Being a continuation of Monday’s rant, “Taking Kissinger seriously—an infantile disease”
A couple of days ago I was riffing on Aaron Friedberg’s review of Henry Kissinger’s latest authorial offense, On China. Despite being crammed with all manner of Kissingerian offensiveness, about which I’ve expatiated at length in the past, Henry’s conclusion—that there’s no reason for the U.S. and China to have a showdown over who’s top dog in the Pacific, is quite sensible. While Friedberg titles his review “The Unrealistic Realist,” and scores, as I’ve noted, numerous palpable hits on Henry’s grievously exposed intellectual paunch, Aaron’s knockout punch, condemning Henry’s concluding plea for peaceful coexistence between China and the U.S., misses entirely.
Admitting that our differences, such as they are, are reconcilable is quite a sacrifice for Henry, because his whole “theory” is that states’ interests aren’t reconcilable. The trick is, through artful bumping and shoving, and occasional “masterful,” though limited, shows of force, to bully other nations into accepting your dominance, a dominance that still allowes adversaries a limited sphere of influence of their own, as when Bismarck, after divesting France of Alsace-Lorraine, a move vociferously applauded by German nationalists, then encouraged France to seek its “destiny” in Africa, said destiny having the twin advantages of lying a long way from the Rhine and being highly unlikely to do anything other than waste French blood and treasure in the sands of the Sahara.
Kissinger’s great fear is that China will play the role of Germany prior to World War I, pushing to acquire the “great” navy appropriate to a great power, and then ultimately goading the U.S. into a showdown. What Kissinger demands of the U.S.—though of course he can’t quite come out and say it—is humility: surely one of Kissinger’s least favorite words and least favorite qualities. The U.S. should not treat encounters with the Chinese as matters of “prestige”—that is to say, we should not behave like thugs in prison, where the least breach of courtesy—stealing a french-fry, for example—is simply the opening gambit in a chess match whose endgame involves the loser grabbing his ankles and squealing like a pig. It doesn’t have to be that way, says Henry, sounding surprisingly like Jesus. Presented with unreasonable but unessential demands from a bumptious superpower on the make, the wise elder delays, sidesteps, but ultimately concedes.
Friedman is disgusted by all of this. “Like it or not, the American people are not going to abandon their notion of themselves as the citizens of a country that is the embodiment, and the foremost defender, of certain universal values, and they are going to continue to regard with suspicion and distaste regimes that cruelly flout them, especially ones that seem to be growing in power. The United States might be willing to relinquish its preponderant position in Asia to a democratic China, but it will resist the efforts of an authoritarian regime to displace it from the region.”
One has to wonder why. The title of Friedman’s own book, of A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia, is highly reminiscent of AJP Taylor’s famous work The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918, written in 1954. At that time, the verdict of history was clear for all to see: the struggle for mastery of Europe had been won, for Eastern Europe, at least, and the winner was the Soviet Union. Sixty-five years later, things look a little different. Who is “master of Europe” now? No one. And who, really, is “master” of Asia, or could be? China, for all its size, is surrounded by large, unfriendly nations—India, Russia, Japan, and Indonesia. Even “little” Korea, which will not be quite so little once the inevitable reunification takes place, will not be so little. China will, no doubt, remain an authoritarian country for a long time and with its increasing wealth will undoubtedly do more things we don’t like. But the notion that the U.S. should risk a war of unbelievable destruction merely to keep China in her “place” is beyond ridiculous. Score one for Henry. I can’t believe I’m saying that!
Afterwords
Henry’s “vision” does sound an awful like the détente that he wanted to work out with the Soviets, one that was be carried out on the backs of Eastern Europe, and it was the moralists whom Kissinger detested who found a third way between Bismarckian compromise and World War III, even though “true” conservatives like William F. Buckley and Charles Krauthammer were aghast when they discovered that Ronald Reagan was actually going to end their beloved Cold War once and for all. But China, though it may be a bully (and is China as much of a bully as the U.S.? How many countries has China invaded in the past 25 years?), is not an ideological power whose reason for existence is bound up with the dream of world revolution. Any country as agog over iPads as China is a long way from the Soviet Union.
