U.S.-China "Extreme Competition" and the Drumbeat of War

As we approach the end of 2022, amid Russia's ongoing brutality in Ukraine, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, global economic turmoil, and increasing planetary warming, a war between the world's two biggest powers—effectively a war to end all wars—is also looming. For forty years, between 1979 and 2019, the United States and China managed their relations, to the extreme betterment of both, in accordance with an uneasy diplomatic deal: the United States would basically live with China's Communist ideology and the more objectionable practices of the Chinese state inside its own borders for the sake of being able to work with one-fifth of humanity on shared objectives (first countering the Soviet Union, then the pursuit of mutual prosperity), whereas China would cease fomenting revolution, devote itself to its modernization, and accept U.S. de facto ambivalence regarding the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to rule China. Of course, this deal was never explicit, but each side wagered that, over time, it would become easier. The United States hoped that China's ideology and governance practices would change (I would argue that they have, although certainly not as completely as some wished) and the CCP surmised that with China's restoration as a great power, questions of its legitimacy would fade (as they mostly have, with less than .01% of the world's people living in countries that do not de jure recognize the CCP's legitimacy to rule China). But instead of growing more accepting of each other, the two sides have now chosen to focus on the narrow, unrealized hopes of the deal and to magnify their cries of the other side's perfidy in causing the deal to break apart.

There will be many books written in time about the causes of the coming rupture (and indeed, many are being written already), but The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict between the U.S. and Xi Jinping's China by Kevin Rudd, former prime minister of Australia and current president of the Asia Society, wants to be proactive and provide an antidote to the unfolding downward spiral. The book seeks to explain to the unseeing on both sides in real time why the breakdown of the deal is not inevitable and, in general terms, how to avoid what must be avoided. As such, Rudd adroitly exercises his third-party perspective to sketch a more balanced history than one typically finds in American or Chinese popular accounts. Rudd's method is to outline how U.S. and Chinese perceptions and policies are blinkered and, if not urgently readjusted, are very likely to lead to conflict. He leads us through a museum of opposed perspectives, political narcissism, and exaggerated insecurities that future historians will likely point to as markers on the road to the unmaking of the era of prosperity, peace, and promise known as globalization. What is Rudd's bottom line? That the United States and China can and must avoid a catastrophic conflict that would usher in a new world war unlike, and worse than, the last one. But while he hopes to convince us that human agency and efforts can prevent the forces now at work from bringing us to disaster, one cannot help but come away from the read with a sense of foreboding and inevitability about the prospect of conflict.

How Did We Get Here?

Rudd, who seems to subscribe to Henry Kissinger's warning about the United States and China being "in the foothills of a Cold War,"¹ begins his argument with a brief and accessible trip through the history of U.S.-China relations, reminding us of all the long-standing antagonisms just below the surface. Even before the Communist victory in 1949 and continuing to today, Rudd points out, the CCP has viewed the United States as "hostile to its ideological interests and a continuing challenge to its efforts to secure and sustain political power" (p. 30). His reminder of the importance of Vietnam to Richard Nixon's motivations for U.S.-China rapprochement and...