Insights

I’m not going to rehash my book, but I will speak briefly tonight about three things: (1) how far China has come and where it’s headed; (2) whether China is able or willing to displace the United States as the global hegemon; and (3) the notion of our shifting our strategic attention more toward East Asia, which, of course, presupposes that we somehow restrain our seemingly irresistible impulse to start new wars in the Middle East.

First, a few words about Chinese progress. China has had a couple of bad centuries, but it’s back, and it’s on track soon to regain its millennial status as the largest economy in the world. Chinese think that’s the natural state of affairs. It is only the speed with which it has happened that they find remarkable. And it is.

When I first visited Beijing in 1972, GDP per capita there – in today’s dollars – was about $130. Last year, it was almost $14,000, with purchasing power equivalent to about $21,000. That’s a more than 100-fold increase in the wealth of the average Beijinger!

In 1972, Taiwan’s 16 million people had a GDP slightly larger than the China mainland’s 875 million. The Chinese economy is now expected to surpass ours in purchasing power terms by 2016, when we hold our next presidential election. China will almost certainly overtake us in nominal exchange rate terms before the 2021 centennial of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Not long ago, the Economist magazine predicted this will happen in 2018, but falling growth rates both here and in China may have altered that calculation.

In 1972, China’s worldwide imports and exports came to a grand total of $6.3 billion, including US-China trade of about $95 million. Last year China’s trade in goods alone was $3.9 trillion. US-China trade in goods and services came to $536 billion.

There was no investment by either country in the other in 1972. Now there is investment by American companies everywhere in China. Our states and localities are pushing for some sort of Open Door policy for Chinese investment in the United States. A Chinese company is about to bring home the U.S. bacon and Smithfield ham, and, with them, better standards of food safety for Chinese consumers.

In 1972, there were no Chinese tourists or students in the United States or anywhere else. A few hundred Americans visited China. This year there are over 200,000 Chinese studying here. Almost 2 million Chinese tourists will visit and over 2 million Americans will go to China.

This has become a very consequential relationship and it’s becoming more so. Having just waxed uncharacteristically numerical, I want to assure you that, while there are many references to facts and figures, there are no dreary charts and graphs or statistical recitations in “Interesting Times.”

The book does, however, explore how China transformed itself by inventing something I call “cadre capitalism” – otherwise known as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Ideological skittishness means that cadre capitalism is not much analyzed in China. Ideological preconceptions make it greatly misunderstood here and elsewhere abroad.

Cadre capitalism links local boosterism to economic entrepreneurship and then links both to the promotion of individuals to higher levels of the Party hierarchy. It creates self-interested, selfish partnerships between local officials and business people. They collude to advance local political, economic, and commercial interests over those of other such partnerships elsewhere. This drives so-called state-owned enterprises to ferocious competition with each other and everyone else.

Cadre capitalism makes doing business in China quick and easy for those who understand and participate in it and hard for those who don’t. It’s a unique artifact of Chinese culture. It can’t be exported as a model or borrowed abroad. Perhaps that’s just as well. If corruption is at heart the result of an inability to separate personal interests from public or enterprise interests, then cadre capitalism promotes corruption as well as the energetic pursuit of profit.

China’s astonishing economic success has led lots of people to envy it. But most economists and – more important – China’s leaders believe that the model that produced this success is obsolete. The country is now entering a decade-long era of restructuring and reinvigoration to enable it to cope with the many challenges its successes have created, including huge environmental damage, overdependence on export markets, overinvestment and under-consumption, abuses of monopoly power, over-regulation, burgeoning local debt, and inadequate financial support for China’s booming private sector. China plans reforms of its monetary system, capital markets, and taxes. The list of proposed reforms has twenty-two items on it, in seven economic sectors. We won’t know the details of the first set of reforms or how bold or timid they are until November at the earliest. That’s when the Communist Party is scheduled to have its next plenary session.

I’d bet on bold ideas, implemented incrementally and cautiously. There’s a reason that Deng Xiaoping favored what he described as “feeling one’s way across a stony riverbed with one’s feet.” China has very little margin for error. It needs to tread carefully as it adopts new ways of doing things.

China’s leaders are haunted by their country’s horrifying history of pestilence, severe famine, and violent subjugation by foreigners. China must feed, clothe, and house twenty percent of the world’s people on less than ten percent of its arable land, with only seven percent of its water. For almost four hundred of the past thousand years, foreign invaders ruled China. As recently as 1931- 1945, as many as thirty-five million Chinese died as Japan tried to conquer their country. At least seventy million more died from internal rebellions and disorders over the century between the second Opium War and Deng Xiaoping’s repudiation of Mao’s totalitarian utopianism.

There is not a country anywhere on the planet that would exchange its geopolitical circumstances for those of China. China shares land borders with fourteen countries, including some very tough customers, like Afghans, Indians, Koreans, Mongols, Pakistanis, Russians, and Vietnamese. The Japanese, Taiwanese, and U.S. navies are just off China’s coasts, where the Indian navy has also begun to make occasional appearances.

China’s human and natural history as well as its geography make its leaders risk averse. They are conservative and cautious in their management of their country and its foreign affairs. Even if China had an ideology or political-economic system it could export (which it doesn’t), its leadership would still be very conscious that they can’t afford to make mistakes at home or abroad.

