Towards a Better China Strategy

welcome to csis online the way we bring you events is changing but we'll still present live analysis and award-winning digital media from our drakopolis ideas lab all on your time live or on demand this is csis online well good morning everyone and thank you for joining us my name is jude blanchett and i'm the freeman chair in china studies here at csis i'm really delighted this morning to welcome my colleague and my friend ryan hass senior fellow and michael armacost chair in foreign policy at brookings institution we're here today to discuss ryan's fantastic new book uh stronger adapting america's china strategy in an age of competitive interdependence i think those of us who are watching the evolution of the bilateral relationship have long turned to ryan's steady analytical hand to make sense of what's occurring i think to objectively look at this from from both sides and try and chart a better path forward here for these two great powers as they try to navigate a mounting number of challenges and opportunities in the 21st century um folks i'm sure know that before joining brookings ryan had an illustrious career in the us government including time as a foreign service officer at the u.s embassy in beijing and then later as the director for china taiwan and mongolia at the national security council between 2013 and 2017 those who had a chance to read the book will not be surprised by the extraordinarily high quality of the analysis and insight contained within the book covers and i think folks will have noticed that this is again surprisingly a very optimistic book i think one that should be read by americans who are concerned about the future of this country and who i think have a tendency to underestimate the extraordinary strengths and resiliencies the country has even as we confront clear clear domestic challenges but starting from a position of recognizing these strengths is i think the best position to to have as we look at this china challenge um and there ryan not only captures our resiliencies but also captures many of the challenges that china faces in the coming decades so um i'm really really delighted to dig into all of this today with ryan and uh mr haas thank you thank you for joining us well thank you jude i really appreciate the chance to be with you and more importantly i appreciate your friendship uh and camaraderie uh throughout the book writing process and and uh the conversation we're gonna have today just to clarify that camaraderie for everyone entailed two emails early on saying you can do it um so it was not much more than that but uh i i appreciate that ryan um although i did notice by the way i'm not sure you recognize this i think you may have stole my line in your acknowledgments where you say it takes a village to write a book i'm pretty certain i said that to you first in an early email so i feel like some of my ip has been has been stolen but nonetheless um i wanted to start out before we really dig into the the guts of this book and unpack your framework for the relationship going forward which is this idea of competitive interdependence um i wanted to take an opportunity to pick your brain um to get a sense of where we are in the relationship right now um even those who follow this pretty closely i think are overwhelmed by the velocity of actions counteractions that are occurring right now obviously with the biden administration coming in we did not get a pause from an increasingly you know intensifying relationship even if we certainly got a pause from the um i think the unpredictable news cycles that were occurring within the within the trump administration i wanted to ask you less how is biden doing and i actually wanted to ask you to zoom out a little bit and with your long um with with a longer arc where does the relationship stand right now and i think if we're looking at this in the arc of sort of the past three or four decades some have said this is the lowest ebb since tiananmen square some have said this is the lowest ebb since before the normalization of relations in 1979 or before nixon's visit in 1972 um how do you view the relationship uh right now well i i think that we are in a a tenuous position in the relationship but i don't think we're in a unique uh position in the sense that what we are seeing today is a incremental buildup of pressure in the relationship that has been taking place for a long time a lot of people recently have talked about the meeting between the national security adviser and secretary of state and their chinese counterparts in alaska several weeks ago as a major turning point in the relationship and i would just say that for those of us who have had the privilege of being in the room for those meetings what we saw publicly didn't look that unique or dissimilar from what we've heard privately from our chinese counterparts for a long time and it reflects the fact that the relationship is highly competitive and it has been uh both countries believe that their governance system is best in class and best able to deliver results both want to benefit from the pull of power through demonstrated success both believe that they are entitled to a leadership role in the world stage and what was unique about alaska was that all of that bled out in the public view as opposed to being held behind closed doors but what happened after uh that public area of grievances also is important because the two sides spent over eight hours together in conversation around every issue that impacts both countries around the world from climate to iran to myanmar north korea you name it and so you know that also revealed a a character of the relationship as well that we are sort of bound to each other we're impacted by each other around the world whether we like each other or not and so what what it feels