Rogue Nation

Backlash against China jeopardizes its free ride
By BRAHMA CHELLANEY 

On a recent official visit to China, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad criticized his host country’s use of major infrastructure projects – and difficult-to-repay loans – to assert its influence over smaller countries. 

While Mahathir’s warnings in Beijing against “a new version of colonialism” stood out for their boldness, they reflect a broader pushback against China’s mercantilist trade, investment and lending practices.
Since 2013, under the umbrella of its Belt and Road Initiative, China has been funding and implementing large infrastructure projects in countries around the world, in order to help align their interests with its own, gain a political foothold in strategic locations, and export its industrial surpluses. 

By keeping bidding on BRI projects closed and opaque, China often massively inflates their value, leaving countries struggling to repay their debts.
Once countries become ensnared in China’s debt traps, they can end up being forced into even worse deals to compensate their creditor for lack of repayment. 

Most notably, last December, Sri Lanka was compelled to transfer the Chinese-built strategic port of Hambantota to China on a 99-year, colonial-style lease, because it could longer afford its debt payments.
Sri Lanka’s experience was a wake-up call for other countries with outsize debts to China. 

Fearing that they, too, could lose strategic assets, they are now attempting to scrap, scale back, or renegotiate their deals. 

Mahathir, who previously cleared the way for Chinese investment in Malaysia, ended his trip to Beijing by canceling Chinese projects worth almost US$23 billion.
Countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Hungary and Tanzania have also canceled or scaled back BRI projects. 

Myanmar, hoping to secure needed infrastructure without becoming caught up in a Chinese debt trap, has used the threat of cancellation to negotiate a reduction in the cost of its planned Kyaukpyu port from $7.3 billion to $1.3 billion.
Even China’s closest partners are now wary of the BRI. 

In Pakistan, which has long worked with China to contain India and is the largest recipient of BRI financing, the new military-backed government has sought to review or renegotiate projects in response to a worsening debt crisis. 

In Cambodia, another leading recipient of Chinese loans, fears of in effect becoming a Chinese colony are on the rise.
The backlash against China can be seen elsewhere, too. 

The recent annual Pacific Islands Forum meeting was one of the most contentious in its history. Chinese policies in the region, together with the Chinese delegation leader’s behavior at the event itself, drove the president of Nauru – the world’s smallest republic, with just 11,000 inhabitants – to condemn China’s “arrogant” presence in the South Pacific. 

China cannot, he declared, “dictate things to us.”
When it comes to trade, US President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war with China is grabbing headlines, but President Trump is far from alone in criticizing China. 

With policies ranging from export subsidies and non-tariff barriers to intellectual-property piracy and tilting the domestic market in favor of Chinese companies, China represents, in the words of Harvard University’s Graham Allison, the “most protectionist, mercantilist, and predatory major economy in the world.”
As the largest merchandise exporter in the world, China is many countries’ biggest trading partner. Beijing has leveraged this role by employing trade to punish those that refuse to toe its line, including by imposing import bans on specific products, halting strategic exports (such as rare-earth minerals), cutting off tourism from China, and encouraging domestic consumer boycotts or protests against foreign businesses.
The fact is that China has grown strong and rich by flouting international trade rules. 

But now its chickens are coming home to roost, with a growing number of countries imposing anti-dumping or punitive duties on Chinese goods. 

And as countries worry about China bending them to its will by luring them into debt traps, it is no longer smooth sailing for the BRI.
Beyond Trump’s tariffs, the European Union has filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization about China’s practices of forcing technology transfer as a condition of market access. 

China’s export subsidies and other trade-distorting practices are set to encounter greater international resistance. 

Under WTO rules, countries may impose tariffs on subsidized goods from overseas that harm domestic industries.
Now, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping finds himself not only defending the BRI, his signature foreign-policy initiative, but also confronting domestic criticism, however muted, for flaunting China’s global ambitions and thereby inviting a US-led international backlash. 