All this is in effect the answer to the second question I posed. Can China displace the United States as a military colossus in command of global affairs? Does it want to do so?

China’s multiple past wounds and present vulnerabilities are about as solid a guarantee as one could hope for that it will continue to be interested mainly in its own domestic tranquility and prosperity. It will continue to wait for foreigners to come to it for enlightenment, not pursue them to impose Chinese ways on them. Chinese have never been astonished by the well-known fact that foreigners are incorrigibly barbarous. If we and other benighted peoples continue to fail to appreciate the superiority of China’s way of doing things, Chinese will just write us off as boorish and uncultured. They will shake their heads in disbelief at the ignorance and poor judgment that make us foreign, and go on about their own business.

This brings me at last to “the Pivot” – the proposed rotation of American forces and shift of foreign policy attention to East Asia from points West. The first thing our government tells us is that the pivot is “not about China.” Of course it’s not about China, except when it is – or when there are no Chinese in the room to listen to us as we figure out how to turn our attention to the Indo-Pacific while simultaneously bombing Syria and/or Iran and continuing our crusade against militant Islam.

Strangely, we are having trouble convincing others in Asia that we’re really going to drop things elsewhere to help them balance China’s rising wealth and power not just now but over the long haul. We’re also having trouble convincing the silly Chinese that, despite everything we’re doing, it’s not our intention to remain in position to assault them from their own near seas or to keep them from having much say in what happens in their neighborhood. They just don’t seem to appreciate that we feel threatened by their belated attempts to complicate and frustrate foreign attack and undermine our omnipotence. We demand that China swear off all acts that undercut our ability to overwhelm it! We, not they, properly call the shots in East Asia. To underscore this point, we now propose to build a trans-Pacific free-trade zone that excludes China, even though it is every Asian and Pacific country’s largest trading partner.

The trouble with foreign affairs, I guess, is that it involves foreigners, who are by nature inscrutable and inexplicably disinclined to recognize our inherent benevolence as Americans.

The Chinese and others need to understand that we Americans have no choice. There’s no one else who can do what we can. So we must pivot to the East. God is on the side of the big economies and that’s where they’re beginning to be and that’s where China is too. We need to deploy our military to do something about this, even if it’s not clear exactly what economic problems an American military build-up might solve other than keeping our defense spending up while our allies keep theirs down. But military build-ups are as American as the Colt revolver and the Lone Ranger. So redeploy we must.

The problem is that China may be on the verge of developing an autistic government with a bloated military budget, a bad habit of exempting itself from international norms, and a preference for applying coercion rather than diplomacy to those who annoy it. Perhaps, in time, China will even develop some sort of ideology it can seek to impose on others with the fervor of a gang of Jehovah’s witnesses or democracy promoters. Some might say that our problem boils down to a well-founded fear of China becoming more like us. Does the world have room for another country that is strong at arms but a bit weak in the head and convinced that bombing foreigners is both an act of humanitarian assistance and the surest path to peaceful coexistence with them? We doubt it.

Americans who are nostalgic about the Cold War and eager to reenact it look forward to China mirroring us to become a true “peer competitor.” That may not include a critical mass of people in this room. But, just think! A China that modeled itself on America would justify sustaining our own bloated military budget, cure our enemy deprivation syndrome, and return us to the welcome simplicities of some sort of bipolar struggle for global dominance. For the leprechauns of the military-industrial complex, such a China is the pot of gold at the end of the congressional rainbow. So we propose to swing our military away from West Asia (the Middle East) and rebalance it to East Asia.

China’s bankers, unlike its military, seem curiously relaxed about this possibility. Perhaps it’s because they own so much American debt they can’t help noticing that we have a budget problem we are addressing by mindless disinvestment – cutting everything equally so as to avoid having to make choices or set priorities. If the United States can’t prepare itself for the future, make choices, or set priorities at home, why worry about it doing so abroad? As long as there’s an Israel Lobby to set Washington’s foreign policy priorities for it, what’s the real chance that China – as opposed to angry Arabs and militant Muslims – will become Enemy Number One for Americans? And, if Asia deserves more attention because it’s becoming the world’s economic center of gravity, will a militaristic “Pivot” affect that reality, or just waste money?

So the best bet in Beijing – like the worst fear of the military-industrial complex here – is that America’s “Pivot” will turn out to be just another blast of boastful babble from the Beltway bubble’s bureaucrats and their bloviating bosses. Of course, the People’s Liberation Army can’t be sure about that, so it will prepare for the worst. What this means is that China’s ability to fend us off will improve even if our ability to bludgeon it into submission doesn’t. This is how wasteful arms races are born. This time around the competition is with a country that does seem to know how to set priorities and whose economy is about to be bigger than ours. Despite our unmatched military capabilities, the “Pivot” strikes most America-watchers in China as too clever by half – more self-licking ice-cream cone than military menace. I suspect they’re correct.

Most likely, the “Pivot” will turn out in the end to have been part pirouette, part bluff, and part fiscal fizzle. That’s too bad. It is entirely appropriate for the United States to pay more attention to East Asia, including to shifting military balances. These involve more than the return of China to its pre-modern weight in regional affairs. Since 1945, Japan has achieved wealth, international respect, and an unsung but formidable self-defense capability. It has been followed on this path by the southern half of Korea, India, and most of the ASEAN nations. Countries like Singapore punch above their weight and, as Americans and Chinese have both learned, Vietnam is no pushover.

It is true that China is now rising, but there is no vacuum along its borders. The task before us is not to build a military Great Wall on China’s East and South, but to facilitate graceful adjustment by China’s smaller neighbors to its renewed prosperity and military vigor and by China to their wealth, power, and independent sovereignty. This task makes a robust American presence in the region desirable for some time to come. But adjustment to new regional realities will not be advanced by U.S. policies that obviate the responsibility of Asian nations to mount their own effective efforts at self-defense or that discourage their establishment of mutually respectful relationships with China, India, and other regional powers. If China’s behavior stimulates its neighbors to come together to limit its influence, this a problem for China, not one for us, still less a reason to expand our military presence in Asia.

Forty-one years ago, Richard Nixon reopened relations with China and ultimately catalyzed China’s return to wealth and power. Perhaps a word from the master is in order. In dealing with the changes since 1972, the United States should be guided by the Doctrine Nixon articulated at Guam on July 25, 1969. This put forward three principles:

“First, the United States will keep all of its treaty commitments.

“Second, we shall provide a shield if a nuclear power threatens the freedom of a nation allied with us or of a nation whose survival we consider vital to our security.

“Third, in cases involving other types of aggression, we shall furnish military and economic assistance when requested in accordance with our treaty commitments. But we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense.”

That was sound policy then and it is sound policy now. I’d add only that, for the United States to meet the economic challenge of a rising, competitive Asia, we need policies that leverage Asian prosperity to the benefit of our own. If we try to divide Asia to suit our geopolitical convenience instead of accepting, accommodating, and buttressing its new balances of power, we will end by dividing Asia from ourselves. That would undercut both our prosperity and our global and regional influence. It would also necessitate an even higher level of defense spending than the unaffordable one we now have.

In foreign policy, national interest is the measure of all things. But interests, national or otherwise, are defined by the vectors of domestic politics. No region better illustrates this than the Middle East, the region that extends from the Eastern Mediterranean to Iran and Arabia. I want to speak to you today about the differing national interests of the states and peoples of this region, the United States, and China, which is emerging as a growing presence there as it is everywhere. One legacy of the Cold War is an American tendency to search for an arch adversary and cast relationships with it in zero-sum terms. As I will explain, I don’t think that is the correct prism through which to view China’s engagement with the Middle East.
But before I get to China, let me begin with a few observations about where we Americans now stand in the Middle East with regard to Arab-Israeli peace, strategic transit, energy security, markets, and the effects of regional instability on our domestic tranquility.

For fifty years, we have treated the achievement of security for a Jewish homeland in Palestine as our top priority in the Middle East. We have sought to achieve this by military aid to foster and guarantee Israeli military hegemony in the region and by diplomacy aimed at brokering acceptance of it by its Arab and Muslim neighbors. The results are in. At no small cost to the United States in terms of the radicalization of Arab and Muslim opinion, oil embargoes, subsidies, gifts of war materiel, wars, and now anti-American terrorism with global reach, Israel has become a regional military Goliath, enjoying a nuclear monopoly and overwhelming superiority in the region’s battle space. But U.S. diplomacy has definitively failed.

In no small measure as a result of its own decisions, the Jewish state has no recognized or secure borders. Although acknowledged as an unwelcome fact, Israel remains a pariah in its region. In many ways, acceptance of Israel’s legitimacy is receding, not advancing, under the impact of the racial and religious bigotry its policies are seen to exemplify. Israel appears to have decided to stake its existence on the dubious proposition that it can sustain military superiority over its neighbors in perpetuity. It has no diplomatic strategy for achieving acceptance by them. Nor does the United States.

The great American naval strategist, Alfred Thayer Mahan, was the first to call the region “the Middle East.” The age of oil had not then quite arrived. Admiral Mahan wanted to highlight the area’s strategic importance as the meeting place of Europe, Africa, and Asia and the focal point of the transportation corridors connecting Europe with the Indo-Pacific. The Middle East’s geopolitical location remains a central but largely unremarked aspect of its importance. Logistics is everything in military strategy but only logisticians seem to think about it. Without the ability to transit the Middle East at will, America would be much impaired as a global power. The maintenance of a permissive environment for such transit thus remains a vital U.S. interest. Our privileges in this regard rest on the value the region’s rulers assign to our commitment to protect them. That, in turn, depends on whether they judge that they have an alternative to the United States as their protector. It’s clear that, at present, no one else wants or can take on the role we have traditionally performed. So, though we are increasingly estranged from the region’s peoples, our ability to travel through it to other parts of the globe is not in immediate jeopardy.

When someone mentions the Middle East, most people think first of oil. The United States ceased to be a net exporter of petroleum in 1970, when domestic oil production peaked. By 2005, we were importing 60 percent of the oil we consumed. Most of this came from outside the Middle East. Still, about 56 percent of the world’s oil reserves are in that region, as is the only surge production capacity. What happens in the Middle East, more than anywhere else, determines both levels of global supply and prices. During the Cold War, the U.S.-led anti-Soviet coalition we called “the free world” was heavily dependent on imports from the region. Our economic and strategic interests combined to make secure access to its energy supplies a matter of vital concern. Our relationships with countries in the Middle East like Iran and Saudi Arabia reflected this. So did our emphasis on freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf.

