In the last few months, President Trump and his people — especially his trade guru Peter Navarro and his leading definer of foreign policy, John Bolton — have increasingly allowed their approach to China to be characterized as a “cold war.”
The clear reference is to the standoff with the Soviet Union in the decades following the Second World War which, more than once, brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust.
{mosads}In using this phrase, it is obvious that the Trump administration wishes to conjure up a time when America, through the exceptional leadership of presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, was able to stand up to the Soviet Union and to expansionist communism.
But the phrase “cold war” has no place in setting the tenor for China.
China is not the Soviet Union.
The Chinese Communist Party and its leadership under Xi Jinping do not have a of glimmer of similarity to the old Soviet Union or to leaders such as Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev.
The Soviet Union, as George Kennan observed in his famous “long telegram” from Moscow in 1946, was inherently unstable and would inevitably disintegrate if the cold war was allowed to run its course.
China is on no such track.
The Soviet Union was essentially devoid of a functioning economy. It was forced to import even wheat and grain because its collectivist system of economic management was fatally flawed.
The Chinese are an economic force unto themselves: dynamic, entrepreneurial and competitive.
The Soviets attempted to maintain pace with our own military and technological inventiveness. For a period it worked as they launched the first satellite, Sputnik, and put the first man in space. But we quickly left them behind.
The Chinese have the ability and capacity to keep up with us, or potentially even surpass us.
Importantly, the Soviet Union was an inherently broken system. There was no way that a police state oppressively built on a socialist model could keep up with our democracy and the energy of our market economy.
The Chinese government, although clearly an authoritarian state, is communist in name only. It is essentially a new form of managed government where the people are given great latitude in building their own financial success.
There is no likelihood that China will economically self-destruct. Its people, at least those that have input, have made a bargain in which they accept the loss of individual liberties in return for stability and economic opportunity.
Most significantly, even a nation as large as the Soviet Union would be dwarfed in size, as we are, by the 1.3 billion people who live in China.
This mass of humanity under one government, in one country, creates many challenges but also numerous clear advantages over a system like the Soviet Union’s.
China has options.
With a population one billion larger than ours, the Chinese government can direct people toward leadership in all the fields needed for economic growth, especially those that are science-based.
As a police state, the Chinese have an almost limitless supply of people to populate whatever size military they desire.
Trump, Navarro and Bolton will not run China into the ground. This is especially true if they attempt to approach China with Soviet-era cold war dogma.
A better approach to dealing with China would be to narrow the confrontation.
There is no need to go to the mattress in this bilateral relationship. We do not have universal differences with the Chinese.
There are obvious points of major contention.
First, if we are to keep our competitive edge against such a large country, we must protect our primary advantage, which is our technological and educational excellence.
The primary goal of engagement with the Chinese should not be to balance imports and exports but rather to protect our intellectual property. Addressing this does not require a new cold war.
Second, there is a need to protect the dollar as the world currency. This is critical because it gives us unique advantages in trade and essential leverage in impacting world economic activity.
It is clear the Chinese appreciate this and wish to undermine the dollar’s status with the yuan.
The best course to neutralize this Chinese effort is not a cold war.
It is to have our country pursue responsible fiscal policies, including those that reduce our deficit. Doing so will, in turn, reduce our dependence on international borrowing.
Third, we should follow a realistic approach to China’s expansion of its military and its sphere of influence. There is no need for that realism to topple over into jingoism.
Yes, we need to make it clear to the Chinese that the South China Sea is not theirs. But at the same time we should acknowledge that China does have a unique role there, much as the United States does in the Caribbean and South America.
China is not the Soviet Union, following a Stalinist impulse to acquire or control neighboring nations.
China has no significant history of expansion beyond what it deems its historic borders. To confront Beijing as if we are back to some sort of cold war domino theory is to fail to appreciate the reality of today. Doing so could also lead to misguided military excesses.
Our approach to China needs to be as unique as that nation. It cannot be a throwback, applying the Soviet Union model to our times.
We need to approach China differently and recognize that our roles in the world are interwoven.
Our involvement should not, therefore, be seen through the prism of cold war dogma. Rather, it needs to be much more creative and reflective of the vast differences from the Soviet era.
Hopefully, the president and his people will adjust their approach to reflect this fact.
Judd Gregg (R) is a former governor and three-term senator from New Hampshire who served as chairman and ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, and as ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Foreign Operations subcommittee.