Singapore's senior diplomat bluntly said: The biggest mistake the United States made was to rashly launch competition with China, and the United States now has only 10 years left to contain China's rise! The United States is anti-China for the sake of being anti-China, and has no goal or plan, so how should China respond?
The biggest strategic mistake of the United States is to rashly oppose China
Is U.S. power declining? This is a fact that no one in the world, including the Americans themselves, can deny. But how can the United States stop this decline from continuing? Shinobayashi noted that Ma Kaishuo, a senior diplomat in Singapore and a senior adviser to the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, recently gave his own views on this world-class problem: at least it is certain that the biggest mistake the United States has made to achieve this is to rashly launch competition with China. And now, there are only 10 years left for the United States.
Shinobayashi noted that this argument was made by Ma Kaishuo in a speech at the UAE Center for Strategic Studies on June 10. In his speech, Ma Kaishuo first said that although the United States today is a deeply divided society and Americans cannot agree on anything, on the issue of China, Americans do have reached the only consensus - it is time to contain China in an all-round way.
So what is certain is that no matter who wins this year's election, how much will change the basic "national policy" of the United States to contain China. And if Trump wins, the situation will be even worse - after the defeat of the last four years in power, the resurgence of Trump will inevitably cherish the importance of the word "anti-China" to the consolidation of his own ruling position, and even become more and more extreme.
And Ma Kaishuo described this as follows: "I have never seen a country of such scale and strength as China and the United States face each other head-to-head today. It will shake the world and affect all of us. ”
But since it has been determined to compete with China, does the United States have any systematic "grand strategy" to support it in this regard?
Regrettably, Ma Kaishuo said that he had a lunch exchange with the late Henry Kissinger, a famous American geographer and former secretary of state, and that Kissinger sent him such a profound message at that time:
The biggest strategic mistake made by the United States was to launch a competition with China in the absence of a strategy.
What do you mean?
According to Shinobayashi, this sentence is actually quite easy to understand:
In fact, the Americans have never had a long-term and systematic strategy toward China, and their opposition to China is completely reflexive -- this kind of stress initially existed in isolation in various fields, and when the number and number of accumulations were sufficient, American politicians finally realized the value of political speculation contained in it, and then raised it from a social phenomenon to a broad political consensus, which in turn resonated with the whole American society.
If there is any difference from this ideal model, the emergence of Trump, a populist, has advanced the process of elevating this "isolated social phenomenon to a broad political consensus" so much earlier that in 2016, when many people around the world were actually unaware of the problem, Trump could take the opportunity to set off a political storm in the United States and officially put the issue of "competition" with China on the highest political stage in the United States.
Then the new crown epidemic problem that occurred after that quickly resonated with "anti-China" in American society, and then Biden took office in 2021, from the perspective of Americans, it finally began to launch a systematic counterattack against China's "competition", and the Sino-US contradiction finally broke out in full force.
It can be seen that the above early and critical stages of the "competition" with China were all completed by the Americans in a chaotic and emotional state, and by no means the political elites calmly produced a complete set of complete strategic roadmaps with the most rational thinking.
The United States is anti-China for the sake of anti-China, what should China do?
But in this way, the most fundamental question arises: What kind of goal is to be achieved in this "competition" with China?
Is it to curb the erosion of Chinese manufacturing on the U.S. market, and to achieve the import and export balance that the U.S. wants? - For the people at the bottom of the United States, their hatred of China ends here;
Or is it necessary to curb the expansion momentum of Chinese manufacturing and Chinese capital in the entire global market? This is what the American capitalists are most hoping to achieve;
Or is it the end of the overthrow of the entire Chinese country, as was the case with the Soviet Union? This is the true understanding of "competition" by American politicians.
"As people know, these things have never been clarified by the Americans. ”
To a large extent, the current Americans are completely anti-China for the sake of being anti-China, and what American society needs is more like a simple emotional catharsis that will inevitably be triggered by its own decline.
The United States, the world hegemon, is far from being as smart as we think.
As a result, a more serious practical problem has emerged: the competition between China and the United States has entered a stage where it must formulate specific countermeasures according to its own strategic demands, and with this state of "one family" talking nonsense, how should the United States formulate its next strategy?
Ma Kaishuo reminded the United States that China is quite sober on these issues:
China does want to become the world's largest economy, but the Chinese do not have the ambition of Americans to dominate the world, and will not try to intervene in various global problems like the United States;
Internally, the Chinese know that the American dream is to make China a "second disintegrated Soviet Union", so China realizes that in order to survive, the first task is to have a very strong and dynamic economy and society, and now China is indeed doing this;
Externally, China has also taken the initiative to counter the U.S. policy of using its neighbors to contain China, strengthen economic relations with neighboring countries, and put forward the "One Belt, One Road" initiative to build infrastructure around the world.
And this kind of strategy of taking into account both internal and external aspects, and by the way, positioning itself accurately, do the Americans have it?
At the end of his speech, Ma Kaishuo said that it will take only 10 years at most for China to basically complete the above strategic goals, which means that the United States only has 10 years to achieve its "dream" of containing China.
However, with the current state of confusion in the United States, Shinobayashi believes that even if the Americans are given 50 years, they will not be able to fulfill this "grand wish."