Optimists (liberal doves) vs. pessimists (conservative hawks) on China.

• Author: Logan, Justin
• Position: Worldview - Foreign policy

AMERICAN foreign policy in Asia is plagued by three problems. First, Washington's policy centers on a contradiction: making China more powerful while seeking to make it act as though it is weak. The "containment" and "engagement" aspects of the policy countervail one another. This "congagement." approach is built on contradictory policies. Congagement frequently is defended with puzzling formulations such as "Washington must engage China in order to balance against it, and balance against it in order to engage it," but this is incoherent. The two aspects of congagement do not complement each other--they work at cross purposes.

Washington policy analysts and pundits like to market congagement as a "hedging" strategy, but this analogy is unfounded. Hedging refers to a decision to make a conservative investment with low, but likely, returns in order to help cover potential losses from a risky investment with high, but less likely, returns. In the analogy with China policy, the large, risky bet would be trading with China, which narrows the relative power gap between the two countries, in the hopes that China will be transformed and will not compete with the U.S. militarily. The hedging analogy falls apart because the longer the risky bet goes on, the more Washington will need to pour ever-increasing resources into the conservative bet--the military instruments needed for containment--in order to cover the potential losses should engagement fail to pay off. Congagement is not a hedging strategy.

Second, the policy of "reassuring" our allies forces the U.S. to carry a disproportionate share of the growing burden of containing China. Finally, although Washington agrees with the pessimists (read, conservative hawks) that China's growing military power is a problem, no one has specified precisely how even a very militarily powerful China would directly threaten U.S. national security.

Optimists (read, liberal doves), meanwhile, place too much faith in international institutions, the idea that economic growth in China necessarily will lead to democratization there, and that a democratic China necessarily would be at peace with American military domination of Asia.

As a general proposition, optimists--such as John Ikenberry, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University--tend to elide the zero-sum tradeoffs inherent to military issues, ignoring for the most part the question of U.S. military policy in Asia.

This leaves one of the most important questions about the future of American foreign policy outside their analysis. As Columbia University professor of war and peace studies Richard Betts writes in a stinging critique: "Ikenberry says nothing about what U.S. military policy should be in [East Asia], dismisses the whole dimension of analysis with the facile assumption that mutual nuclear deterrence precludes...