like to me and i'd love to hear your perspective on this jude is that there has been an accumulation of pressure that has created intensifying competition in the relationship since at least 2008. i was in the embassy in 2008 2008-2012 and i could begin to feel it then and and i haven't seen or felt uh that pressure abate since then uh and i think that that's sort of where we are uh and the question that we all face is is it possible for the united states and china to coexist amidst this intensifying competition i remain optimistic that the answer is yes uh but that's you know a debated point at the moment and if you're um if you're diagnosing continuity versus change now a few months into the binding administration you do hear i think especially in in news articles um the idea that not um we're we're almost in trump 2.0 seems to be some of the some of the framing um my own personal view is is that um they're similar about a centimeter thick and then things get very differently very quickly but i wanted to get your take on this um what's different and what's the same you know as of april 6th into a new administration compared to 2016 to 2020 yeah well i think it's worth bearing in mind that we're what 75 76 days into the new administration so they deserve the benefit of a little bit of time before people start casting judgments in stone about their uh approach to the relationship uh they are still getting the administration still getting its team in place uh important figures that will have custody over the relationship are not in office yet and so um there probably is more continuity and the overall tone and tenor than some people were hoping for but there have been changes they've been somewhat subtle but i think they've been significant uh there is no longer talk about trying to separate the chinese communist party from the chinese people uh you don't hear much discussion about uh you know massive whole scale economic decoupling um the president talks about uh stiff competition or extreme competition with china and makes it a distinction between competition and confrontation uh which is significant because a competitor is someone that you try to outpace whereas a opponent or enemy is someone that you feel the need to harm in order to help yourself and there has been a recognition by both leaders that it is possible and in some places necessary to cooperate with competitors which is a you know an important distinction from where we were uh four months ago at this time in the relationship uh switching gears a bit one of the things that impresses me about your work and indeed in the book is an ability to put yourself in beijing's shoes um and and see the world you know as the as the the leaders in zhongdang hai view it and and i'm for folks who haven't read it ryan's got a really fantastic piece in the last issue of the china leadership monitor um looking at beijing's view of the strategic competition so i wanted to just now go 6 000 miles i forget if it's west or east it's 6 000 miles but uh go over to beijing right now and how is beijing viewing the relationship um we get two sides when we when we talk with beijing one is the sort of davos side where it's win-win it's about uh upholding the global order it's about china's a developing country um always seeking opportunities for cooperation then you open the pages of a you know chosen you know or or inward-facing publication and you get a somewhat darker view of the world that is much more to me almost manikin in the great struggle that xi jinping is trying to lead the country through so splitting the difference or in your own analytical view what what are the conversations going on right now in jung hai about the state of the relationship and where it's headed yeah i so my my impression is that uh the chinese leadership is coalesced around a three-word mantra for explaining what's happening in the relationship it's america's fault and uh and i'm sorry to say that because i don't think it's very productive and i don't think it's going to lead us in a positive direction but that's just what i i that's what i feel when i talk to our chinese counterparts when i read the chinese media the argument that they put forward is that china's policy has been steady and consistent that china has deepened its relationships with countries all over the world and that america stands out as a bit of an exception and an outlier and the reason why the united states is an outlier from their perspective is one because the united states is fractured and divided at home and is searching for an external enemy to serve as a cohesive agent for healing some of its domestic divisions and two because of the gap in relative power between the united states and china is shrinking the united states is becoming more insecure and reactive and anxious about china's rise and that these uh these sort of twin twin events are are pushing the united states in a more sharp or hostile direction towards uh towards china and you know they see the deterioration relations more as a product of china's success and america's insecurities than they do as a result of any change in their own behavior but which is you you and i are in these conversations together often so i mean does that gel with what you hear or how do you think about these things certainly i think the the diagnosis of it's america's fault um is a consensus and indeed we don't have to scratch that deep to get that indeed if we look at early you know speeches by folks like wong yi uh you know some comments by ambassador sway young dieter it was pretty clear the the the message confusingly to me being delivered early on was you you broke it um which i agree um is is is problematic the second thing is that this is now i think becomes so much of a consensus here in the united states it's verging on cliche is that um china you