Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster (Ret.) and Jonathan D.T. Ward wrote in Thursday’s Chicago Tribune that the United States’ strategy vis-à-vis China should include the kind of policies used by President Reagan in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Messrs. McMaster and Ward explain:
“Reagan’s approach – applying intensive economic and military pressure to a superpower adversary – became foundational to American strategic thinking. It hastened the end of Soviet power and promoted a peaceful conclusion to the multi-decade Cold War.”
While these are the right general polices, linking them to how we beat the Soviet Union in the Cold War may not be the best way to describe them. The Cold War was different. As Messrs. McMaster and Ward say:
“[T]he operational approach … was ‘external resistance to Soviet imperialism’ and ‘internal pressure on the USSR to weaken the sources of Soviet imperialism.’ … [The] aim was ‘competing effectively on a sustained basis with the Soviet Union in all international arenas.’ Within nine years, the Soviet Union collapsed, worn out by economic pressure, an arms race it could not win and internal political contradictions.
Messrs. McMaster and Ward agree that:
“The goal of a competitive strategy versus Chinese Communist Party aggression should be different. The United States and like-minded liberal democracies must defend against the expansion of the party’s influence, thwart its ambitions to dominate the 21st century global economy, and convince Chinese leaders that they can fulfill enough of their aspirations without doing so at the expense of their own people’s rights or the sovereignty of other nations.”
The potential problem is linking, even in just a general way, our strategy against the Soviet Union with our policy vis-à-vis China. The Chinese Communist Party remembers what happened to the Soviet Union in 1991, and they are committed to not having that happen to them. Deng Xiaoping saw the problem in 1989, which may explain China’s crushing of the protests in Tiananmen Square in June of that year.
In dealing with China, we should not indicate we are pursuing any policy of, or any policy that might result in, regime change in Beijing. It’s hard to see how we can talk about that and still get China to work with us on problems we need to deal with.
Economic and military pressure are the right policy against China. Publicly reminding the Chinese leadership of how the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and then collapsed is not.
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