Our ability to extract oil and gas from shale and other previously unexploited sources at current price levels will alter these equations importantly. By the end of the decade, the United States may again be a net exporter of energy. Our reliance on imported oil could fall to as little as 10 percent before rebounding as shale reservoirs are depleted. But, regardless of North American progress toward energy self-sufficiency, the world and most of its major energy consumers will remain dependent on oil from the Middle East. What happens there will continue to have a decisive effect on energy prices. The availability of energy from shale means strategic immunity from supply disruptions outside North America. It does not mean independence from global markets.

What self-sufficiency does mean is that our interest in protecting access to the Persian Gulf’s energy resources will soon derive entirely from our aspirations for leadership of a globally healthy economy rather than from our own import dependency. This will raise obvious questions about the benefits versus the costs to our country of our traditional “lone ranger” approach to preventing the disruption of supplies and shipping in the Persian Gulf. I wouldn’t be surprised to find us looking for partners with whom to share the financial and military burdens of that mission in future.

The Middle East accounts for around 5 percent of global GDP. It is growing by about 5 percent annually and accounts for about 5 percent of U.S. exports. Arab cash purchases and generous taxpayer funding of arms transfers to Israel play a vital role in keeping production lines open and sustaining the U.S. defense industrial base. Including military goods and services, the United States has a substantial but declining share of the region’s imports – about one-fourth of them. By way of comparison, China’s share is nearly two-fifths and India’s one-fifth, almost all non military in nature. The Middle East is a significant market for American engineering, educational, and consulting services. Otherwise, as long as Arab oil producers’ currencies remain linked to the dollar, the region’s markets cannot be said to be of more than marginal importance to the U.S. export economy.

The Middle East has, however, become the principal focus of U.S. national security policy. U.S. support for Israel and military interventions in the region have made it the epicenter of anti-American terrorism with global reach. Israel is threatening war on Iran to preclude it from developing nuclear weapons. Although other countries in the region dislike – even fear – Iran, none supports preemptive attack on the Islamic Republic. Meanwhile, our cooperation with the region’s governments on counterterrorism is on the rise. So is the number of terrorists. There is a lot more hatred of America out there than there was before 9/11. We have added the resentment of most Sunnis to that of Iranian Shi`a, while igniting a civil war between these two sects of Islam and destabilizing the Fertile Crescent. No one can now say when or how any of this will end.

The peoples of the region share a desire for freedom from imperial or colonial dominance and for affirmation of their disparate religious, ethnic, or cultural identities. They are not much interested in our ideology or political practices but, by contrast with other regions, almost all seek foreign patrons to secure themselves against each other. Israeli Jews depend on us to support their ethno-religious uniqueness. Iranians believe that we menace their independence and cultural identity. Egyptians count on us because they do not know where else now to turn. Kurds hope we will back their self-determination. The Gulf Arabs seek our help and that of others to protect them against Israel and to balance Iranian power and preclude Persian hegemony.

Middle Eastern governments with oil or gas depend on energy exports to finance their defense and domestic welfare, development, and stability. Those without such resources seek subsidies for the same purposes. Despite varying degrees of foreign dependency, all jealously guard their independence and freedom of action. And none is wedded to us or any other patron. All are looking around for alternative backers.

This is where many in the region believe China could come in. In China, the Arabs see a partner who will buy their oil without demanding that they accept a foreign ideology, abandon their way of life, or make other choices they’d rather avoid. They see a country that is far away and has no imperial agenda in their region but which is technologically competent and likely in time to be militarily powerful. They see a place to buy things they can use and enjoy. They see a country that unreservedly welcomes their investments and is grateful for the jobs these create. They see a major civilization that seems determined to build a partnership with them, does not insult their religion or their way of life, values its reputation as a reliable supplier too much to engage in the promiscuous application of sanctions or other coercive measures, and has no habit of bombing or invading other countries to whose policies it objects.

In short, the Arabs see the Chinese as pretty much like Americans – that is, Americans as we used to be before we decided to experiment with diplomacy-free foreign policy, hit-and-run democratization, regime change, drone wars, and other “neocon” conceits of the age. And they see a chance to rebalance their international relationships to offset their longstanding overdependence on the United States. But the political aloofness that makes China attractive as a partner also makes it unlikely that it would agree to compete with us for the privilege of acquiring and protecting foreign client states.

China has a long history of engagement with the Middle East. Islam entered China shortly after its seventh-century revelation, in 618, the year the Tang Dynasty began. The first official envoy of the Rashiddun Caliphate arrived in Chang’an in 651. It’s little known in the West that the great Ming Admiral Zheng He, who commanded multiple voyages to South Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East from 1405 to 1433, was a Muslim whose grandfather and father had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and who had been tutored in Arabic. He was following long-established, well-mapped Arab and Chinese trade routes. Four of his seven voyages touched Arabia. He himself visited Mecca on the last of them. The connections between East and West Asia were severed and atrophied during the era of European imperialism and the Cold War. They are now being rebuilt with astonishing speed.

