Book Review - The Avoidable War - NY Times

[johnkarls]

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/book ... -rudd.html


Are China and the United States on a Collision Course to War?

By Kevin Peraino - the author, most recently, of “A Force So Swift: Mao, Truman, and the Birth of Modern China, 1949.”
April 14, 2022


Here is one way the American era could end: China, on a pretext or piqued by some provocation, orchestrates an invasion of Taiwan. Beijing launches a shower of missiles toward Taipei, crippling its American-supplied military, followed by attacks on Okinawa and Guam. More than 200,000 People’s Liberation Army troops climb ashore at 20 different beachheads along the Taiwanese coast. American submarines sink some Chinese ships; still, it’s not enough to slow the onslaught of paratroopers and helicopters. Slowly — then swiftly — the pitched fighting tilts in favor of the Middle Kingdom, altering the military and political balance in East Asia. The result, which ultimately reduces a world superpower to one weakened player among many, comes to be seen by historians as the “American Waterloo.”

It is not such a far-fetched scenario: According to Kevin Rudd’s penetrating and sensible new account of the United States-China relationship, some reports have shown Washington losing to Beijing as many as 19 straight times in desktop war games simulating a conflict over Taiwan. Rudd, who is a former prime minister of Australia and now president and C.E.O. of the Asia Society, has spent four decades trying to understand the machinations of the Chinese and argues that President Xi Jinping is “a man in a hurry when it comes to Taiwan,” having concluded that his predecessors’ “gradualist approach has failed.” In a larger sense, Xi has come to believe that the age of American predominance in Asia is over. He has taken to observing with icy understatement that the geopolitical landscape is “undergoing profound changes unseen in a century.” Beijing, Rudd believes, now sees “the time as ripe … to change the nature of the order itself.”

The American diplomat George Kennan, one of the architects of that order, once wrote that a healthy American foreign policy should create “the impression of a country which knows what it wants.” Yet it is just as important to know what one’s adversaries want. American adventures in East Asia, particularly, are notable for their long history of governments talking past one another. Frances FitzGerald, in her classic Pulitzer-winning account of the Vietnam War, “Fire in the Lake,” describes how Americans failed utterly to comprehend even the “basic intellectual grammar” that lay beneath the cultures of the region they sought to shape. “There was no direct translation … in the simple equations of x is y and a means b,” she writes. Any attempt to find common ground “would have to recreate the whole world of the other, the whole intellectual landscape.” It is precisely this type of worthy and ambitious intellectual re-creation that Rudd undertakes in “The Avoidable War.”

The path that Rudd has followed in his career to get there is certainly unorthodox. After leaving office, at age 60 he enrolled at Oxford University to study for a doctorate focusing on understanding Xi’s worldview. (According to one report, the student committee at Jesus College passed a cheeky motion granting Rudd full access to the undergraduate pool tables.) Rudd, who has visited China more than 100 times and speaks fluent Mandarin, is one of the few foreign politicians who have had a chance to get to know Xi personally — first as a diplomat when Xi was a junior official in Xiamen, and later when Xi was vice president; on one occasion the two men spent hours conversing in Chinese before a winter fire in Canberra. Those talks, among other impressions gleaned from his travels, have left Rudd with a rare feel for China’s cultural flash points. “Our best chance of avoiding war,” Rudd writes, “is to better understand the other side’s strategic thinking and to conceptualize a world where both the U.S. and China are able to competitively coexist, even if in a state of continuing rivalry reinforced by mutual deterrence.”

That task feels particularly urgent in the shadow of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Already the post-World War II order that underpinned the American Century appears to be fraying, with 19th-century-style power politics supplanting it. Russia, moreover, is a relatively weak power, with an economy smaller than that of Italy. Should Moscow succeed, through its diplomacy or its progress on the battlefield, in persuading Beijing to join its efforts in reshaping that order, the global landscape could shift dramatically. Xi has worked harder than his predecessors to court Russian leaders, flattering Putin by implying that the two countries are peers and bolstering joint military exercises. He has referred to the Russian president as his “best friend”; he calls Putin on his birthday.

Until now, however, Xi has remained satisfied to let Putin play the spoiler while China patiently bides its time. The Chinese president, Rudd observes, “recognizes great value in Moscow being prepared to act far more adventurously than China itself” — not only in Ukraine but in Syria as well. Quietly, however, China has been working to reorganize the strategic chessboard. It invested, for example, more than $90 billion between 2012 and 2017 into building ports and coast guard hubs along a maritime route through the Arctic known as the Northeast Passage that would cut the voyage from Asia to Europe by more than two weeks and nearly 5,000 miles. The route would also allow Chinese forces to avoid bottlenecks like the Strait of Malacca, which are vulnerable to American naval forces.

In conveying all this, Rudd structures his book like a white paper or policy brief — full of useful facts and trenchant analysis. But at times I found myself wishing he would set aside his policy-wonk hat and just tell some stories. We get plenty of good grist for a presidential daily brief; it would have also been nice to hear more of the kinds of tales he might tell over a beer. Almost nobody has enjoyed the kind of access he has had to Chinese officials, and those encounters could have proved as revealing as any intel briefing. He mentions in passing that he once listened to Jiang Zemin, when he was a top party official, belt out a tune from the stage at an empty Sydney Opera House — but dispatches the scene in a sentence or two. He briefly recounts a boozy evening over “much maotai” with several Chinese generals, but we hear little beyond the fact that they displayed a high level of “professional prudence” over the East China Sea.

And yet the book is not overly academic. It includes no footnotes, endnotes or even a bibliography — leaving the reader to wonder whether the material on any given page comes from a newspaper article, a paper provided by one of Rudd’s “many research assistants” (the acknowledgments list 11) or simply a conversation with a Chinese friend. “The Avoidable War” covers a broad range of subjects — from the contest to perfect semiconductors to dollar figures on Chinese sovereign credit flows to Ecuador. Readers looking for resources to embark on an even deeper dive on any specific topic may find themselves at a loss.

The core of Rudd’s argument, however, remains unimpeachable: The consequences of a full-scale war with China are almost too grave to contemplate. The American statesman Dean Acheson — who never fully recovered from his own role in the war with China over Korea — liked to complain that Americans too often think of foreign policy problems as “headaches” for which they can just “take a powder” and make them go away. Rudd understands better than most that there will be no wishing away of Xi Jinping and his transformative worldview, at least in the short term. The headache is chronic; Americans will need to use all their ingenuity if they hope to manage the pain.