Xi has discarded one of former Chinese strongman Deng Xiaoping’s most famous dicta: “Hide your strength, bide your time.” 

Instead, Xi has chosen to pursue an unabashedly aggressive strategy that has many asking whether China is emerging as a new kind of imperialist power.
International trade has afforded China enormous benefits, enabling the country to become the world’s second-largest economy, while lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. 

The country cannot afford to lose those benefits to an international backlash against its unfair trade and investment practices.
China’s reliance on large trade surpluses and foreign-exchange reserves to fund the expansion of its global footprint makes it all the more vulnerable to the current pushback. 

In fact, even if China shifts its strategy and adheres to international rules, its trade surplus and foreign-currency reserves will be affected. 

In short, whichever path it chooses, China’s free ride could be coming to an end.

The Chamberlain Trap

There is no Thucydides Trap.

Appeasement of aggressors is far more dangerous than measured confrontation. 

Book review: Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap, by Graham Allison (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2017)
By Arthur Waldron

Arthur Waldron is a notable scholar of Chinese history and military affairs. In this book review, he argues persuasively against a fallacious concept that has become a pillar of establishment thinking on China.

In 1938, Chamberlain led the European chorus to appease Hitler by agreeing to his expansionist plans. The Munich Agreement served Hitler with Czechoslovakia on a silver platter. Chamberlain was naive enough to proclaim that the agreement had brought "peace in our time."
79 years after, Donald Trump tried to appease Xi Jinping

Let us start by observing that perhaps the two greatest classicists of the last century, Professor Donald Kagan of Yale and the late Professor Ernst Badian of Harvard, long ago proved that no such thing exists as the “Thucydides Trap,” certainly not in the actual Greek text of the great History of the Peloponnesian War, perhaps the greatest single work of history ever.
Astonishingly, even the names of these two towering academic giants are absent from the index of this baffling academic farrago. 

It was penned by Graham Allison, a Harvard professor — associated with the Kennedy School of Government — to whom questions along the lines of “How did you write about The Iliad without mentioning Homer?” should be addressed.
Allison’s argument draws on one sentence of Thucydides’s text: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian Power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” 

This lapidary summing up of an entire argument is justly celebrated. 

It introduced to historiography the idea that wars may have “deep causes,” that resident powers are tragically fated to attack rising powers. 

It is brilliant and important, no question, but is it correct?
Clearly not for the Peloponnesian War. 

Generations of scholars have chewed over Thucydides’s text. 

Every battlefield has been measured. 

The quantity of academic literature on the topic is overwhelming, dating as far back as 1629 when Thomas Hobbes produced the first English translation.
In the present day, Kagan wrote four volumes in which he modestly but decisively overturned the idea of the Thucydides Trap. 

Badian did the same.
The problem is that although Thucydides presents the war as started by the resident power, Sparta, out of fear of a rising Athens, he makes it clear first that Athens had an empire, from which it wished to eliminate any Spartan threat by stirring up a war and teaching the hoplite Spartans that they could never win. 

The Spartans, Kagan tells us, wanted no war, preemptive or otherwise. 

Dwelling in the deep south, they lived a simple country life that agreed with them. 

They used iron bars for money and lived on bean soup when not practicing fighting, their main activity. 

Athens’s rival Corinth, which also wanted a war for her own reasons, taunted the young Spartans into unwonted bellicosity such that they would not even listen to their king, Archidamus, who spoke eloquently against war. 

Once started, the war was slow to catch fire. 

Archidamus urged the Athenians to make a small concession — withdraw the Megarian Decree, which embargoed a small, important state — and call it a day. 

But the Athenians rejected his entreaties. 

Then plague struck Athens, killing, among others, the leading citizen Pericles.
Both Kagan and Badian note that the reason that the independent states of Hellas, including Athens and Sparta, had lived in peace became clear. 

Although their peoples were not acquainted, their leaders formed a web of friendship that managed things. 

The plague eliminated Pericles, the key man in this peace-keeping mechanism. 

