W.W. Norton - A contest for supremacy: China, America, and the struggle for mastery in Asia

ALSO BY AARON L. FRIEDBERG

The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 18951905

In the Shadow of the Garrison State: Americas Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy

A CONTEST FOR SUPREMACY

China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia

AARON L. FRIEDBERG

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK LONDON

Copyright 2011 by Aaron L. Friedberg

All rights reserved

First published as a Norton paperback 2012

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Friedberg, Aaron L., 1956

A contest for supremacy : China, America, and the struggle for
mastery in Asia / Aaron L. Friedberg. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-393-06828-3 (hardcover)

1. United StatesForeign relationsChina. 2. ChinaForeign relationsUnited States.
3. United StatesForeign relationsAsia. 4. AsiaForeign relationsUnited States.
5. ChinaForeign relationsAsia. 6. AsiaForeign relationsChina. 7. AsiaStrategic aspects. 8. AsiaForeign relations21st century. 9. GeopoliticsAsia. I. Title.

JZ1480.A57C6 2011

327.5105dc23

2011017661

ISBN 978-0-393-34389-2 pbk.

eISBN 978-0-393-08216-6

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

TO ANDREW W. MARSHALL AND TO THE MEMORY OF SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON ( 19272008). TEACHERS, MENTORS, EXEMPLARS.

Contents

Acknowledgments

I began work on this book in the fall of 2001 while serving as the first occupant of the Henry Alfred Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress. I am extremely grateful to James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, and to Peg Christoff of the John W. Kluge Center for their hospitality and assistance. During the summer of 2002 I had the chance to gain some fresh perspective on Asian security issues by spending six weeks as a visitor at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. I wish to thank Hugh White and Alan Dupont for their help in making this possible.

Generous grants from the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Harry and Lynde Bradley Foundation enabled me to finish the writing of this book in a timely fashion. I wish to express my sincere appreciation to Marin Strmecki and Allan Song at Smith Richardson and Diane Sehler at Bradley for their continuing support of my work. I am also grateful to Anne-Marie Slaughter, former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, who encouraged me to return to Princeton in 2005 after a two-year stint in government.

I have been fortunate to have the help of several extremely able research assistants. Daniel Nikbakht, Owen Fletcher, and Rex Douglass all assisted greatly in the early stages of the project. Rushabh Doshi went above and beyond the call of duty in tracking down sources and footnotes and in locating and translating material from dozens of Chinese-language sources.

I wish to thank my agent, Eric Lupfer of the William Morris Agency, and my editor, Maria Guarnaschelli, and her assistant, Melanie Tortoroli, at W. W. Norton for their enthusiasm and encouragement. Mary Babcock did an outstanding job in copyediting the manuscript.

As always, I benefited greatly from the comments of many friends and colleagues. Steven David, Kurt Guthe, Andrew Marshall, Jacqueline Newmyer, Stephen Rosen, and Shivaji Sondhi all read the manuscript in whole or in part and offered numerous useful suggestions. Gabriel Schoenfeld read everything from the first proposal to the final draft and played a crucial role in helping me to find a publisher.

My wife, Adrienne Sirken, and my sons, Eli and Gideon, tolerated my work on this project with as much good grace as could reasonably be expected under the circumstances. I humbly beg their forgiveness for my prolonged absences and perpetual preoccupation.

I wish that I could have had the chance to give copies of this book to my father, Simeon Friedberg, and to my father-in-law, Irving Sirken.

This book is dedicated to two men who have had a profound impact on my intellectual and professional development: Andrew W. Marshall, director of the Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the late Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University.

No one else bears the blame for any errors of fact or interpretation that this book may contain. Only I am responsible for its contents.

Preface

This book took the better part of five years to research and write, but it has been gestating for a good deal longer than that. Although not by training a regional expert, a linguist, or a country specialist, in the early 1990 s I began to spend much of my time thinking and writing about the fast-changing politics of postCold War Asia. In contrast to most of Europe, where nationalist passions, territorial disputes, and arms races were fast dwindling into historical memory, Asia seemed ripe for the reemergence of traditional great power rivalries. Among its other effects, the collapse of the Soviet Union had removed almost overnight the rationale for twenty years of close cooperation between the United States and China. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre also served as an inescapable reminder that, despite its undeniable economic progress, China was still ruled by a brutal authoritarian regime. By the mid- 1990 s, a trans-Pacific contest for power and influence between a still-dominant America and a fast-growing China began to seem an increasingly likely prospect. Over the years, I took part in a number of academic conferences and government-sponsored studies on alternative futures for Asia in general, and China in particular. Finally, in the closing months of the Clinton administration, I was asked to participate in a review of the intelligence communitys assessments of Chinas economic performance, political stability, strategic intentions, and military power.

These experiences left me deeply troubled about where China was headed and about the future direction of relations between that country and my own. I also found myself puzzled and frustrated by what struck me as a willful, blinkered optimism on these matters prevalent at the time in the academic and business communities and across significant portions of the U.S. government. Most of the China experts whom I encountered seemed to believe that a Sino-American rivalry was either highly unlikely, too terrifying to contemplate, or (presumably because talking about it might increase the odds that it would occur) too dangerous to discuss. Whatever the reason, it was not something that serious people spoke about in polite company.

Not being a card-carrying member of the China-watching fraternity freed me from most of these inhibitions. In November 2000 the journal Commentary published an essay in which I speculated about what a future strategic competition between the United States and China might look like and how it could unfold. Aiming to grab potential readers by the lapels, I titled the piece The Struggle for Mastery in Asia (a play on British historian A. J. P. Taylors study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European diplomatic history) and began it with the following words: