Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

What no American official seems to have considered is what a policy of “adjustment” to the reemergence of China might look like. To make space for or alter American policies in order to accommodate China’s legitimate concerns as a potential future superpower seems beyond the policy horizons of American officialdom. Adjustment would hardly mean “appeasement”; it is possible that China might miscalculate and undertake some initiative so damaging to the rights of others that retaliation would indeed be appropriate. But the United States seems to assume that such an outcome is preordained, rather than undertaking diplomacy and statecraft to head it off.

The American president says one thing, but the American military presence in East Asia implies another. During the first half of the twentieth century, China often found itself in a similar situation in relation to the Japanese, whose central government expressed a desire for peace while its military simultaneously launched armed attacks on Chinese territory. A distrust of public protestations of peace and the need to draw conclusions from concrete military acts are part of China’s heritage of international relations. They played a role in Chinese thinking during the Korean War, when differences between General MacArthur’s strategic decisions in Tokyo and President Truman’s statements in Washington contributed to China’s decision to intervene. In the same way, the discrepancies between the American military’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, on May 7, 1999, and the White House’s subsequent protestations that the attack by a B-2 bomber using precision-guided munitions was an accident based on an “outdated map” are particularly hard for the Chinese to overlook. Contemporary American actions in East Asia, as distinct from statements by Washington, help trigger these old memories in Beijing.

The Chinese were sufficiently alarmed by our self-appointed post–Cold War mission of maintaining stability wherever we declared it to be threatened that, according to Helmut Sonnenfeldt (an executive of the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., and a close associate of Henry Kissinger’s), they began studying George Kennan’s early reports from the Soviet Union. At the dawn of the Cold War, Kennan was the State Department’s foremost specialist on Russia. In a famous 1947 article in the magazine Foreign Affairs written under the pseudonym “X” and entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” he first suggested a postwar policy of attempting to “contain” the expansion and influence of the USSR. According to Sonnenfeldt, the Chinese were interested because “now that the United States was turning containment against China, they wanted to learn how [the policy] had started and evolved.”²

U.S. policy toward China, whatever the disagreements about it within the government, is driven by a familiar global agenda aimed at preserving and enhancing a Washington-centered world based on our being the “lone superpower.” Whether it is called “globalization,” the “Washington consensus,” “soft power,” or the “indispensable nation,” it still comes down to an urge to hold on to an American-inspired, -financed, and -led world order. Whereas such hegemonism vis-à-vis Germany, Japan, Latin America, Russia, or the United Nations is only likely to result in imperial overstretch and the probable long-term decline of the United States, attempts to establish American hegemony over China hold out more explosive futures and are in any case doomed to failure.

As the histories of previous empires demonstrate, imperial overstretch can be a long-drawn-out process if all sides are careful to avoid confrontation (the Russian and Ottoman empires come to mind). But such hegemonic policies applied to China are likely to precipitate a crisis. China is the world’s most populous country and has recently achieved an economy that promises to provide it with commensurate wealth and power. It is also an old civilization, whose humbling by foreign imperialists over the past two centuries led to the most sweeping and complex of all the modern revolutions. Its leaders are still working out whether they should seek parity on a global stage as defined by Western conceptions of international relations or try to re-create an older Sinocentric world of tributary states that existed before the arrival of the European imperialists, or perhaps some amalgam of the two.