Friedman: Think clearly, don't easily slide from the war on terror to the war on China, our children and grandchildren will thank us in 2041

Source: Global Times

The New York Times article on September 7, the original title: What happened after the war on terror? War on China? The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has led many Americans and analysts to say, "If we had known that, we would not have gone down this path." I don't know if that's really the case, but it still raises the question: What kind of foreign policy would make us look back today and say, 'If we had known that, we wouldn't have gone down this path at all?'

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My answer can be summed up in one word: China.

And my concerns can be summed up in a few paragraphs. The 40 years from 1979 to 2019 were an era in the U.S.-China relationship. Relations between the two countries have ups and downs, but overall we are an era of steady economic integration between our two countries.

Deep U.S.-China integration has helped drive deeper globalization of the world economy and supported 40 years of relative peace between the world's two great powers. Remember always that it is the great power conflicts that have brought us to a turbulent world war.

The era of U.S.-China globalization has put some U.S. manufacturing workers out of work and opened up huge new export markets for other countries. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in China, India, and East Asia, while allowing more American consumers to enjoy a wide range of inexpensive products. In short, if it were not for the U.S.-China relationship, the world's relative peace and prosperity over the past 40 years would have been impossible to talk about.

But over the past five years, the U.S. and China have begun to diverge, perhaps towards direct confrontation.

Continuing on current trends, our two countries — not to mention many others — are likely to look back 20 years from now and say that the world has become more dangerous and less prosperous because of the breakdown in the U.S.-China relationship in the early 2020s.

At first, the two giants worked closely on the table, occasionally tripping offstage, but now there was less business on the table, and the tripping became more and more intense offstage—so fierce that even the table was about to break, and both sides left.

But before we evolve from "cooperation-competition" with China to confrontation, we should ask ourselves some tough questions. China is to do the same. Because when that relationship goes away, we may really miss it.

We first need to ask: Between an emerging power and a conservative power, in what ways is Sino-US competition/conflict inevitable, and in what ways can it be suppressed through smart policies?

Let's start with the inevitable. For the first 30 years of 40 years of economic integration, China sold us what I call "shallow goods," such as shirts we wore on our bodies, tennis shoes on our feet, and solar panels on rooftops. The United States, on the other hand, sells China "deep commodities," such as software and computers that penetrate its systems. China needs these things, and they can only buy them from us.

Today, China can make more and more "deep goods," but there is no shared trust between the two countries to install its deepest technology in our homes, bedrooms, and businesses, or even to sell our deepest goods, such as advanced chips, to China. When China sells us "shallow goods," we don't care whether its government is authoritarian, liberal, or vegan. But when we start buying China's "deep goods," shared values matter, and they don't exist.

Nader Mousavizadeh, founder and CEO of geopolitical consultancy Macro Advisory Partners and senior adviser to former U.N. Secretary-General Annan, suggests that if we are now to shift our attention from the Middle East to an irreversible strategy to confront China, we should start with three basic questions.

First, he said, "Are we sure we know enough about the dynamics of such a vast, ever-changing society as China that we think its inevitable mission is to spread authoritarianism across the globe?" Especially when this requires the United States to pass on its anti-China resolve from generation to generation, which in turn leads to a more nationalist China? ”

Second, Mousavizadeh said: "If we believe that alliances are "an asset unique to the United States, are we listening to them as we talk to our Asian and European allies about the realities of their economic and political relations with China — ensuring that their interests and values are incorporated into the common line toward China?" Otherwise, any alliance will disintegrate. ”

The third question, Mousavizad argues, is it more useful or more dangerous to emphasize the Chinese threat if we believe that after 20 years of war on terror, our priority must now be "to fix it domestically — by addressing huge gaps in infrastructure, education, income, and racial equality." It could ignite the flames of Americans and make them take national rejuvenation seriously. But it could also ignite the flames of the entire U.S.-China relationship, affecting everything from supply chains to student exchanges to China's purchase of U.S. government bonds.

In any case, these are the first questions we must consider before we move from the war on terror to the war on China. Let's be clear.

Our children and grandchildren will thank us in 2041. (Written by Thomas Friedman as a foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, translated by Qiao Heng)