America's role as a stabiliser in Asia
Zbigniew Brzezinski says America should seek to be a constructive balancing influence in Asia, which means building a solid framework for working with China. Conflict is not inevitable
Today, many anxious voices fear that the emerging American-Chinese duopoly must inherently generate hostility and lead to inevitable conflict. However, I do not believe that wars for global domination are a serious prospect in what is now the post-hegemonic age.
Admittedly, the historical record is dismal. Since the onset of global politics 200 years ago, four long wars were fought over the domination of Europe (1812-1815) due to Napoleonic ambitions; 1914-18 due to Germanic imperial frustration; 1939-45 due to Nazi madness; and, from the late 1940s to 1991, due to worldwide Soviet ambitions. Each of these wars could have resulted in global hegemony by a sole superpower.
Yet several developments over recent years have changed the equation. Nuclear weapons make hegemonic wars too destructive, and thus victory meaningless. One-sided national economic triumphs cannot be achieved in the increasingly interwoven global economy without precipitating calamitous consequences for everyone. Further, the populations of the world have now awakened politically and are not so easily subdued, even by the most powerful. Last but not least, neither the US nor China is driven by hostile ideologies.
Moreover, despite our very different political systems, both our societies are, in different ways, open. More than 100,000 young Chinese are students at American universities. Thousands of young Americans study and work in China. Several major US universities now have their own campuses in China. Unlike the former Soviet Union, millions of Chinese travel abroad as tourists and to work temporarily. Millions of young Chinese are in daily touch with the world through the internet.
All this contrasts greatly with the societal self-isolation of the 19th- and 20th-century contestants for global power. Mutual isolation in those days intensified grievances and made it easier to demonise one another.
Nonetheless, the hopeful expectation of an amicable American-Chinese relationship has lately been tested by ever more antagonistic polemics, especially in the mass media of both sides. This has been fuelled in part by speculation about America's allegedly inevitable decline and about China's relentless, rapid rise.