China’s economy grew more than six-fold over the past ten years. China became the world’s largest energy consumer in 2010. It is the world’s biggest investor in renewable energy, but last December it displaced the United States as its largest oil importer. China now consumes 21.3 percent of the world’s oil. Not surprisingly, its main interest in the Middle East is uninterrupted access to the region’s abundant energy supplies.

China imports over half its oil from the region, primarily from Saudi Arabia, though it also buys almost half the oil produced in post-Saddam Iraq, where Chinese oil companies now play a leading role, and more than two-fifths of the oil exported by Iran. To buy all that oil, China must sell goods and services to Middle Eastern oil producers. As has become so common in so many other places, China is now the top destination for the region’s exports and the largest source of its imports. Chinese companies are the largest foreign investors in a growing number of Middle Eastern countries. For non oil-producing countries that rely heavily on the tourist industry, Chinese visitors are now a significant source of hard currency. Chinese is taught in Confucius Institutes in Israel, most Arab countries, Iran, and Turkey.

American presidents up to Woodrow Wilson (and his immediate successors) would have understood today’s China’s reluctance to take sides in the quarrels of others. As a vulnerable new state, the People’s Republic of China follows a policy analogous to that recommended by our founding fathers. As Thomas Jefferson put it: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none.” China does not wish to be manipulated by Israel against the Arabs, by the Arabs against Israel or each other, or by either against Iran. It hopes for productive relations with all. Unique among great powers, China simultaneously maintains largely positive and substantive relations with all the region’s peoples. This is not an easy stand to take in an area prone to view events as a conflict between good and evil.

In dealing with the turmoil in Syria, China has clung to its vision of non interference in the internal affairs of sovereign nations despite the damage this has done to its image in Saudi Arabia, its most important economic partner in the region and the principal sponsor of the Syrian rebels. Its unwillingness to support the Assad government against the insurgents has meanwhile earned it no points with Iran. China has excellent relations with Israel (including a lot of military technology coooperation), but does not take the side of the Jewish state in its struggle to master and dispossess the Palestinians. Nor, as a country that seeks no enemies, is China prepared to play the role of mediator in the Middle East. It recognizes, as the Greek philosopher Bias did two-and-a-half millennia ago, that “it is better to mediate between enemies than between friends, because one of the friends is sure to become an enemy and one of the enemies a friend.”

China has sound domestic reasons to be cautious about involvement in the Middle East. There is not a single province in China without a native Muslim population. Increasing numbers of Chinese make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Although – for complex reasons – the official figures are much lower, well over 100 million Chinese are Muslim, and the number is growing. Some Uyghurs have raised the banner of Islam in a violent campaign for the secession of Xinjiang. Al-Qaeda had a a Uyghur chapter. The contagious sectarian dogmas of the Middle East could adversely affect China’s security and social tranquility.

In short, China shares neither the priorities nor the impulse to activism of the United States in the Middle East. It has no emotional commitment to the Jews of Israel or the Muslims of Arab countries, Iran, orTurkey. It did not have its diplomats taken hostage by raging students in Tehran. Its armed forces are configured to defend its national territory, not to project power on the global level or to the Middle East. China does not need security of transit through the region.

China is dependent on Middle East oil supplies but confident that the self-interest of vendors and diplomacy make the use of force largely irrelevant to the security of energy supplies. Where actual threats to this security have arisen, as from Somali piracy in the Gulf of Aden, China has independently deployed the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA Navy) as part of an ad hoc, U.N.-authorized, multinational effort to restore freedom of navigation. Meanwhile, China has hedged against the possibility that the United States, India, or another great power might try to break its energy supply chains by diversifying its sources of oil and gas as much as it can. And, for sound strategic reasons, unlike us, China has kept its distance from the religious struggles of the Middle East. It has been content to buy what it needs and sell what it can to cover the cost, stay out of politics, and avoid taking stands on religious issues. If that sounds like the advice your grandmother gave you for dealing with other people, that just confirms its essential wisdom.

Much as the countries of the Middle East would like to enlist China as a sponsor and protector, they are learning that China has neither the capability nor the inclination to take on these roles. Their disappointment with Chinese distance from them has not impeded their development of a robust pattern of economic interdependence with China. The good news is that China does not seek to usurp our self-appointed role as the protector of the Middle East. That, I think, is also, in some senses, the bad news. We will not easily escape the burdens we have assumed in that region.

There is room for Sino-American cooperation in the Middle East. There is no inevitability about contention between us there. One must hope that we can in fact ways to work together or in parallel. It would help to listen, not apply mirror-imaged stereotypes to each other. Perhaps we could both learn something from that. Neither coercion nor the use of force is the only way to advance the national interest. Diplomacy and other measures short of war are generally less costly and more effective. The politics of the homeland may define national interests but a clear-eyed view of the realities of the world beyond it is essential for their successful prosecution.

Despite the growing economic interdependence of the United States and China, the overall trajectory of our official relations is at present negative. We would do well to avoid adding needless elements of a zero-sum game in the Middle East to the mix. There, as elsewhere, we need to search for broader common interests within which narrow differences can be subsumed and on which policy coordination can take place. I hope the effort to do this will be a significant part of the summit meeting between Chinese Communist Party chairman Xi Jinping and President Obama that begins tomorrow.

