Mutual Trust Called Crucial to U.S.-China Relations
By KATRIN BENNHOLD
Published: September 12, 2010
GENEVA — As the center of gravity of world affairs moves from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the United States needs to forge ties with China that match in depth, scope and trust those it has with theEuropean Union, senior U.S. officials and strategists said this past weekend.
Henry A. Kissinger, a former secretary of state and national security adviser, warned at a conference here of the risk of a confrontation between the world’s two biggest economies unless they create “a pattern of continuous cooperation.”
Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg was less blunt, but also stressed the need to build what he called “strategic trust” with China, an unshakeable foundation of mutual trust and instinctive cultural understanding of the kind that has underpinned Washington’s relationship with its European allies.
“There is no more consequential bilateral relationship for the U.S. than that with China,” Mr. Steinberg said.
“The test of the future,” he said, will be whether Washington and Beijing can have differences without fundamentally destabilizing their relationship. He pointed to the numerous times the United States and European capitals had disagreed in recent decades, “but at the end of the day there was strategic trust.”
China’s rise as a major economic and political player is forcing governments across the world to adapt their strategic thinking on everything from energy security to regional conflict resolution and economic policy much faster than many had anticipated.
Simmering tension between Washington and Beijing has been recurrent. China resented the joint naval exercises America conducted with South Korea after Seoul accused North Korea of sinking one of its warships in March, killing 46 sailors. American policy makers and analysts regularly criticize China for not allowing its currency to rise further against the dollar. And the standoff between the Chinese government and Google early this year over censorship has come to symbolize growing difficulties many U.S. companies experience in China.
Avoiding such disagreements will be impossible, experts and officials in Geneva said, but ensuring that such differences do not fundamentally undermine the relationship is key to global stability in the decades ahead, they said.
Mr. Kissinger drew an analogy between China’s emergence as a great power and potential rival of the United States, and Germany’s rise in Europe a hundred years ago. At the time, the inability of the then dominant international power, Britain, to integrate Germany ultimately ended in two devastating world wars.
“The DNA of both countries could generate a growing adversarial relationship, much as Germany and Britain drifted from friendship to confrontation, unless their leadership groups take firm steps to counteract such trends,” Mr. Kissinger said.
Neither Washington nor Beijing “has much practice in cooperative relations with equals,” he said. “Yet their leaders have no more important task than to implement the truths that neither country will ever be able to dominate the otherand that conflict between them would exhaust their societies and undermine the prospect of world peace.”
Mr. Steinberg called Mr. Kissinger’s analogy an “important cautionary tale,” but expressed confidence that both countries recognized that cooperation was ultimately in their interest. Strategic competition was no long-term “sustainable strategy,” he said, arguing for cooperation on everything from access to natural resources to pacifying regional conflicts, like the war in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan was the other major issue discussed during two days of talks held in Geneva by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, based in London.
There was a broadly shared sense at the talks that the era of military interventions with sweeping objectivesthat had become fashionable after the Cold War was drawing to an end. Drawn-out campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have made similarly ambitious engagements politically impossible in coming years, while the economic crisis would probably shrink defense budgets in most Western countries, officials and experts said.
“Wars in which the Atlantic countries have been engaged in the past two decades have become extremely controversial, tearing the domestic consensus,” Mr. Kissinger said. “That pattern will end because, in the future, the American public will insist on clarity of objectives and unambiguous definitions of attainability. Wars will be risked only for specific outcomes, not for abstractions, like nation-building and exit strategy..”
The same is true for America’s allies, like Britain. Liam Fox, Britain’s defense secretary, whose budget faces cuts of between 10 and 20 percent amid a government-wide budget review, insisted that British forces would stand ready to intervene beyond Afghanistan if the need arose. But he made clear that objectives for such campaigns would be clearly and narrowly defined on national security grounds.
He also warned that the imminent budget cuts would be painful. “In the financial environment we find ourselves a few sacred cows will need to be slaughtered,” he said. “This is the review where we have to say good-bye to the Cold War.”
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