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Look, when the US has serious conflicts with any country - be it China, Iran, North Korea, etc - the first question is not whether we can make all those conflicts - or the country itself - completely go away, but what kind of country we can acceptably live with.
The second question is what we are realistically willing to risk or sacrifice to achieve those conditions. And if we aren't, we need to rethink the first question again.
This is something we very much failed to do in Afghanistan, and why we are still there fighting for - it's not clear what achievable objectives - almost two decades later.
So if we begin with the premise that we're not going to reinvent China in our own image, and we're not going to wipe them off the face of the earth (Japan tried) then we need to figure out what differences we can live with, and what we really can't.
My friend @EvanFeigenbaum calls this matching means with ends, and ends with means.
And I find it completely lacking in our DC-based national discussion about China.
And I find it completely lacking in our DC-based national discussion about China.
Some will argue that containment or "decoupling" will achieve this without war, but I don't think this takes even China's legitimate aspirations at all seriously, and expects them to somehow crawl back into a hole and be poor and irrelevant, which is not going to happen.
In fact, I don't think it's going to happen even if China faces a serious financial crisis due to its mounting bad debt, any more than the US receded into oblivion because of the Great Depression.
I do think China's reform and opening over 40 years has unlocked huge social change and rising expectations, which the CCP will continue to struggle to contend with. Xi's authoritarian approach may have the upper hand right now, but I can't say how it will eventually play out.
One reason I am out of sync with the emerging national consensus is that I do not think China "owns the future" unless we somehow "defeat" it (whatever this means). I think this displays an amazing lack of confidence in America's own long-term strengths and resources.
