The strategists of Clown World have belatedly realized that the neocons are not only lunatics, but rank amateurs when it comes to assessing military capabilities and are attempting to establish some sort of Cold War-style detente with China before the asymmetric warfare of the last 25 years goes hot. A 100-page report offers some principles and initiatives conceived to replace the outmoded idea that the US military can simply enforce the will of its masters with regards to the Middle Kingdom. (PDF)
Several broad principles can guide efforts to stabilize intense rivalries
- Each side accepts that some degree of modus vivendi must necessarily be part of the relationship.
- Each side accepts the essential political legitimacy of the other.
- In specific issue areas, especially those disputed by the two sides, each side works to develop sets of shared rules, norms, institutions, and other tools that create lasting conditions of a stable modus vivendi within that domain over a specific period (such as three to five years).
- Each side practices restraint in the development of capabilities explicitly designed to undermine the deterrent and defensive capabilities of the other in ways that would create an existential risk to its homeland.
- Each side accepts some essential list of characteristics of a shared vision of organizing principles for world politics that can provide at least a baseline for an agreed status quo.
- There are mechanisms and institutions in place — from long-term personal ties to physical communication links to agreed norms and rules of engagement for crises and risky situations — that help provide a moderating or return-to-stable-equilibrium function.
Six broad-based initiatives can help moderate the intensity of the U.S.-China rivalry
- Clarify U.S. objectives in the rivalry with language that explicitly rejects absolute versions of victory and accepts the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party.
- Reestablish several trusted lines of communication between senior officials.
- Improve crisis-management practices, links, and agreements between the two sides.
- Seek specific new agreements — a combination of formal public accords and private understandings — to limit the U.S.-China cyber competition.
- Declare mutual acceptance of strategic nuclear deterrence and a willingness to forswear technologies and doctrines that would place the other side’s nuclear deterrent at risk.
- Seek modest cooperative ventures on issues of shared interest or humanitarian concern.
I think it is at least 15 years too late for any sort of meaningful rapprochement between China and the Clown World West, because the Chinese now understand what we have also learned in the interim: there is an ancient and malevolent evil that is not limited by human reason or timeframes that is the motivating force behind Clown World. Any compromise with it will eventually result in submission and destruction.
I am not the only one who is skeptical. Simplicius, too, has serious doubts about the ability of the Western states to change their course, as well as the probability that the Chinese will be convinced to alter their own.
It’s clear that RAND is trying desperately to make US policymakers abandon their obsolete and blinkered world view centered on the idea that any challenger must by its nature represent the selfsame kind of hegemonic exceptionalism cultivated by the US itself for over a century. The US views the entire world as a threat in the same light that a thief mistrusts all those around him—it is past guilt sublimated into national suspicion and Machiavellian subversiveness.
The US, being the pernicious by-blow of the late British Empire, has inherited all the hawkish trappings of its former parent. RAND here attempts to ween the US political culture away from this perpetually adversarial and hostile approach to foreign diplomacy because, as it has become apparent, the people ‘behind the scenes’ have slowly recognized not that confrontation with China will lead to some kind of global war, but rather the much barer reality that the US simply isn’t what it once was, and does not have the sheer overwhelming capability to bully the world’s foremost ascendant power. Thus, this RAND call to action is not—as they would have us believe—some kind of de-escalatory peacenik measure, but rather a desperate attempt to stave off the US from a historically fatal humiliation and geopolitical defeat at the hands of China.
I tend to agree that this attempt at establishing a new detente is nothing more than the desperate flailings of a failing power to avoid its now-inevitable decline and fall.