know the the east is rising the west is west is declining um which nearly a day goes by without some commentator now uh referring to and indeed i will sneak peek here that we have a piece coming out on this as well so i'm only the latest to pile on to this cliche um but what worries me about this is i think there are elements of truth in beijing's diagnosis of what led to the deterioration of the relationship including as as i wanted to segue to your book in a minute um a concern about anxiousness in the united states and and searching for external enemies enemies which is not a unique phenomenon in the united states even if there is oftentimes a core kernel of truth about where the u.s concerns are what worries me in beijing is this this narrative is taking hold at precisely the same time that we're seeing a pretty extraordinary shrinking of the public square in beijing and the consolidation continual consolidation of power under the xi administration where i think there are significant concerns about one of the abilities that beijing seemed to have for much of the reform and opening period which is the ability to adjust when a certain course of action was was not was not working and as i think we'll discuss later on in the program we've seen a spate of actions from beijing over the past few weeks which seemed to give it marginal strategic benefit but come at the come with some pretty significant soft power cost and one has to wonder um are are assessments of the damage making their way to the big guy um and is he um how is he processing these and i think from what i've heard is that from folks who have interactions with senior leadership in beijing the information environment is getting pretty constricted there and if we just think about how bureaucratic processes work anywhere where you have an outsize overpowered leader it's a rare character who feels comfortable knocking on the leader's door and telling them that the course of action the leader has chosen um is is leading to uh to a cliff and so i think that's um that's what worries me now is is china's ability to assess um the return of resilience in the united states accurate and i think final point here this is not about jude but i think remember where we are we're on on january 6th or 7th when we were talking about even here in the united states are really a broken country um we were in the depths of of cover 19 there was no we hadn't seen any of the big progress on vaccinations we didn't know what growth was going to be like for 2021 and china had just in principle signed the cai it had gotten our sep it had you know grown at two plus percent and there were projections that it was going to grow at seven or eight percent and now look where we are in april i think we've seen the united states make a really significant uh recovery here and so is beijing hearing that and is that going to modulate the the east is rising west is declining um narrative i certainly hope so i've seen a few hopeful signs uh sri and hong for example i think wrote a piece recently talking about the need for the united for china to re-evaluate some of its assumptions about china's america's decline um and you know i hope that that is just a foretaste of a discussion that will take deeper root uh in beijing but i agree with you i worry about what i i consider sort of bureaucratic constipation where it's just very difficult for tough information to reach the top for all the reasons you describe and i i think that uh you know an honest assessment of china would conclude that the formula they used for 40 plus years that enabled tremendous historic growth is not the formula that they're following anymore you know the formula that they had relied upon a stable relationship with the united states a benign periphery uh and avoidance of sort of assuming undue burdens on the world stage and steady reform and opening of their economy and society and i think that you could argue on all four of those levels china is off course at the moment and it's concerning to me but it also is concerning for what it tells i think us about what china's judgments are about the u.s china relationship because i think that they are reaching a point if they haven't already where they're judging that uh it's not that beijing can no longer expect or rely upon a generally stable relationship with the united states therefore the goal of china's policy and approach is not to lower tensions with the united states it's to gird itself and strengthen itself for the competition that's coming and i think that we've seen this for example with the discussion about dual circulation changing china's economic model to focus more on domestic demand and in indigenous innovation and less upon uh reliance upon the outside world i think we've also seen it in some of the myrian activity and the diplomatic space in in recent weeks and months uh you know i don't think it was lost on many that secretary blinken traveled to brussels after alaska at the same time foreign minister wang yi hosted uh his russian counterpart and then traveled to uh you know the aggrieved countries in the middle east uh towards the united states so both countries are sort of in a process of finding their friends to fortify themselves for for the competition that's to come and i i expect that uh the the sort of the stiff competition competition will be a definitional feature of the relationship for for the foreseeable future which is an incredibly artful transition um ryan to to talk about to talk about the book because that is one of your defining diagnoses of the relationship and indeed if we just look at your your framework which is competitive interdependence um as opposed to what we're seeing now strategic competition um you share a diagnosis that competition will be a defining feature moving forward but you shift around where