I can’t help thinking of the old man who was sitting with his friend in the living room while his wife rustled up dinner for them. He turned to his friend and said: “my wife and I went to this really incredible restaurant downtown last week. Amazing food. Impeccable service.”

“What’s the name of it?” his friend asked.

“Well . . . ” He scratched his head and stared into the fireplace. After a long pause, he looked at his friend and asked: “What do you call that red flower with the thorns you give to women you love?”

“A rose?” his friend suggested.

The old man turned in the direction of the kitchen and bellowed: “Hey, Rose! What was the name of that restaurant we went to last week?”

As long as we have someone like Rose to consult, hindsight is an exact science. But, even with Rose as an assistant, prediction is not.

We are living in a world no one who toiled through the Cold War ever imagined. There is no Soviet Union. There are once again wars of religion, but there is no global contest of ideas Five centuries of Western dominance is coming to an end and the world and regional orders created by European ascendancy and American primacy are disintegrating. Our republic is becoming a garrison state in which our civil liberties are contracting rather than expanding.

Except where we are making war on foreigners, they no longer pay as much attention to us as they used to. In most places, anti-Americanism is giving way to creeping indifference about what Washington and New York think. For the first time since about 1880, there will soon be an economy larger than ours. We need to adjust to China’s return to wealth and power as well as to the strikingly unfamiliar context in which this is occurring.

It’s already obvious that the 21st century will be very different from the last. Before I get to the evolving relationship between the United States and China, let me briefly sketch out some of the remarkable changes taking place in the world that the U.S. and China cohabit. These changes add up to the end of the worlds created by World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Power is devolving to the world’s regions. No one is in overall charge. And that raises a lot of questions.

In the Middle East, the work of Mr. Sykes and M. Picot is being undone. As you’ll recall, they were the British and French bureaucrats who dismembered the Ottoman Empire’s West Asian provinces to create today’s Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. The ongoing demolition of Syria very likely foreshadows the demolition of some or all of the other states Sykes and Picot agreed to set up. Meanwhile, Turkey is back as a great power in West Asia and North Africa. This, together with the Syrian turmoil and the Arab uprisings in North Africa, is a big bang on the Middle Eastern kaleidoscope. How the pieces will rearrange themselves is unclear, but some sort of rearrangement is in prospect.

So too with America’s military role in the region. The United States has begun to revert to its historic status as a major energy exporter rather than importer. Indeed, U.S. production of oil and gas will double or even triple over the coming decade. It seems certain that some Americans will question the rationale for continuing to provide free U.S. military protection to assure access by other great powers to Middle Eastern energy supplies that they can’t do without but we can. Will we ask the major consumers of this energy – China, India, Japan, Korea – to assume this politico-military burden or to share it?

Having belatedly come together to establish the world’s largest economic collective, Europe seems to be unraveling. The European Union is too big to be ignored but too feckless to be taken seriously. The good news is that, unlike the 20th century, when the fault lines in Europe triggered a series of violent changes in the global order, in the 21st century, Europe now seems more squishy than tectonically brittle.

But Europe’s divisions are sharpening. Britain is seriously contemplating secession from the European Union (EU). Scotland may hive off from England. Germany more and more openly calls the shots in the EU. France chafes at German ascendancy and the triumph of the English language in Europe but has no persuasive answer to either phenomenon. The European South is on the economic ropes.

All in all, Europe remains a puzzle, wrapped in a muddle inside a pretense. It may be becoming something, but no one can be sure or say quite what. In the meantime, its component parts are focused on each other more than on the wider world. That gives them greatly diminished influence internationally.

Europe was the birthplace of the Enlightenment values that gave America its libertarian soul. In some ways, after the battering we Americans have administered to our civil liberties since 9/11, Europeans are now more faithful to the rule of law than we are. If the two sides of the Atlantic no longer agree on the norms of constitutional democracy and international law, what future do these concepts have? Now that Asia has become the world’s economic center of gravity and seems to be outperforming the West in delivering an ever-better life to its citizens, this question can no longer be evaded.

The major challenge to the once-universal sway of Western values now comes from the Dar al Islam, the 1.6-billion and 57-nation-strong global community of Muslims. This is the last remaining ideological bloc on the planet. Islam spans four continents and is expanding on all of them. The human-guided cruise missiles of 9/11 were acts of reprisal by a small and deviant minority of this vast community. They sought revenge for the deaths at our hands or those of Israel of hundreds of thousands of Muslims. And they wanted to drive home their opposition to our perceived imperial ambitions in the Islamic heartland.

Our immediate response to 9/11 had the support of the world, including overwhelming majorities of Muslims. We squandered that support with our subsequent invasion of Iraq, our mindless transformation of our punitive raid in Afghanistan into a bloody campaign of pacification there, and our inauguration of a drone-borne reign of terror in an expanding number of Muslim countries in West Asia and North Africa. The perceived injustice and inhumanity of American policies in the Muslim world have now gone a long way toward transforming an anti-American minority into a very large majority. This is most evident in Pakistan. It is happening elsewhere as well.

The hatred that our policies engender was the proximate cause of the April 15 terrorist bombing of the Boston Marathon. The insecurity we have imposed on Muslim peoples abroad is now blowing back on our own domestic tranquility. The president’s speech last week at the National Defense University was characteristically eloquent in its analysis of this vicious cycle of causation, but typically cursory in terms of prescriptions for how to break it.

