To prevent China's rise, the United States only has a 10-year window left? Kissinger once admitted that the United States had made a strategic mistake and was too blind to start competition with China. China and the United States have their own strengths, so why is cooperation the best way forward?
Blocking China's rise, the United States still has a ten-year window left?
Since around 2010, China's rise has become the biggest topic of discussion in the world.
At the same time, the "China threat theory" led by the West also began to be popularized, and the Obama administration at that time also launched the so-called "Asia-Pacific rebalancing" strategy at the same time, and began to gradually tilt US military resources towards the Asia-Pacific region in order to cope with the changes in regional military strength brought about by China's rise.
However, with the passage of time, more and more Western countries and scholars have found that China's rise is still beyond the concept of an event, and is gradually becoming a "phenomenon", and a large number of small countries close to China geographically have also enjoyed China's development dividends, which has made China's influence in the Asia-Pacific region have increased dramatically, triggering a high degree of vigilance in the United States.
Therefore, both the subsequent Trump administration and the current Biden administration have adhered to a resolutely anti-China path, using various radical or moderate methods to block China's pace of industrial upgrading and gain time for the revitalization of the manufacturing industry in the United States. However, there is a view that this behavior of the United States is logically flawed.
According to a report by the Observer on July 1, well-known Singaporean scholar Ma Kaishuo delivered a speech at the UAE Center for Strategic Studies on June 10, and the relevant video has been widely circulated on the domestic Internet.
Ma Kaishuo said that the United States believes that there are still about 10 years left to prevent China from becoming the world's leader, so during this period of time, the United States will inevitably exhaust various measures to continuously increase pressure on China. But even so, the United States is still unable to effectively contain China.
The main reason behind this is that China has learned the lessons of the collapse of the Soviet Union and has no ambitions to confront major powers such as the United States, and its focus has always been on strengthening its domestic economy and improving its relations with other neighboring countries.
The White House has made a strategic mistake, and anti-China has become a dead end
As for the psychological misunderstandings at the strategic level of the United States, Ma Kaishuo also has a fairly clear understanding, he believes that Americans are afraid that if China's economy becomes the world's first, then "everything will be different".
Therefore, although the United States today faces a divided society, containing China has become a national consensus. Therefore, no matter which US president comes to power in this election, the US line towards China will not change significantly, especially Trump, in view of his more radical style, the pace of Sino-US competition will be further "accelerated" in the next decade.
It is worth noting that in his speech, Ma Kaishuo also mentioned the late American strategist Henry Kissinger, who told him during a lunch meeting that the biggest strategic mistake the United States has made was to launch a competition with China in the absence of strategy.
Although the United States has made it clear that it will compete with China, no one seems to know what the ultimate goal of this competition is. If it is to prevent China's economic development, then this will certainly not be possible, and if it wants China to follow in the footsteps of the Soviet Union and isolate and contain China, the current United States will not be able to do it either.
Therefore, the embarrassing point is that the United States has set off this confrontation, but it has not defined what exactly is considered a "victory", and it is obvious that the blind anti-China line is already a real dead end.
Ma Kaishuo suggested that the United States should change its thinking, and instead of constantly suppressing and containing China, it should cooperate with China to jointly create a new world that can accommodate the two great powers, China and the United States. This also coincides with the "new type of major-country relations" that the Chinese government has called for in recent years, and under this kind of two-way rush, the friendly atmosphere and cross-regional cooperation between China and the United States will inevitably develop by leaps and bounds, and the two sides will fall into the "Thucydides trap", and the probability of triggering a third world war will also be reduced to the lowest point.
Duality confrontation loses both, and cooperation has a future
And at a higher level, the relationship between China and the United States is not "structurally contradictory" as some politicians believe, but in fact, the two countries are quite complementary in terms of industry.
On the one hand, after the deindustrialization of the United States, the labor costs of the United States soared, which made it difficult for the United States manufacturing industry to revitalize for a long time, and the emergence of a comprehensive generation of technical talents, but China is just a manufacturing power, whether it is in the cultivation of talents, or in the construction of the supply chain, the United States can complement each other, and even the United States for the manufacture of large warships gantry cranes are imported from China, China and the United States have their own strengths.
On the other hand, on global geopolitical issues, the United States has always pursued a balanced strategy, allowing multiple countries in a region to restrain each other and thus achieve a state of "cold peace" in order to facilitate the US globalization strategy.
Today, China is also an export-oriented country, and this new "balancing strategy" is also needed to create a favorable external political environment for China's trade with other countries. Therefore, China and the United States still have important common interests in maintaining world peace and stability, or in other words, maintaining this "rules-based international order" in a short period of time.
What's more, if we take 10,000 steps back, China is now the world's largest manufacturing country, which also means that China has extremely terrifying war potential, including the United States, no country can overpower China militarily, can pack tickets to the outside world, and can win the war with China.
Moreover, the Chinese government has stressed on several occasions that China is not willing to engage in a global struggle for hegemony with the United States, nor does it adopt an extremely hostile policy toward the United States like the Soviet Union. Even if there is a confrontation between China and the United States, it is often the United States that initiates provocations and fails to respect China's core interests. It can be said that China has shown enough patience in dealing with the United States, and the door to negotiations with the United States has been open, as Ma Kaishuo said, the US decision-makers should really think about whether competing with China is a good thing or a bad thing for the United States.