leaders complain about being encircled by the United States and its allies, and
smoulder at American criticism of China’s domestic politics, especially its record on human
rights. From the Chinese perspective, America’s engagement of China has often appeared
anything but conciliatory.
Moreover, America’s mixed strategy of congagement has never visibly been subjected to
thoughtful and purposive strategic planning or meaningful domestic ratification.82 Instead,
US–China relations have been allowed to evolve into their current form without significant
attention being paid to the political bargains undergirding US strategy. Worse, the two
strands to American foreign policy vis-à-vis China are clearly in tension—one (in the economic sphere) extends a hand of friendship to Beijing while the other (in the security
sphere) overtly seeks to resist Chinese influence in the region and the wider world—yet they
have been uneasily pursued in conjunction with one another for over three decades. By
definition, congagement is a strategy of ambivalence. The United States has always sought
to pursue a cold, conditional, and partial strategy of conciliation towards China, and the
80
81
82
Daniel Twining, ‘America’s Grand Design in Asia’, The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 3
(2007), pp. 79–94. China has not stood idly by, however, in the face of apparent ‘encirclement’. See John W. Garver and Fei-Ling Wang, ‘China’s Anti-Encirclement Strategy’, Asian
Security, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2010), pp. 238–61.
The hope that Beijing would be able to apply pressure on North Vietnam also played into
the White House’s thinking.
There are those who thoughtfully argue for a mixed strategy that includes only elements of
accommodation. See, for example, James Steinberg and Michael E. O’Hanlon, Strategic
Reassurance and Resolve: US-China Relations in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2014). But it is still true that the present strategy of congagement has undergone very little in the way of public scrutiny and endorsement.
244
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
goal has never been to warmly embrace China as a full equal on the world stage. The question is: for how long can this Janus-faced foreign policy be sustained?
Congagement: Built upon the Sand?
As argued above, all successful foreign policies critically depend upon firm domesticpolitical foundations. One problem for congagement is that very little groundwork has
been laid for it in the domestic sphere. No major domestic-level strategic adjustment visà-vis China has been undertaken since Richard Nixon—a reflection, most likely, of the
nation’s ambivalent and bifurcated foreign policy. Instead, congagement has been pursued
without regard to the task of building an enduring domestic coalition in support of
the policy.
In the past, American leaders worked hard to sell China to domestic audiences; first, as
a massive threat in the 1940s and 1950s; and secondly, as a strategic partner suitable for
the United States during the 1970s. There has been precious little management of public
opinion towards China in recent decades, however. Partly, this is because of the incomplete
nature in which China was sold to the American people during rapprochement. Under
Nixon and Ford, Beijing was sanitized in the public and official American imagination,
transformed from a threatening communist monolith into a useful counterweight to the
more menacing Soviet Union;83 natural supporters of China’s integration into the world
community, such as business leaders, were harnessed towards the Nixon administration’s
ends, and folded into a domestic coalition in favour of a lasting rapprochement. Yet at the
same time, China was ‘otherized’ and ‘exoticized’ in American political discourse, inevitably limiting the scope of acceptance for China in US politics.84 Such otherization
has continued unabated since the 1970s, and orientalist (and often outright pejorative) representations of China have been exacerbated by China’s recent economic growth, which
has given rise to fear-mongering about the implications of China’s rise for the US
economy.85
Recently, negative images of China have come to dwarf the positive representation of
China as a strategic partner. The dominant discourse has been one of stoking fear about the
rise of China, particularly in the economic sphere, with China’s growth commonly being
framed as a cause—or, at the very least, a correlate—of American decline. There has been
precious little attempt to build a domestic coalition in favour of China’s rise: economic and
political groups with a stake in facilitating Chinese economic growth are unorganized, lacking a coherent voice in US politics, while those poised to make political hay out of so-called
83
84
85
For the best overview of this process, see Evelyn Goh, Constructing the U.S.
Rapprochement with China, 1961–1974: From “Red Menace” to “Tacit Ally” (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
On the history of orientalism as it relates to China’s image in western politics, see David
Martin Jones, The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought (New York:
Palgrave, 2001).
