Clash of cognitions: the United States, China, and strategic thinking.

• Author: Kerbel, Josh
• Position: Viewpoint essay

Editor's Note: The China-Taiwan conflict has currently receded from the forefront of global threats to peace and stability. This provides an opportunity for the United States to broaden its perspective and to build better long-term relations with China; but, this essay argues, the two countries' fundamentally differing strategic mindsets makes this extremely difficult.--Ed.

Summary: The United States and China "think differently." Although this assertion is readily acknowledged by most U.S. strategists, it also seems to get just as quickly discounted. While the reasons for this discount are debatable, the result is not: The differences rarely get explicated and/or considered in terms of how they comparatively manifest themselves in each country's strategic mindset. This article sketches out some of those key differences and argues that China's more "synthetic" mindset--vice America's more "analytic" one--appears to be better suited to an increasingly synthetic (complex, interconnected, and interdependent) international system. In turn, it argues that the United States would probably do well to begin the admittedly hard task of fostering its own more synthetic worldview.

The calming of the China-Taiwan issue in the wake of the March 2008 presidential election on Taiwan is, in several ways, a strategic gift to the United States. Most obviously, it is a gift because it means the probable cooling of what may be the most likely flashpoint for a potential U.S.-China military clash. Less obviously but more interestingly, however, it is a gift because it affords the United States an opportunity to widen its aperture from what is essentially an operational-level issue--a potential cross-strait crisis/conflict--and to look at Asia and beyond in broader strategic terms. Finally, it is an opportunity, in a much broader sense, because it could conceivably catalyze the United States to stop lasering from one specific issue to the next at the expense of ever developing a "bigger-picture" perspective. That is the good news.

The bad news, however, is that the United States may well prove incapable of capitalizing on this opportunity. There are numerous reasons one might point to in support of this assertion, but the most fundamental is that the world is growing steadily more "complex" (interrelated, interdependent, and integrated) and requires a commensurately complex mindset--a mindset that most U.S. strategists (1) appear to lack. And, as if that were not bad enough, it actually gets worse. For China, in contrast, does seem to possess a comparatively complex strategic mindset. Taken together, these assertions lead to a troubling question: Considering the interconnected nature of the emerging international environment, might China have a "cognitive" advantage?

Do the United States and China really "think differently"?

Before one can seriously consider the above provocations, one must first consider whether the United States and China really do "think differently," and if so, how. In general, the notion that they do is neither new nor particularly controversial. For instance, the University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett has extensively explored the cognitive differences between Asians and Westerners and found that, "The collective or interdependent nature of Asian society is consistent with Asians' broad, contextual view of the world and their belief that events are highly complex and determined by many factors." In contrast, he wrote, "The individualistic or independent nature of Western society seems consistent with the Western focus on particular objects in isolation from their context ..." (2)

Rarely, however, are these contextual inclinations considered specifically in terms of what they mean for China's strategic thinking--how China conceives of, and consequently deals with, the international system. And even when they are, the consideration often only goes so far as to encapsulate these Chinese biases in some pithy little axioms--"China has a longer-term perspective" or "China emphasizes winning without fighting" being prime examples--which are then just as often set aside and ignored.

The reasons for this dismissal vary. Sometimes it seems these axioms get discounted as mere by-products of circumstance--as an inadvertent relic of a long history in the case of the former or as an expedient adaptation to a periodic deficiency (military weakness) in the case of the latter--as opposed to being considered as the products of deeply ingrained cognitive biases or preferences. More usually, however, the dismissal seems to involve even less thought and results from an almost reflexive but fundamental misunderstanding about the influence of Confucianism. That is to say, there appears...