CULTURE
Can China and America Live and Let Live?
Détente with the Chinese regime had many downsides. Open conflict might be much worse. By Blaise Malley Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace By Van Jackson Yale University Press In the last half-decade or so, the United States’ political and national-security establishment has re-embraced great-power competition as the organizing principle of American foreign policy at an alarming rate. After 30 years of relative calm between major nations after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Democrats and Republicans alike have concluded that rivalry with China will be the defining challenge of the next generation of American national security. They justify that conclusion by arguing that rivalry is inevitable and that countering Chinese influence in Asia is crucial to maintaining regional stability. “China has mounted a rapid military modernization campaign designed to limit U.S. access to the region and provide China a freer hand there,” reads the Trump administration’s December 2017 National Security Strategy. “China presents its ambitions as mutually beneficial, but Chinese domiBooks nance risks diminishing the sovereignty of many states in the Indo-Pacific. States throughout the region are calling for sustained U.S. leadership in a collective response that upholds a regional order respectful of sovereignty and independence.” The NSS, along with the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS), codified growing bipartisan concerns about China’s influence, concerns that had percolated in think tanks and the bureaucracy during the Obama years and become politically viable under Trump. The conventional wisdom 60 PROSPECT.ORG FEBRUARY 2023
around this question went something like this: The post–Cold War consensus that welcoming China into the global economy would lead to political liberalization was deeply misguided, and China was now using the advantages created by years of skirting international norms to threaten stable U.S. leadership in Asia and around the world. In his new book, Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace, Van Jackson, a former Defense Department staffer during the Obama administration and current professor at Victoria University of Wellington, disputes both the post–Cold War narrative and the new hawks. Jackson makes the case that while détente with China may not have always served to accomplish American policy goals, Washington’s relationship with Beijing was more often a stabilizing force in the Asia-Pacific than a destabilizing one, and that outside of détente with China, U.S. policy was not as foundational to the Asian peace as American narratives may suggest. “U.S. détente with China—the flawed but long-lasting cooperative relationship between Asia’s two largest powers,” Jackson asserts in the book’s conclusion, “has been a vastly underappreciated source of regional stability since the 1970s.” Pacific Power Paradox sets out to answer crucial questions about America’s role in the world. These include: “How much has America really mattered, for good or ill?” “To what extent has Washington been not just a source of, but also a threat to, regional security?” and “What might the United States do to shore up an Asian peace that is today under tremendous strain?” Jackson’s account is a deeply researched analysis of the seven presidents (not counting the incumbent) who have overseen a more than 40-year-long stretch in which “no interstate wars have been initiated in Northeast Asia,
Southeast Asia, or the Pacific.” Each chapter of the book focuses on one of these presidents’ terms in office, and each is split into several sections: U.S. forward military presence in Asia, the White House’s handling of alliances in the region, economic interdependence, regionalism, democracy, and good governance. Jackson details American relations with countries throughout the region, notably Japan, North and South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the other countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). But for the purposes of this review, the most important theme is the nature of the great-power détente with China. Maintaining an increasingly fragile peace in Asia will require reconciling two competing beliefs: one, that U.S. competition, if not outright rivalry, with China is an inescapable fact of American statecraft, and two, that the ability to keep that rivalry within certain limits, and avoid crossing certain lines, has been crucial to achieving peace in Asia in the first place. Jackson points to several times over the last 40 years in which American presidents faced a fork in the road vis-à-vis the relationship with China, and each time Washington opted against antagonizing Beijing. Following Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with China in the early 1970s, and some hiccups in the relationship during Gerald Ford’s presidency, Jimmy Carter’s administration sought to strengthen ties because a “genuinely cooperative relationship between Washington and Beijing would greatly enhance the stability of the Far East,” as then–National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski argued. Internal tensions were often starker during Republican administrations, due to disagreements stemming from the party’s varying levels of commitment to anticommunism, foreign-policy realism, and a corporatist influence from U.S. businesses hungry for Chinese markets. Despite some debate within the administration, Jackson states that in the Reagan years, the United States ultimately fulfilled Assistant Secretary of State John Holdridge’s statement that “our long-term objective is to enhance greatly the stability of the region by strengthening U.S.-China ties.” In June 1989, shortly after George H.W. Bush ascended to the presidency, he faced a tough choice during the Tiananmen Square massacre “between putting the weight of