For an overview of representations of China in US newspapers between 1992 and 2001, see
Zengjun Peng, ‘Representation of China: An Across Time Analysis of Coverage in the New
York Times and Los Angeles Times’, Asian Journal of Communication, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2004),
pp. 53–67.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
245
‘China bashing’86 do so with impunity. As a result, congagement rests upon fragile—and
potentially volatile—domestic-political foundations, the ‘containment’ (anti-China) elements of the strategy perhaps resting upon firmer ground than the ‘engagement’ (pro-China)
aspects.87
So far, congagement has been kept in place as an organizing template of US–China relations more out of inertia than deliberative policy planning.88 Certainly, there are few
domestic groups with a strong attachment to the policy, and successive US presidents have
done little to articulate the strategy either to Congress or the general public. This portends
ill for the future of the strategy.89 As hawks clamour for increased military posturing
towards China, and as doves volubly insist that the United States ought to extricate itself
from an increasingly tumultuous East Asia, who will speak up in defence of a halfway
measure? Surely, it is difficult to imagine any president or political party staking electoral
success on the back of congagement, a strategy that alienates many, pleases few, and lacks
any recognizable domestic base.
Overall, then, it is probably true to say that what has been done in the United States to
respond to China’s rise is—at this point—insufficient to take the strain of upholding the
kind of grand strategy that will be required to respond to China’s rise. Yet it could be considered a blessing in disguise that so little has been done to prepare the American political
system for China’s rise—that is, there is still a relatively blank canvas on which foreign policy elites can work. With very little attention having been paid to coalition building in the
United States, and with most public figures preferring to make short-term political hay out
of China’s rise instead of investing in long-term planning, the possibility exists for
far-sighted US leaders to redesign the country’s grand strategy towards China in dramatic
fashion, and to begin the domestic groundwork necessary to support such a strategy.
In order to exploit this window of opportunity, though, political leaders must act with
some urgency. Congagement is overdue for an overhaul. But what exactly is to be done in
its place?
Why Containment Will Not Work
If US leaders arrived at congagement via a process of ‘muddling through’, does this mean
that the strategy should be scrapped? If so, what should be implemented in its place? Here,
it is first necessary to recall the menu of options available to an established state when faced
with the rise in power of a potential peer competitor. As noted above, the choice facing
established states during a major shift in power essentially is between containment and
86
87
88
89
Carlos D. Ramirez and Rong Rong, ‘China Bashing: Does Trade Drive the “Bad” News about
China in the USA?’, Review of International Economic, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2012), pp. 350–63.
On the use of China as a political issue in US partisan politics, see Peter Trubowitz and
Jungkun Seo, ‘The China Card: Playing Politics with Sino-American Relations’, Political
Science Quarterly, Vol. 127, No. 2 (2012), pp. 189–211.
Friedberg, Contest for Supremacy, pp. 89–90.
An instructive parallel, perhaps, is the Nixon administration’s failure to sell détente with the
Soviet Union to either Congress or the American people. Nixon’s neglect to ensure sufficient domestic ‘buy-in’ for what was essentially a mixed strategy of containing and conciliating Moscow is argued to have been an important reason for détente’s ultimate demise.
See Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, chapter 9.
246
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
conciliation; of preventing (or reversing) adverse shifts in power and accepting such shifts
as faits accomplis.
Some analysts, of course, forcefully argue for the former prescription, insisting that the
United States should strengthen its containment of China or else pay the price of dealing
with an aggrandized and aggressive Beijing at some point in the future.90 Yet even if the
present balance of power between the United States and China can be buoyed to an extent
(through the construction of balancing coalitions against China, for example, or through
the redeployment of US military capabilities to the Asia-Pacific), it is difficult to imagine
how the United States and its allies could keep the international distribution of power such
that benefits in international society will not have to be revised in China’s favour to at least
some degree.
As A. F. K Organski—one of the major architects of power-transition theory—wrote
over six decades ago, rapidly and massively developing states like China today simply cannot be prevented from growing in aggregate national power (at least, not through the application of external force).91 How can US foreign policymakers prevent the modernization,
industrialization, and urbanization of 21st century China? What tool of statecraft exists to
keep this country of 1.35 billion people in a state of inferiority and underdevelopment?