the competition sits in the in the framework so maybe i could use that as an opening question for the book is um what is competitive interdependence as opposed to strategic competition or great power competition or any of the other you know innumerable framings new cold war uh that that we're seeing right now what what's the difference and why is this why is this a better approach well the difference is that uh competitive interdependence is trying to capture two thoughts simultaneously uh one that the relationship is just fundamentally competitive that uh you know we have different governance systems uh we have competing ambitions we have different and i would argue irreconcilable interest in certain areas such as the balance between individual liberties and social stability the role the state and the economy uh the distribution of power in the international system hong kong xinjiang tibet so that there is just a a intense competition that i think is baked into the relationship but at the same time uh there is an interdependence that i think is inescapable uh the united states and china are going to be affected by each other for good or ill [Music] in pretty much every issue that confronts them around the world we have economies that are deeply integrated with each other uh 700 billion dollars of two-way trade every year i think something like 400 billion dollars of of sales by american firms operating in china selling into the chinese market knowledge production between both countries is deeply integrated and on pretty much every global challenge that we confront it's very difficult to find a path towards progress unless both the united states and china are pulling in a similar direction whether it's a global economy uh building global public health infrastructure climate change uh iran north korea you name it and so uh even even if we don't necessarily like each other we're sort of bound uh to each other we will each be a partner or a problem or some combination thereof in in many of the issues that we both confront and so that's the the basic idea of competitive interdependence where i think it differs or departs a bit from some of the other tag lines that you described whether it's strategic competition or great power competition or new cold war is it's intended to be a bit broader in scope too to sort of embrace the idea that the relationship is not monochromatic we don't have the luxury of being able to view the relationship singularly as uh purely competitive because of the interdependence that we face with each other i wanted to ask you where you saw the demarcation between competition and rivalry because when i think about the first groupings of tensions that exist in the bilateral relationship whether that's over governance systems economic models i can imagine a parallel uh book event going on right now where someone has the same uh essential diagnosis of the number of fissures in the relationship and has a different framework which is something more like rivalrous interdependence and i want to know where for you the demarcation was between a competition and rivalry and i think as an adjunct question to that um i don't know there are many types of competition many competitions are zero sum there is one winner and there is one loser um so i'm curious for you why the word competition what sort of competition are you envisioning here as you imagine this um because it sounds like you don't mean a there's one winner and there's one loser and whoever gets to the finish line first takes all the spoils yeah i think that's right jude i mean one of the the things that i've sort of been thinking about is that it's going to be very hard for either country to impose its will on the other it's going to be very difficult for either country to accept a subordinate role to the other given their national identities and so um it's the the i think that we are in a long-term systems competition with china we both believe that we have the best governance and economic models to deliver the best results for unlocking the potential of our people and reaching our national ambitions um and we're not going to know the outcome of this competition for a long time but i think over time we'll be able to begin to get a clue as to which way it's going both countries want to you know they want their systems to be demonstrable as successful because they want to enjoy the pull of power in the international system the the prestige that comes with that success and so that's that's sort of how i've been thinking about the competition i don't have a great answer i'm going to think further about where the demarcation is between competition and rivalry i guess i've been thinking more along the lines of the demarcation between viewing china as a competitor versus viewing them as a enemy or an opponent because if if we tip into viewing china as an implacable foe uh it's going to cause us to concentrate a lot of our national focus and attention on seeking to blunt and obstruct china and you know those aren't cost free shots they will incur second and third order effects that will blow back on the united states china will respond in kind we will create separation from our friends and allies who will be less comfortable going down a sort of purely rival or adversarial track with china and what i would like to see us do is uh shrink the gap between us and our allies and partners rather than widen it because the more that we're able to work in common cause with others i think the more influence we're going to have uh over how china you know defines and pursues its interests so maybe maybe implicit in in what i've been thinking about is that this framework brings us a little bit closer to to some of our friends and partners and creates a little more permission space for them to work alongside us on china i want to just drill down for a moment on what competitive interdependence looks like in practice given the current leadership coterie who is in beijing and is likely to be there for the next 733 years namely the xi jinping administration as i was reading the book and i was thinking about the power of the the framing that you've put forward here and and i was nodding my head if that makes sense that makes sense where i found myself straying in my thoughts is mapping that over the current leadership in beijing and and to ask a concrete question of what competitive interdependence would look like now or how practicable it would look now we've seen an element of a competitive interdependence or or coexistence model by the bi-demonstration they've been saying in a sense we're happy to compete on or excuse me to cooperate on issues like climate change but we're not going to give up our focus on values and beijing seems to be signaling um an issue like xinjiang or hong kong is of such core core national security interest to us um that it is going to essentially that's going to be fungible and that's going to affect um many parts of the relationship beyond just a narrow bucket of xinjiang or hong kong so in in a you know using the cliche you know china gets a vote in in the framework too can you talk about how you see beijing um accepting or integrating with a competitive uh excuse me a competitive interdependence framework given what seemed to be a a hardening of a position on some of these core interests that almost an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force we're not going to stop talking about xinjiang and that's going to make it only more compelling for beijing to double down on its approach yeah well i wish that this framework came with a silver bullet solution to many of the challenges that you identified and i'm i'm going to disappoint you and our audience by not having uh uh solutions uh but i do have a couple of thoughts that i'll try to use to address your questions the the first is you know why why competitive interdependence right i think that's sort of at the core of of what you're asking and i i think that it it can be helpful in allowing us to identify what we can influence and what we cannot we are not going to decide china's regime type whether we like it or not we are not going to be able to determine the size of china's economy even if we wish that we could but we are going to be able to i think influence china's choices on important issues to us the more so uh if we were able to work alongside our allies and partners on on common cause and we are going to be able to strengthen the sources of our competitive advantage towards china you know these are things like our domestic dynamism our alliance network our global prestige china does not control those things we do and the more that we're able to sort of concentrate our focus on areas where we can nurture our strengths i think the stronger position we're going to find ourselves to influence china's behavior and and so when it comes to you know an issue like xinjiang yes there is going to be fundamental and irreconcilable differences in views between the united states and china but there are things that we can do to to raise the cost to china of continuing on its current course the the first is to strengthen the power of our own example you know to live up to our values the more that we are able to do that the more pressure it places upon the chinese leadership the second is we just need to speak out clearly and consistently at all levels bilaterally multilaterally privately publicly at the presidential level and every level below it about the strength of our concerns about these issues and the fact that as long as is there is a shadow cast over the relationship by events in xinjiang it's going to be impossible for the relationship to return to any type of equilibrium that beijing may see i think that we also can you know take measures to be attentive to trade and goods that are made with forced labor and exports of items that could enable greater repression in xinjiang um but we also you know we need to show support and let the chinese people see us show support for their efforts and their concerns inside china and it relates to uyghurs but it goes beyond that to things like access to educational opportunity to freedom of information uh air quality water safety that the more the more good will the united states enjoys among the chinese people inside china the costlier it is for the chinese leadership to take actions that uh clearly undermine the us china relationship i want to save some a few minutes here we're getting some questions that are that are coming in but i wanted to um somewhat abruptly uh shift tackier given the time limitations i think even those who you know have gone out read the book and are in full throated agreement may be thinking about uh what appears to be as reported to be a real near-term black swan which could throw everything off balance which is there seems to be rising chatter that xi jinping has drastically pulled forward some sort of artificial timeline on using force to reunify taiwan and we've seen a series of reports coming out i think starting last um starting last fall and really into the winter the end of the end of the trump administration you seem to see a rise in reports that both the u.s was going to preempt the strike in the south china sea as sort of a late term lash out by the trump administration and you began hearing this rumor uh um i i'll show my cards here unsubstantiated but this rumor that that xi jinping had had decided to throw caution the wind and to escalate escalated confrontation over taiwan because he was sensing u.s weakness or distractedness i now get this question a lot from folks um you are a real bonafide expert in this in a way that i pretend to be one so i wanted to take advantage of your assessment here and say what's the point of the competitive interdependence framework when it looks like the united states and china may may possibly come to blows over over over taiwan how do you assess that where do you see china's thinking on this right now and do you foresee in the imminent future whether that's two three years or as admiral davidson said possibly in the next six years do you see china launching an invasion to take taiwan and it looks like we have uh we have momentarily lost ryan undoubtedly because the question i asked was too sensitive so i'm going to fill in here for ryan as he as he reconnects and just further extrapolate out on my own thinking uh on the question as the listeners could probably tell that i had my own bias here um as i've been thinking through the issue of of how taiwan fits into beijing's thinking of course you're seeing um undoubtedly an escalation of sable rattling by beijing in the taiwan straits i also think it's it's important to note that undoubtedly beijing has an invasion plan but the debate is not over whether or not uh the pla is preparing to take taiwan by force i think the core um the core focus though is not only does beijing have the military capability but what are the domestic political calculations uh for the shi administration as as they contemplate this and this is one of the areas of analysis that i have found absent from this overall discussion of are are they on has their timeline been elevated which is to say imagine if you're xi jinping right now your grand strategy does not consist merely of this one single objective namely of reunifying with taiwan everything we know about xi jinping including uh intentions stated at at uh high level four like the 19th party congress in documents like the 14th five-year plan is that china has um you know manifest ambitions that it has that uh far spread out much farther than taiwan so i would imagine that if we were thinking about um if we're thinking about xi's calculation on taiwan that it would include um hey ryan is back so iran i promise i have not been still asking the question i have just been filling in with some of my own analysis on this so let me um i had begun to further show some of my cards by saying what we had been talking about before the event of um xi's calculations on taiwan are are multifaceted and are not just about the military capability or or temporary distraction by the united states so just to kick it over to you as you're hearing these these reading these news reports on on an imminent attack or attack within six years what is your assessment well i jud first of all uh thank you for for carrying things forward my internet appears to have slipped out uh at a precarious moment but i i'm struggling to wrap my head around the idea that uh that we have foresight of uh you know a specific timeline of china taking action uh militarily against taiwan um i did a interview with john culver last week john culver was the former national intelligence officer for asia and one of the wisest men i know and his his view uh just to paraphrase his comments was that an invasion is not the plan it's not an impossibility but it's not the plan for china and i think that sounds about right uh because you know china has a couple of objectives when it comes to taiwan the first and most immediate is to deter taiwan independence or permanent separation of taiwan from the mainland and then the long-term goal is to compel unification but that is a long-term goal and and i think that beijing has good reasons to want to avoid direct conflict it would probably invite a clash with the united states that would be very difficult to control both geographically and in terms of escalation it would lead to massive capital outflows from china it would alert china's neighbors to sort of the the aggressive nature of china in asia it would uh inaugurally poison china's image in the world and it would lead to a massive diverse diversion of resources and attention from china's efforts to achieve its other national ambitions and its domestic priorities so it's not surprising to me that the chinese have settled on an approach of coercion without violence this is an approach that tries to put mounting psychological pressure on the people of taiwan to persuade them to believe that that their path their only path to peace security and prosperity runs through beijing that resistance is futile that eventually that taiwan will you know welcome the warm embrace of beijing and i i worry frankly that the more that uh the u.s officials whether on background or on the record hype the the threat of an invasion from taiwan the more that we you know are doing a bit of a service to beijing's efforts to increase uh pressure psychological pressure on the people of taiwan to help them feel like there is a sort of damage that's constantly hanging over their head and there's nothing that they can do about it so my my preference and you know my humble suggestion to our friends and government would be to spend more time talking about focusing on areas where we can help taiwan strengthen itself to feel dignity and respect on the world stage to diversify its trade relationships to remain at the cutting edge of technological innovation the more that we can sort of concentrate our attention in those areas i think that the stronger position taiwan will find itself to to chart its own path forward well thankfully i think that was a good dose of of of common sense and i hope going back to one of our earlier conversations about information environments in beijing which i think does give pause for this for the possibility of of miscalculation by beijing i i hope the xi administration understands that it would be absolutely catastrophic for china its future its ambitions its desire to be a respected global power for its economy um it would be truly truly a pyrrhic defeat i wouldn't even say victory it would be a pyrrhic defeat for for beijing and i hope um i i hope that message is is getting through indeed i suspect it i suspect it is and i think you know beijing long a student of great power decline i hope understands that um uh first day victory is one thing um attempting to be an occupying power uh is another um and i and i hope that's what is giving beijing significant significant pause to the point of this not being a a realistic option and indeed what you say which is precisely why the campaign the psychological campaign is so intense as well as the saber rattle um final thought here is i i suspect some amount of beijing's view of its own military credibility rests on saber rattle and that for beijing this is where it demonstrates resolve that it feels as fungible to other areas around the world which which puts it in this bind of needing to saber rattle precisely so it can project credibility to the united states in other areas but this is where we've lost our old criminology reflex which was our ability like john culver to i think really understand how beijing is making assessments um where it is and what its intentions are and i think we've lost a little bit of that muscle um ryan i want to use i just want to use the past few minutes to get through just a few questions if you'll permit me that coming in um one of them is on the question of working with allies this of course has been this along with we need a strategy on china have been the two bumper stickers i see on most volvos around around town um and so i wanted to ask you that the trump administration especially late in the trump administration was making i think some some significant progress here after it um it holstered its weapon and stopped pointing it at allies and partners but obviously it showed that there were some limitations to working with allies and partners we don't have completely overlapping objectives and interests um so i wanted to ask you how does the united states plan or how should it plan to approach working with allies when we can't expect 100 alignment yeah it's it that's the exactly the right question and and i will offer a perspective on that but before i do i just wanted to reinforce some points that you brought out in your comments about taiwan i certainly don't want to leave anyone with the impression that we can afford to be passive or sanguine about the risk that taiwan faces i think that we need to be very robust in our defense and our deterrence um and and take the threat seriously um but we i think that the security dimension is just one element of the support that we ought to be providing to taiwan on the question about allies um you know it's going to be slow it's slower than we want it's going to require patience and we're going to have to be opportunistic about finding areas and opportunities to collaborate with allies i think we saw a good example uh last month when president biden hosted the first ever leaders meeting of the quad um where the leaders of you know australia india japan and the united states came together to announce a major initiative on vaccine distribution in asia this wasn't directly aimed at china but it certainly signaled that the democratic countries are not going to cede the space in asia around covid response to china and if it leads to a race to the top dynamic where china tries to out-compete the united states and other allies by contributing more uh vaccines to the rest of the region than great then the world will be a better place for it but that's just an example of of the types of cooperation i'm thinking about i think that we need to sort of approach this question from the principle of meeting our allies where they are rather than where we want them to be uh and then building from there and each of our allies are in different places when it comes to china but i think that they all share a pretty common attribute of wanting to push china to forego bullying both at home and abroad and wanting china to contribute more in a constructive manner to addressing some of the global challenges we all confront so i think that that provides a a pretty solid platform for us to build on and i hope that we use opportunities around the g7 and and other venues to try to see if we can get some proof of concept uh to demonstrate that it is possible for us and our allies to work together in china um a question just came in asking about the possibility of strategic mistakes in the relationship and again i think this this builds on our some of our previous comments on information environments in beijing if we imagine let's imagine after the 20th party congress next fall xi jinping will have clearly reached escape velocity um and will have a just a if he doesn't already an absolutely dominant position but the downside of that is um we can imagine sort of more room for uni unilateral decisions by by she um so we've often seen strategic miscalculations or strategic mistakes um can can have pretty significant knock-on effects and indeed i think one of the concerns right now would be especially that we have a lot of tonnage out in the south china sea and things are getting sporty there even if there are um if both beijing and the united states see a long-term path for trying to get to something like a competitive interdependence framework um how do you think about the possibility of either just a miscalculation kind of high on its own you know easter's rising supply or because we see a more near-term um you know unintended or mistake with a collision of two visible you know vessels in the south china sea um so how do we bracket how do we contain those given that those are our many historical antecedents of that and a real practic possibility here yeah i mean that's a really important question jude and i'm glad it was raised i i think that there are a couple of potential flashpoints of conflict uh one is if china were to take any actions that implicated the credibility of our alliance commitments or commitments to security partners we would have a real problem if china were to seek to impede america's access in the region we will have a real problem there's also the risk of you know as you said unintended collisions uh that lead to rapid escalation and there's risk around um some of these new and emerging technologies uh where the pace of innovation is is exceeding the the rules and norms that are being built around these technologies and so what i would like to see us do is uh you know draw from some of the lessons of the cold war and apply them to this moment we know where the risks are and we know that we are significantly far behind where the united states and soviet union were in terms of their risk reduction and crisis management protocols uh during the cold war now it isn't going to be a one-to-one facsimile the the relationship is different and and the challenges are different the geography is different um but we we need to prioritize risk reduction in relationship uh we're just behind schedule on this and the only way that it's going to make progress is that both leaders instruct their bureaucracies to make it happen and use their meetings as action forcing events to push and prod uh both of their systems to to reach agreements because left to their own devices uh you know both country security services are going to be pretty reluctant reticent to seed uh uh use of certain capabilities that they think could benefit them in conflict with the other i i know we're at time i just wanted to sneak in one one final question i want to thank everyone we've got some really thoughtful questions that have come through and i and i apologize that we can't get to all of them but i'll make sure i'll forward all these um on to ryan just so we can see what folks are interested in um but one of the final ones is actually getting back to this competitive analogy here um one of the strategies that was clearly operative in the trump administration was thinking about a race but focusing on tripping up china slowing china down obviously which is appears to be cheaper than uh you know me going to the gym and learning how to run faster but one of the questions here is about where should we think about tripping china up even if we imagine that we're having a a strategy based on increasing our own domestic resiliency and we take that out as a given that's that's a do we also need a defensive strategy here that in the work in the words of this question are about gumming up the works of some elements of china's ability to to compete in us in areas where we do see it as more zero-sum so can you talk for a minute about where does tripping actually have a role if it does it all in thinking about our strategy on china yeah well i as as you alluded to i prefer the balance of our efforts to be on us running faster rather than seeking to trip china because i think that we're in a stronger place if if we were on offense and the chinese are reacting to us rather than us anxiously reacting to to every advance that they make but there is a certainly there is a place for defense i've learned a lot from your colleagues scott kennedy and jim lewis on this they've they've written a lot and they're very thoughtful on these questions so i would certainly encourage uh anyone in our audience to take a look at their work but around export controls around leakage of sensitive technology that has dual use applications we need to have a national conversation about where where that sweet spot is around what we can comfortably export to china and and where we need to set some boundaries to limit the export of items to china and there are certain tech uh choke point technologies around lithography and in other areas where i think that we need to think deeply about um about limits that should and could be applied to exports to china it's to our advantage to to stay ahead of the chinese and a lot of these technologies and and we need to make sure that our policies enable and support us in doing so and part of that is the defensive element and part of it is understanding also that you know a lot of these companies revenues are aided by trade with china which is funneled into research and development which allows us to continue to maintain the edge uh innovatively over china so uh that's a muddled response to a very clear question um but that's the best i've got at the moment well the the best you've got the moment is is is fantastic ryan and i want to um thank you including for the ability to seamlessly switch camera angles um and and uh go from steadicam to uh to mobile cam um and i want to thank everyone for tuning in today we we really had some great questions um and i wish we had five hours with with ryan but again i'm going to hold it up the book is stronger uh just out from yale university press as you can see from my well tabbed and dog-eared copy there's just a lot in here for pushing thinking on how the united states can reapproach its relationship uh to china one from a position of of confidence rather than anxiety um and i i just really think uh ryan's steady hand um in in the community of folks advising uh advising the us on what we should do so ryan thank you very much and appreciate your time thank you dude i encourage you great thanks everyone so so

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

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Keywords: Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, bipartisan, policy, foreign relations, national security, think tank, politics

Id: ybSOIeKtuSk

Length: 57min 25sec (3445 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021