With a didactic and light-hearted style, the new book by Harvard law professor Noah Feldman Cool War: the future of global competition, discusses how China’s rise as a globally important economic superpower has created an increasingly complex dilemma for the United States, both militarily and economically. Consequently, Feldman aptly coined the term “cold war” to describe a much more complex set of cooperation, competition, and tension between two enemies caught in an uneasy embrace of economic interdependence.
Feldman points out that the interrelationship of the two nations is new by historical standards. For example, throughout the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were clear military and political rivals, with little or no significant economic interaction. In contrast, Communist-controlled China is currently America’s largest trading partner. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students study at American universities, and the two nations have become stakeholders in a shared cultural and economic experiment.
Furthermore, China quietly amassed a staggering amount of America’s sovereign debt. Even in the 20th century, Feldman points out that nations never significantly invested in another country’s national debt.
To act as the last remaining global superpower, Feldman correctly points out what it means to have to spend as such. And, after several costly misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US population is clearly not in the mood to spend billions more on a massive military build-up, especially one that relies on borrowing from the very nation from which it apparently it seeks to defend itself, to finance that.
While China has yet to attempt to achieve military parity with the US, that strategic goal is not beyond the means. The bottom line, Feldman observes, is that a shooting war is not inevitable, but clearly some form of ongoing conflict is.
He illustrates how Taiwan’s status and independence represent a significant potential flash point for both nations, as Taiwan’s current diplomatic stance involves an ambiguity that suits both Chinese and American wishes. On the one hand, the main Chinese ambition is to return Taiwan to its own orbit. On the other hand, a visible failure to defend Taiwan in the event of a crisis with China would effectively end any semblance of US global hegemony in the Far East. This imaginative moment may come earlier than anticipated, as many experts have contemplated that the United States may have to realistically abandon any hope of continuing to treat Taiwan in a protective manner, in light of broader global realities involving South Korea. North and other hot spots.
China’s global ambitions are hidden from view. The populous nation has already invested billions in conventional military reinforcement. In practice, China’s outward activities are in line with the government’s intention to eventually align its geostrategic position with its economic one.
Regarding China’s weaponry, Feldman astutely observes that such empowerment occurs over decades, not a few months. And, unlike the US, which confers its powers on officials after a publicly visible election in regular 2- or 4-year cycles, Chinese military plans can be more gradual and without the need for sudden policy changes afterward. of a contested election.
Furthermore, China only needs to increase its military capacity to the point where it is large enough that it does not have to actually use it. China ends up winning a war without even firing a shot, as the United States suddenly finds itself uninterested in waging a serious war that it could actually lose.
Feldman also correctly points out that modern acts of “cyber warfare” are an asymmetric, non-traditional form of combat that allows the Chinese to exploit non-traditional weaknesses in the US security infrastructure without a realistic threat of military retaliation. Additionally, covert cyber warfare enables intellectual property theft and corporate espionage, where American corporate trade secrets and other valuable data are compromised and stolen. Feldman predicts that the regular acts of cyber warfare emerging within China are likely to continue into this “cold war” phase.
In particular, Feldman’s book does not explore the prevalence of Chinese counterfeiting as a source of constant contention with the corporate world of the United States. Counterfeit products are viewed by US corporate interests as a covert form of economic espionage that is causing significant harm to business interests. While human rights are undoubtedly a major source of Chinese criticism from the West, China’s tolerance for intellectual property theft is a more sore point for thousands of American companies, who routinely push for tougher and tougher sanctions against such violations. of the WTO rules.
Feldman also notes that there is nationalistic sentiment on both sides of the coin, and that China’s citizens are likely to take pride in China’s rise to global prominence, and Americans’ frustration with manipulating the Chinese currency and growing trade deficit, equally robust. He points out that economic interdependence does not eliminate this tendency to silent conflict.
Another interesting area that Feldman explores is the conflict between American and Chinese ideology, as it is. The central ideology of the Communist Party today represents a strange experimental pragmatism in economics summed up by Deng Xiaoping’s quote: “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white; if it catches mice, it is a good cat.” Even the goal of maintaining the communist party apparatus is viewed with such harsh pragmatism that it places China in an ideological place very different from that of the Stalinist Soviet Union in the 1960s.
China’s ideological pragmatism leads to the result that it will gladly do business with countries like the United States, provided that American democracy respects the way it does things. Thus, the ideological divide between the United States and China is much less a moral chasm than the disagreements that separated Kennedy and Khruschev. Yet to the extent that Americans perceive China as fundamentally reluctant to commit to Western values such as human rights and the rule of law, it is hard to imagine how the continuation of ideological conflict is not inevitable.
Cool war erases an interesting issue: Feldman points out that as long as the United States can preserve the rule of law on its own, it does not have an absolute need to export it. For example, he notes that Western investors have an interest in having their investments in China respected, but would still eagerly invest there if China’s legal establishment were based on coercion (or even outright corruption-based).
The problem with this observation is that it ignores the reality that in this current state of economic and fiscal interdependence, the American rule of law must be exported to other places, under the weight of its own legal system. Take, for example, when an American business executive invests in a factory run by China to make his company’s devices. His company is subject to, among other things, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and a wide variety of tort-based, contractual and regulatory doctrines that would apply in US courts against him and his company.
Suppose your China-run factory ends up hiring some underage workers to make some substandard gadgets, which are then imported and sold to American consumers, and your manager pays a Chinese official to avoid trouble. This situation can be rigor In Chinese business, but in the United States, it can lead to that executive being fired, sued, and even prosecuted. This culture and legal clash is not academic.
Illustrating this culture clash through diplomatic events, Feldman also looks at the anecdotal example of Wang Lijun, the Chinese police chief who applied to the West for asylum after discovering a murder case involving Bo Xilai and a dead British expat involved in a bribery scandal. The story confirmed several widely held beliefs: first, that senior Chinese Communist Party officials participate in widespread corruption, and second, that these party officials and their families act as if they were immune from the rule of law.
The modern twist is that the Chinese party ultimately tried to use this scandal to strengthen its own party apparatus, citing the sordid affair as evidence in the alternate narrative that Chinese corruption will ultimately not hold. Whether anyone really believed in the party is another question.
