The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [63]
There is a group of Americans, made up chiefly of neoconservatives and some Pentagon officials, that has been sounding the alarms about the Chinese threat, speaking of it largely in military terms. But the facts do not support their case. China is certainly expanding its military, with a defense budget that has been growing 10 percent or more a year. But it is still spending a fraction of what America does—at most 10 percent of the Pentagon’s annual bill. The United States has twelve nuclear-powered aircraft carriers that can each field eighty-five attack jets; China’s naval engineers are still working on their first. China has twenty nuclear missiles that could reach U.S. shores, according to Pentagon estimates, but these “small and cumbersome” weapons are “inherently vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike.” The United States, by comparison, has around nine thousand intact nuclear warheads and around five thousand strategic warheads.17
The Chinese understand how lopsided the military balance is. The China challenge, accordingly, will not look like another Soviet Union, with Beijing straining to keep pace in military terms. China is more likely to remain an “asymmetrical superpower.” It is already exploring and developing ways to complicate and erode American military supremacy, such as space and Internet-based technology. Even more importantly, it will use its economic strength and its political skills to achieve its objectives without having to resort to military force. China does not want to invade and occupy Taiwan; it is more likely to keep undermining the Taiwanese independence movement, slowly accumulating advantage and wearing out the opponent.
In a paper titled “The Beijing Consensus,” which draws heavily on interviews with leading Chinese officials and academics, Joshua Cooper Ramo provides a fascinating picture of China’s new foreign policy. “Rather than building a U.S.-style power, bristling with arms and intolerant of others’ world views,” he writes, “China’s emerging power is based on the example of their own model, the strength of their economic system, and their rigid defense of . . . national sovereignty.” Ramo describes an elite that understands that their country’s rising power and less interventionist style make it an attractive partner, especially in a world in which the United States is seen as an overbearing hegemon. “The goal for China is not conflict but the avoidance of conflict,” he writes. “True success in strategic issues involves manipulating a situation so effectively that the outcome is inevitably in favor of Chinese interests. This emerges from the oldest Chinese strategic thinker, Sun Zi, who argued that ‘every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.’”18
The United States understands how to handle a traditional military-political advance. After all, this was the nature of the Soviet threat and the Nazi rise to power. The United States has a conceptual framework as well as the tools—weapons, aid packages, alliances—with which to confront such an advance. Were China to push its weight around, anger its neighbors, and frighten the world, Washington would be able to respond with a set of effective policies that would take advantage of the natural balancing process by which Japan, India, Australia, and Vietnam—and perhaps others—would come together to limit China’s emerging power. But what if China adheres to its asymmetrical strategy? What if it gradually expands its economic ties, acts calmly and moderately, and slowly enlarges its sphere of influence, seeking only greater weight, friendship, and influence in the world?