Would doing so even be conscionable?92 The fact is that China’s rise in material power is,
to a significant degree, unstoppable for all intents and purposes: China’s low GDP per
capita only highlights how far the country still has to go in terms of reaching its full
economic potential.
Moreover, the United States and others in the global economy have considerable reasons
to support China’s rise. Not only should outsiders support the basic right of all Chinese
people to enjoy the array of material goods on offer in the developed world, but there are
self-interested justifications for western nations to aid China’s development. Dependent on
Chinese finance, manufacturing, and markets, it is unthinkable that the rest of the world
would orchestrate an economic embargo of China that would stymie its economic growth
in any meaningful sense. A military coalition to balance against China could feasibly succeed in containing Beijing’s politico-military influence in East Asia for a time, but even
this—with all its costly military investment and attendant risk of arms races and war—
might not dull China’s overall diplomatic pull on the world stage.
The point is not that containing China is beyond the realms of possibility. The costs of
doing so to a meaningful extent, however, would be very high, and the case for containment
is much weaker than was the case for containing the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, for
example. As occurred vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, pursuing the containment of China would
require credible security guarantees being maintained and extended to partners in East Asia
and elsewhere; substantial overseas military deployments; foreign economic and military
aid; heavy investment in military and security technologies; and the opportunity costs that
come with alienating a potential strategic partner.
90
91
92
Mearsheimer, ‘The Gathering Storm’; Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics;
Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy.
Organski, World Politics, pp. 308–11.
Kelly Kadera argues that conflict is the primary mechanism by which states attempt to
weaken their rivals. See Kadera, The Power-Conflict Story, chapter 3. Yet the recommendation that the United States engage in a war of attrition to enervate the People’s Liberation
Army would be difficult to sell to public policy circles.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
247
All of these measures would mean fiscal outlays by the US government (which, in turn,
would require taxation) and a willingness on behalf of the United States to risk its own
citizens’ and soldiers’ lives on behalf of others. Building a domestic coalition of the size and
magnitude necessary to underwrite such a concerted foreign policy effort would be tantamount to achieving what Harry Truman achieved during the early Cold War. In other
words, the whole US foreign policy establishment and huge chunks of the US economy
would have to be oriented towards the goal of containing China. Not only is it difficult to
imagine such an enormous reorganization of domestic politics being feasible any time soon,
especially in the context of war-weariness post-Afghanistan and post-Iraq, but it would be
difficult for any US leader to justify the sacrifices even if they were technically practicable.
Even a brief comparison with US–Soviet relations in the early Cold War makes clear
how unlikely it is that containment could or should be implemented vis-à-vis China. During
the early Cold War, many in the United States—patriots and traditional war hawks among
them, including presidents Truman and Eisenhower—worried about the risks that a permanent military footing would have on the US economy and society. And this was at a time
when the Soviet Union posed a clear security threat to US allies in western Europe and East
Asia;93 when a vast coalition of domestic economic interests were in favour of US internationalism to uphold a liberal economic order in the face of Soviet aggression; and when the
United States stood at the pinnacle of the world economy, as almost all of its industries
more competitive than those of rivals who had been devastated by war.
Mobilizing US society towards the end of containing China today would arguably be a
much more difficult task because China does not display the same clear and unmitigated
threatening behaviour as did the Soviet Union during the late 1940s; because the open
world economy does not appear to be in jeopardy; and because it would rely upon a
national economy that boasts far fewer comparative advantages compared with the rest of
the world. Taken together, the likely difficulty of mobilizing domestic support for containment, combined with the unclear geostrategic rationale for devoting resources towards
such ends, implies that the full-scale containment of China is unlikely to succeed. As such,
some form of accommodation with a rising China seems to be inevitable.94 In turn, this
means a strategy of conciliation. For if China’s share of the international benefits continues
to be kept out of sync with its ballooning aggregate material strength, it can only be a matter of time before Chinese leaders pursue unilateral means of securing their country’s
perceived just deserts.
93
94
For most of the Cold War, Soviet leaders were also disingenuous and untrustworthy in their
dealings with their US counterparts. See Andrew H. Kydd, Trust and Mistrust in
International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). US–China relations
have yet to reach such lows.
