Brad DeLong on Managing China’s Peaceful Rise
In his speech “The Grand Strategy of Rising Superpower Management”at the Munk School Trans-Pacific Partnership Conference Geopolitics Panel, Brad DeLong gives extremely important advice about managing China’s peaceful rise. In my own writing, I have focused on what the United States needs to do to keep itself strong in order to counterbalance China (1, 2) and the hope that India will rise as well to provide another counterbalance to China. Brad speaks directly to what must be done in the US relationship with China. He begins by reminding his listeners about the days when the US was a brash up-and-coming superpower, then makes the analogy to China. I can’t think of wiser words about managing the US relationship with China. Here is a taste:
The mid-nineteenth century United States of America was a rising superpower, aggressively confident of its system. …
… successive British governments, investors, noblemen and noblewomen, merchants, and manufacturers strove mightily to bind the United States to Britain. Material common economic interests and mutual economic interdependence grew. Conflicting political ideal interests fell away. …
The binding of the rising superpower back in the nineteenth century had many policy and non-policy parts, not all of them conscious or deliberate. but whether it was Cecil Rhodes’s offering free acculturation at Oxford to young members of the American elite, British investors entrusting the House of Morgan with their money, the Dukes of Marlborough offering their sons to daughters of plutocrats Consuelo Vanderbilt and Jenny Jerome, it was effective—so effective that just when Nazi Germany attacked the Franco-British army in 1940 the Prime Minister of Britain was a man who, as a natural-born citizen of the United States, was also perfectly well-qualified to be the American president. …
Come 2047 and again in 2071 and in the years after 2075, the NATO powers are going to need China and China’s elite to believe and to have material and ideal interests broadly aligned with those of NATO. Thus there is nothing more dangerous for America’s future national security and nothing more destructive to America’s future prosperity than for Chinese schoolchildren to be taught in 2047 and 2071 and 2075 that America tried to keep the Chinese as poor as possible for as long as possible. There is little more dangerous to the NATO powers than a Chinese elite whose values and interests are not broadly consonant with those of America. And there is nothing more conducive to aligning the interests of China and its elite with those of the NATO powers than a China which is (a) growing richer, (b) increasingly entranced by the economic and cultural successes of North Atlantic civilization, © treated with respect, and (d) incentivized to strive for victory not in negative-sum military power but in positive-sum economic and technological games of international relations.