Richard N. Haass , President of the Council on Foreign Relations, previously served as Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department (2001-2003), and was President George W. Bush’s special envoy to Northern Ireland and Coordinator for the Future of Afghanistan. He is the author of A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order. China’s increasing assertiveness beyond its borders. The Belt and Road Initiative appears to be less a development program than a geo- economic tool to expand Chinese influence. China’s broad claims to the South China Sea and its creation of military bases there are viewed throughout the region as a provocation. China’s domestic political development has also disappointed observers. The abolition of the presidential term limit and President Xi relationship have increasingly become a source of friction that threaten it. China exports far more to the U.S. than it imports, contributing to the disappearance of millions of American jobs, and has not opened up its market as expected or delivered on promised reforms. Moreover, China’s government continues to subsidize state-owned enterprises, and either steals intellectual property or requires its transfer to Chinese partners as a condition of foreign companies’ access to the domestic market. This critique of China is widely embraced by U.S. Republicans and Democrats alike, even if they disagree with many of the remedies proposed by the Trump administration. And the criticism is not limited to economic affairs. There is growing concern in the U.S. about OPPORTUNITY
The contemporary Sino-American relationship was born nearly a half-century ago on a foundation of shared concern about the threat posed to both countries by the Soviet Union. It was a textbook case of the old adage, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Such a relationship could survive just about anything – except the disappearance of the common enemy. And this is of course precisely what happened with the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the demise of the USSR at the beginning of 1992. The U.S.-China relationship, however, showed surprising resilience, finding a new rationale: economic interdependence. Americans were happy to buy vast quantities of relatively inexpensive Chinese manufactured goods, demand for which provided jobs for the tens of millions of Chinese who moved from poor agricultural areas to new or rapidly expanding cities. For its part, the United States was mesmerized by the potential for exporting to the vast Chinese market, which was hungry for the more advanced products it wanted but could not yet produce. Many in the U.S. also believed that trade would give China an increased stake in preserving the existing international order, increasing the odds that its rise as a major power would be peaceful. The related hope was that political reform would follow economic growth. Calculations such as these led to the U.S. decision to support China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. Now, years later, the economic ties that had become the foundation of the Sino-American
102 June 2018
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker