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Ed Webb

What Washington Is Getting Wrong About Dealing With China - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/wrong-about-dealing-with-china

US USA China diplomacy military analysis opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Mar 23 - Cached
  • As Edward Luce pointed out in an insightful column in the Financial Times, we are already effectively engaged in a Cold War with China. “The consensus,” he writes, “is now so hawkish that it is liable to see any outreach to China as weakness.” You could hear that hawkish consensus in the words of U.S. intelligence chiefs as they testified before the Congress during their annual threat assessment hearing on Wednesday.
  • Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines cited China’s ruling Communist Party as the “most consequential” national security threat the U.S. faces. Never mind domestic extremism, enabled by one of the two major political parties. Never mind global warming. Never mind Russia waging an active war in Europe while aggressively pumping out disinformation and promoting authoritarianism worldwide.
  • Why is it such a great threat even though the country has no history of conquest beyond its region in 5,000 years of history and is far from being able or inclined to pose a direct threat of attack to the U.S.? According to Haines, the reason focusing on China is the intel community's top priority is that China is “increasingly challenging the United States economically, technologically, politically, and militarily around the world.” She continued, asserting that the goal of China’s President Xi Jinping is to “continue efforts to achieve Xi’s vision of making China the preeminent power in East Asia and a major power on the world stage.”
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  • we never talk about going to war to preserve democracy when it is at risk in places like Hungary, Turkey, India, or Mexico. What makes Taiwan a special case? We need to ask ourselves whether that has to do with our predisposition to contain Chinese power more than it has to do with a careful assessment of U.S. national interests.
  • if all nations seek to have sufficient power that they cannot be bullied by global hegemons (and let’s be realistic, we’re the only global hegemon in this conversation at the moment), isn’t their desire to have military power consistent with the size of their country, their economy, and their national security interests what we should expect of them?
  • Is there something inherently wrong or dangerous about China seeking to challenge the United States economically, technologically, or politically? Isn’t that what all nations do? Don’t we believe in the inherent superiority of our system? Don’t we believe in the benefits of competition? (I thought that was fundamental to America’s national identity and values.)
  • until the start of the industrial revolution, China had the world’s largest economy and it is now resuming that role.
  • What really bothers us about China’s rise is that they are quite open about the fact that they want to challenge our influence in the world. We want to be No. 1. We don’t like being challenged.
  • we need to get over the idea that somehow the U.S.-China relationship is a zero-sum conflict, the way the U.S.-Soviet Union relationship was.
  • Our economies are intertwined. Over 70,000 U.S. companies are active in China. There is not a single major global issue we can resolve without cooperating with China. On many of them, our interests intersect. On some of them, they overlap.
  • even if our goal is to maximize our influence and our piece of the global economic pie, we need to carefully weigh whether a Cold War and ballooning military expenditures are the best way to balance our interests. It can be argued that overspending on defense has and will cost us influence and undercut the dynamism of our economy.
  • Being called out by the Chinese leader may have been uncomfortable for the U.S. But, as it happens, everything Xi said was true. The U.S. is actively seeking to contain China and impede its ability to develop key technologies.
  • We should believe in our hearts that our values and system serve the world better than theirs do and we should seek to persuade the world of that.
  • We have, I fear, entered a period in which the self-interested search of our defense establishment and our political classes for an international enemy are pushing us into misreading and mishandling the most important bilateral relationship in the world. We are applying old models and obsolescent frameworks to something new. We are mistaking our own bellicosity for strength. We are underestimating our strengths and our rival’s weaknesses. We are relying on reflex, when what we need is creativity.
Ed Webb

The Qatar crisis ends…in the most boring way possible | The Duck of Minerva - 0 views

www.duckofminerva.com/...-most-boring-way-possible.html

Qatar GCC Iran US USA Turkey diplomacy IR analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • As we see with the end of the Qatar crisis, however, this “boring” stuff matters. The crisis may have started with a dramatic event, but that event ultimately had little impact on the region. Meanwhile, politics returned to “normal” through slow, gradual shifts in the interactions between states
  • most of what occurs in international relations is boring, day to day, interactions
  • The Qatar crisis threatened to upend Middle East politics. Instead, it fizzled out.
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