Prepare to Deal with Discontinuities

[ 9 ] special roundtable • advising the new u.s. president “Discontinuity plays a critical part in determining the risks and opportunities that national actors must face in the world arena. The magnitude of the dangers posed (or alternatively, the rewards offered) by sudden discontinuities can be very great indeed. Therefore, as a matter of statecraft, it is highly prudential to the degree feasible to prepare for the unexpected.” • Prepare to Deal with Discontinuities Nicholas Eberstadt If we wish to consider the international policy challenges that may face the new U.S. president, we might begin by reflecting on the experience of the outgoing Bush administration. The first year of the Bush administration saw the September 11 terrorist attacks by al Qaeda on the U.S. homeland. The final year of the Bush presidency saw a global financial panic in which governments around the world committed trillions of dollars of taxpayer-funded subsidies and public guarantees in the hope of keeping a global economic crisis from spiraling even further out of control. These two events—chronologically serving as bookends for the Bush presidency with respect to international affairs—will surely be remembered as among the very most monumental events shaping the Bush years. Some may even argue these were in fact the two signal and defining events of the Bush era, at least with respect to international affairs. The common element in these otherwise disparate occurrences, however, is that they were both surprises: highly consequential—and in retrospect, obviously plausible—contingencies that did not happen to be central in the U.S. government’s own selected international policy agenda but nonetheless dramatically altered the international environment that Washington operated in and was necessarily required to cope with. The chastening lesson here (admittedly, only one of many chastening lessons from experiences of the past eight years) is that governments do not always have the luxury of choosing the problems they face—and that sometimes the most important problems confronting governments turn nicholas eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, and is Senior Advisor for The National Bureau of Asian Research. He can be reached at . [ 10 ] asia policy out to be unexpected challenges to which they had devoted precious little thought in advance. There is an all-too-understandable intellectual temptation to assume that the immediate future will present us with an environment much the same as the one we are familiar with today—and that such changes as may be expected to occur will come about as more or less linear extrapolations of trends we already recognize. Unfortunately, the international political, economic, and security environment is not adequately understood as an aggregation of these (intellectually) comforting continuities. Discontinuity plays a critical part in determining the risks and opportunities that national actors must face in the world arena. The magnitude of the dangers posed (or alternatively, the rewards offered) by sudden discontinuities can be very great indeed. Therefore, as a matter of statecraft, it is highly prudential to the degree feasible to prepare for the unexpected. What does this mean specifically for Asia policy today? Let me offer a few possible examples. Let us start with China. In academia, the business community, and governmental circles, the received wisdom is that the dazzling economic ascent that has been established by China’s economic performance over the past three decades will continue into the future, perhaps for decades: China’s economic success will be the dominant factor altering the international equation in Asia over the years ahead. This may indeed turn out to be the case—but then again, it may not. There are a great many imaginable ways in which China might instead fail. To mention just a few of these: the country’s looming demographic troubles are very real, the potential for resource or environmental crises is already evident, and a sudden unraveling of the brittle, authoritarian, and increasingly corrupt political system is hardly beyond the realm of possibility. Policymakers in the United States must of course deal with China as it is, but they would also be well advised to devote some attention to what such seemingly low-probability alternatives for China’s future might...