Among other unintended consequences, the so-called “war on terror” is now connecting us to Africa in new and troubling ways. Well over 40 percent of Africans are Muslim. American military action against Islamic militants now extends to West as well as East and North Africa. We are beginning to see anti-American terrorism from Africans.

Africa is no longer either the colonial playground or the humanitarian theme park the West has traditionally fancied. Africans have begun to challenge the arbitrary state borders created by European powers at the Berlin conference of 1884-1885. They are in the midst of a violent process of creating their own, indigenously crafted polities. New states have emerged in Eritrea, South Sudan, and possibly Mali, as the sea of human entropy once known as Zaire continues its bloody disintegration. But this chaos obscures the fact that Africa now has many of the world’s fastest growing economies.

Africa’s economic progress reflects and is reflected in the decisions by China, India, and Brazil to treat Africans as trading and business partners rather than as recipients of charity with strings. To the distress of foreign assistance officials in international organizations and Western capitals, this has empowered Africans to make their own decisions about how to develop their countries. The result is a lot more growth as well as more opportunities for corruption.

Africa is finally beginning to emerge as an economic force in the world. In coming decades, as wages rise in China, it is expected to give up 85 million manufacturing jobs, Africa’s abundant cheap labor assures that it is where many of these jobs will end up. China is already Africa’s largest trading partner and investor. Major projects there tend to be contracted to Chinese, Indian, and Brazilian companies.

Brazil’s rise as a great regional power is another significant part of the realignment of global affairs. Before the Spanish Empire connected North and South America, these continents were ecologically, culturally, economically, and politically isolated from each other. This pre-Colombian geopolitical division now seems to be reasserting itself. The Monroe Doctrine posited a single strategic zone in the Western Hemisphere, dominated by the United States and denied to European and – by implication – Asian influence. That notion is dead.

Canada, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean remain in the U.S. sphere of influence but South America has left it. Brazil now has the sixth-largest economy in the world. China overtook the U.S. as Brazil’s largest export market five years ago. Brazil’s main trading partners are now its Spanish-speaking neighbors, Europe and Asia, not North America. As Brazil becomes the center of the South American political economy and develops relationships to its east and west, it is emerging as a diplomatic actor of consequence in Africa and international organizations.

To round out this brief account of the huge geopolitical changes taking place that set the strategic context outside the Indo-Pacific region, let me say a few words about our former Soviet enemy. Moscow now lacks a messianic ideology or the means to attempt global conquest but it retains the ability to destroy any country that attempts to subjugate the Russian Federation. Although most Russians are nostalgic about the USSR’s past global power, its collapse is turning out in many ways to be a good thing for Russia. Putin’s regime may in some ways resemble a protection racket more than a government but it is afloat on an apparently inexhaustible sea of oil and natural resources of great importance to the global economy. Despite its inscrutability, Putanism seems for now to have a firm grip on Russia and the Russian imagination.

Some Russians have become very, very rich. Many others have become world travelers. The Russian middle class clogs the beaches from Goa to Hainan. Every Russian may be dissatisfied in his or her own way, but all are proud to be Russian and – Western sympathy with noisy Russian dissenters notwithstanding – a clear majority supports strongman nationalism.

That is not to say it’s at all clear where Russia is going. Still, as Cyprus and Syria illustrate, Russia’s participation is indispensable in dealing with more and more events well beyond its borders. Meanwhile, the hounds of Russian intellect are once again in joyous pursuit of the elusive fox of their country’s identity. Americans have no dog in that chase. Yet we need to decide how Russia fits into our world view. We have yet to do so.

Situated between East and West, Russia is proving able to exploit both the confusions of Europe and the dynamism of China. A geographic position long thought to be a weakness is turning out to be a strength. Russia’s neighbors are courting relations with it as a great regional rather than world power. Moscow now has the best relations in its history with Germany, Turkey, and China It is conducting experiments in strategic coordination with all of them. It is also on good terms with Iran. And in Central Asia, Russian soft power has become a welcome alternative to past imperial and Soviet might as Russia pursues accommodation with China in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Russia has also retained a cooperative relationship with India, which is slowly shucking off the Fabian socialism with Soviet characteristics that long kept it from realizing its potential as a great power. India dominates South Asia except for Pakistan, which China supports to keep India off balance. India is now reaching out to Vietnam and Japan to pay China a similar favor in East Asia. It is competing with China and the United States for influence in Indonesia, which is itself emerging as a great regional actor. India’s perception of itself as the natural rival to China for leadership in Asia is becoming more plausible than it once was.

This process is accelerating under the impact of Japan’s right-wing government’s determination to make Japan a “normal country” and to abandon the pacificism imposed on it by the American occupation after World War II. Japan is taking a much more active role in its own defense. It is loudly contesting territorial disputes with China, Korea, and Russia. Prime Minister Abe openly aspires to exploit widespread apprehensions about China’s rising power to build an anti-China coalition in Asia.

This coalition would embrace other countries with territorial disputes with China like India, the Philippines, and Vietnam and those interested in rolling back Chinese influence, like Myanmar. But Japan’s prospects for leading such a coalition are impaired by the transparent lack of remorse that underlies its politicians’ formal apologies for wartime atrocities. Indeed, by marked contrast with Germany, many Japanese seem to view a “normal” Japan as one that takes pride in its imperial and militarist past. They see Japan’s principal mistake in World War II as having been to allow itself to be defeated and occupied. They are indifferent to or deny Japan’s gross mistreatment of captive populations and its violations of the laws of war in the 1930s and ‘40s.

So the rise of China, itself deeply unsettling to longstanding dispositions of power in Asia, is far from the only strategic shift in progress there. The strengthening of India and Indonesia, the maturation of south Korea as a global industrial and technological force, the failure of north Korea as a society, and the emergence of a less risk-averse and more nationalistic Japan add to the complexities of the new order in Asia. In my view, we are not dealing well with those complexities.

It is said that generals invariably prepare to fight the last war. Similarly, politicians always seem to want to reenact past approaches as new problems arise in foreign affairs. The United States clung to isolationism in the 1930s long after it was dangerously inappropriate to do so. After World War II, we went to the other extreme, promiscuously extending protection to almost half the world’s countries. Ironically, having entangled ourselves in these alliances to prevent world domination by others, we now justify them in terms of preserving the credibility of our own military supremacy and omnipotence, including especially our postwar control of the Western Pacific. Most remarkably, thirty-five years after China’s defection to cadre capitalism and twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we are clinging to alliance structures designed to contain the long-vanished Sino-Soviet bloc.

The so-called U.S. “pivot to Asia,” though justified by reference to regional concerns about rising Chinese power, seems less a response to demands from allies, partners, and friends than a move to retard the loss of our nearly seven decades of dominance in the Western Pacific. Threat analysis is, of course, the highest form of budget justification. China’s erosion of the traditional American military supremacy in its near seas is a timely justification for military Keynesianism – continuing high levels of defense spending to head off job losses in our military-industrial complex. By ironic contrast, the economic aspects of the “pivot” seem mostly intended to undercut China’s role as the center of the Asian economy rather than to create American jobs.

The Soviet collapse deprived our foreign policy of focus. The “pivot” takes China as the cure for this enemy deprivation syndrome. But it’s far from clear that we have the fiscal resources or freedom of maneuver away from the Middle East that the “pivot” presupposes. So far, the “pivot” – or, to give it its kinder, gentler name, the “rebalancing” – is mostly rhetoric, not action. But this has been enough to embolden some of China’s neighbors to risk provoking it, while inducing a pronounced chill in Sino-American relations. There is a risk that Americans are about to satisfy the nostalgia some evidently have for the Cold War by producing a new version of it. Last time, the game was called when the Soviet Union defaulted. It’s very unlikely that this would be the result of a similar contest with China.

The introduction of capitalism was necessary to save China but capitalism cannot now do without China. China is integral to the global economy; it cannot be isolated or “contained.” Its system, unlike that of the Soviet Union, has a history of adapting to meet the challenges before it. It is unlikely to fail. Indeed, China’s economy seems poised to match and then dwarf ours in size. Historically, there is nothing new about this. Until recently, when it had a couple of bad centuries, China accounted for one-third or more of global GDP. China’s neighbors may be apprehensive about the application of its coercive power to the minor territorial disputes they have with it, but they do not fear occupation or subjugation by it. With the possible exception of Japan, they seek to accommodate China at minimal cost to their interests, not to take sides against it. None wishes to go to war with China.

This is not America’s finest hour. Our political system is broken, our constitutional balances undone. Our bill of rights is compromised or suspended. We are disinvesting in our human and physical infrastructure. Our economic competitiveness is visibly declining. We are unable to pass a budget, still less set priorities for our languishing economy. In short, we are afflicted by budgetary bloat, political constipation, diplomatic enervation, and strategic myopia. This doesn’t seem a particularly propitious time to pick a fight with a rising power.

That’s why next week’s two-day private meeting between President Obama and President Xi Jinping is vitally important. Mr. Xi has proposed that China and the United States try to develop “a new type of great power relationship” to avoid the conflict that has so often occurred between established and rising powers and to foster cooperation instead. His concept makes sense but has little, if any content as yet. Diplomats, of course, take a professional delight in the inchoate, inane, vapid, and unspecific. So I’m sure that you, like me, will see the present lack of substance to Mr. Xi’s idea as a good thing. It’s an invitation to Mr. Obama to work with him to define a new and positive framework for Sino-American relations. And that is exactly what we need to do in the radically changing global and regional circumstances in which our two countries now find ourselves.

China and the United States are dependent on each other for our prosperity. Without cooperation between us, effective global governance is impossible. Challenges like global warming, environmental degradation, pandemic disease, the maintenance of global order and the rule of law, non proliferation, space and cyberspace as new human domains, and the achievement of security from intercontinental war will not be met. If the United States and China choose a path of confrontation, we will both lose. China has been fond of saying that it needs a peaceful international environment in which to restore itself to wealth and power. The United States now needs such an environment no less than China if we are to return to realizing the enormous potential inherent in our geography, human diversity, openness to ideas, propensity for innovation, and traditions of liberty. Next week’s meeting promises to be a turning point for both countries, for Asia, and for the world.