There is the prospect, of course, of balancing against only some of China’s ‘components of
power’, that is, of focusing on negating only some of China’s military forces (its blue water
navy and other power-projection capabilities, for example). Yet a credible commitment to
decisively check or reverse China’s growth in power would still be an enormously expensive and risky proposition. At least today’s leaders in Washington show few signs of willingness to mobilize the country towards these ends. On the concept of components of power,
see Steven E. Lobell, ‘British Grand Strategy in the 1930s: From Balance of Power to
Components of Power’, in Taliaferro, Ripsman, and Lobell, eds., The Challenge of Grand
Strategy, pp. 147–70.
248
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
Choosing Accommodation
‘Properly understood and properly handled’, writes Fareed Zakaria, ‘great power transitions can be smooth. Misconstrued and mismanaged, they can have cataclysmic consequences’.95 Following this advice, it is better that the United States organize itself for the
task of accommodation rather than keep to the ‘wait and see’ approach that characterizes
congagement, or pursue the dead end that is containment. Others have produced detailed
prescriptions for exactly what a strategy of conciliation would look like in terms of foreign
policies.96 Yet preparing for a foreign policy of concerted and long-lasting conciliation
towards China will also involve paying significant attention to US domestic politics—much
more attention, in fact, than presently is the case.
In this sense, China poses not so much a threat to American interests as it does a challenge for the country’s political leaders. Just as Britain’s political elite worked assiduously
to allay fears of a rising United States during the Gilded Age—and just as the United States,
in turn, proved magnanimous in promoting the rise in power of Germany and Japan during
the Cold War—America today must make the positive case for multilateralism in general,
and for Chinese membership of the great power club in particular. The rise of China cannot
easily be halted or even slowed from the outside, but this does mean discontinuation of the
international order that the United States has striven to build and maintain for the past 70
years. Through careful political management and coalition building in favour of a farsighted strategic adjustment to accommodate China, America and the world can avoid
the worst potential pitfalls of shifting power and reap the rewards of shared stewardship of
the global order. Finding the political pathway to such a peaceful power transition will be
the defining challenge for America’s political leadership in the 21st century.
First, leaders in the United States must improve China’s image in the eyes of the domestic public. China has been cast as a bête noire in US domestic politics for too long, a bogeyman intent on upending the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific and an economic giant
capable of displacing the United States from the pinnacle of the world economy. China is
castigated for manipulating its currency, exploiting the intellectual property of US firms
and individuals, and attracting millions of ‘outsourced’ jobs once performed by blue collar
workers in the United States. Negative portrayals of China have become commonplace in
US domestic discourse.97
This must change. As Evelyn Goh has demonstrated, attitudes towards other states—
and China in particular—are socially constructed and can be manipulated,98 but the
rehabilitation of China in the US political psyche will not occur of its own volition; political
will must be expended in order to achieve the goal. At present, such political will appears
to be sorely lacking, yet this is what must be accomplished if the US political system is to
bear a grand strategy oriented towards accepting the rise in power of China on the world
stage and the concessions that will have to be made in order to make this possible.
Secondly, leaders must build political-economic coalitions in favour of engagement with
China. The truth is that some groups within the United States likely do stand to lose from
China’s rise to power. Many groups have already lost out, as America’s economic
95
96
97
98
Zakaria, From Wealth to Power, p. 11.
Goldstein, Meeting China Halfway.
Peng, ‘Representation of China’; Trubowitz and Seo, ‘The China Card’; Ramirez and Rong,
‘China Bashing’.
Goh, Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
249
competitiveness has fallen behind that of China in some sectors, such as manufacturing.
Yet there is considerable potential to put together a broad coalition of interest groups that
stand to gain from China’s continued growth.
Business organizations and the financial sector are likely to form the most important
part of this coalition, sectors which historically were critical in persuading sceptical Britons
to accept the rise in power of the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Leaders in the United States must ask themselves the following questions: Who does globalization work for? Which domestic groups have a stake in China’s economic success? Next,
the domestic-political clout of such groups must be harnessed towards the goal of achieving
a national-level balance in favour of profitable cooperation with China. Ultimately,
this implies a major role for Democratic and Republican party managers, who must
resist the temptation to fan the flames of xenophobia and economic nationalism and
instead work assiduously in the national interest towards building support for a close
US–China entente.
Thirdly, American leaders must take care to tame a sprawling military establishment
that will have its own interests at stake during any future US–China power transition. It is
highly likely that the American military must be trimmed as part of a diplomatic concordat
with China—both in order to sustain American economic vitality at home and signal credible resolve to Beijing that the United States does not intend to hew to a bloody-minded
strategy of containment. Such economies in the size of the military establishment and
the constriction of its global reach must not be allowed to catalyse a backlash in domestic
politics.
What if the Royal Navy had balked at the decision to cede command of the seas to the
United States and had instead possessed the domestic-political influence necessary to place
the country on a naval arms race with America? While the Pentagon is not currently at risk
of overshadowing its civilian masters in terms of policy-making, neither is the US military
establishment an entirely silent partner in domestic politics. Instead, the political and economic importance of the military within the United States constitutes a recognizable ‘tilt’
on the political playing field, pushing the country towards decidedly militarist solutions to
certain problems when a more slender foreign policy might sometimes suffice.99 This bias
in US domestic politics must be tackled if the nation’s leaders are to have the flexibility
necessary to craft a far-sighted and successful grand strategy towards the rise of China.
Military policy must be subordinate to grand-strategic ends and not vice versa.
Conclusion
Rising states never emerge in a geopolitical vacuum. Almost by definition, they increase in
power relative to some other extant state or group of states. Power-transition theorists are
correct to point out that these established great powers are intimately connected with and
invested in the prevailing international architecture, which they likely played a leading role
in building and maintaining.100 Moreover, it is almost always true (again by definition)
that extant great powers materially are stronger than their rising challengers, at least during
the initial phases of a rising state’s ascent.
99
100
Daniel Wirls, Irrational Security: The Politics of Defense from Reagan to Obama
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
Organski, World Politics, pp. 326–27.
250
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3
During these critical early phases of a shift in the international distribution of power,
extant great powers can apply their preponderant wherewithal to shape the foreign policy
options—the opportunity structures—open to rising states. For a limited time at least,
established great powers are the gatekeepers of global order; their foreign policy choices are
central to (even if not sufficient for) explaining what type of international political environment will prevail during the period of a power transition and, by extension, whether or not
a shift in power will pass off peacefully.
The United States today faces an impending strategic adjustment along these lines. That
much, at least, is beyond the control of its leaders. How the nation chooses to adjust, however, is far from pre-determined. It is possible that top US decision makers will judge
China’s rise to be inimical to American interests and will decide that Beijing’s ascent to
international pre-eminence can be thwarted through the adroit application of force—
diplomatic, economic, and military—just as the United States sought to contain the Soviet
Union during the Cold War. If so, the country will be placed upon a path of confrontation
with China, the ultimate goal being to contain China’s global influence and undermine the
foundations of its material strength, ideally with a view to reversing the country’s rise in
power. Massive domestic commitments will be required if such a strategy of containment is
to succeed over the long term, as the experience of US–Soviet feuding during the Cold War
amply demonstrates.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom about shifts in the international distribution of
power, however, history shows that conflict between the United States and its rising challengers is not inevitable. China’s peaceful rise is possible and might even be desirable from
the perspective of the United States. Indeed, and reassuringly, peaceful cooperation seems
to be the preferred outcome for leaders in both Washington and Beijing. In other words,
the fact of China’s rise alone need not condemn US–China relations to the same fate as the
US–Soviet rivalry. Yet if the United States is to mount a successful strategic adjustment
oriented towards China’s peaceful rise, it will need to recalibrate its own external posture
and domestic politics to fit the shifting international environment, instead of relying on
Beijing to do all of the contorting. To date, far too little consideration has been given to
how the US domestic arena must be read for such a strategic adjustment.
In deciding how to proceed towards China, America’s leaders would do well to conceptualize the choice before them as one of global gatekeeping—a set of decisions that portend
far-reaching consequences not only for the future of US–China relations but for the future
evolution of world politics more generally. The United States has a long tradition of executing the role of global gatekeeper in exemplary fashion. Whether it will continue in that vein
will depend upon the achievements of its current and future political leaders more than it
will hinge upon structural forces.