Uncontrolled popular passions took over, and the war was revived, invigorated. 

It would end up destroying Athens, which had started it. 

Preemption would have been an incomprehensible concept to the Spartans, but war was not, and when the Athenians forced them into one, they ended up victors. 

The whole Thucydides Trap — not clear who coined this false phrase — does not exist, even in its prime example.

So now we can turn to the hash Allison makes of the unfamiliar material he has chosen.
Ignoring all this, Allison takes Thucydides literally: Wars (sometimes) begin when rising powers like Athens threaten established powers like Sparta. 

But do they really? 

The case is difficult to make. 

Japan was the rising power in 1904 while Russia was long established. Did Russia therefore seek to preempt Japan? 

No. 

The Japanese launched a surprise attack on Russia, scuttling the Czar’s fleet. 

In 1941, the Japanese were again the rising power. Did ever-vigilant America strike out to eliminate the Japanese threat? 

Wrong. 

Roosevelt considered it “infamy” when Japan surprised him by attacking Pearl Harbor at a time when the world was already in flames. 

Switch to Europe — in the 1930s, Germany was obviously the rising, menacing power. 

Did France, Russia, England, and the other threatened powers move against it? 

They could not even form an alliance, so the USSR eventually joined Hitler rather than fight him. 

Exceptions there are, and Allison makes a half-baked effort to find them, but these are not the mainstream. 

Is this some kind of immense academic lapse?
No. 

What has really happened is that Allison has caught China fever, not hard around Harvard, although knowing no Chinese language and little Chinese history.
As a result, Allison seems to have been impressed above all by Chinese numbers: population, army size, growth rate, steel production, etc. 

So if that sentence from Thucydides is correct, then China is clearly a rising power that will want her “place in the sun” — which will lead ineluctably to a collision between rising China (Athens) instigated by the presumably setting U.S. (Sparta), which will see military preemption as the only recourse to avert a loss of power and a Chinese-dominated world. 

To escape this trap, Allison demands that we must find a way to give China what she wants and forget the lessons of so many previous wars. 

Many of Allison’s colleagues at Harvard also believe this to be true.
The reality, however, is that Allison’s recipe is actually a recipe for war. 

Appeasement of aggressors is far more dangerous than measured confrontation. 

Did China become more aggressive in the South China Sea in the 2000s because the Obama administration got tougher or because it went AWOL on the issue? 

I’d say the latter is more likely. 

When it comes to China, we might want to be more mindful of the “Chamberlain Trap” after the peace-loving prime minister of England, one of the authors of the disastrous 1938 Munich agreement that sought to avoid war by concessions, which in fact taught Hitler that the British were easily fooled. 

That is the trap we are in urgent need of avoiding.
As an intellectual exercise, let us try making the modest substitution in Allison’s argument of Europe for China. 

Europe — excluding Russia and some other, smaller, countries — has a land area of 3.9 million square miles, which is to say larger than the U.S. at 3.79 million. 

The European Union GDP is roughly $20 trillion (nominal) while that of the United States perhaps $1 trillion less. 

Europe had 1,823,000 forces in uniform in 2014, compared with 1,031,000 for the United States today.
Where am I going? 

If we add educational and technical levels as well as standard of living, one might be forgiven for thinking that, by the numbers, Europe, not China, was the leading potential challenger to the United States. 

That of course is what the late Jean-Jacques Servan-Schrieber argued in his immensely popular and influential bit of futurology Le Défi Américan [“The American Challenge”] in 1967. 

It may well be that the great, almost unspoken question of this century is the future of Europe. 

So far, however, Europe and America have not proven “destined to war.”
Nor are America and China. 

My late colleague and mentor Ambassador James Lilley liked to recall a lecture given by an American professor about Taiwan. 

The speaker became increasingly heated, declaring that unless Washington immediately yielded to Beijing’s demands about Taiwan, a nuclear war was unavoidable. 

A PLA general in attendance was at first puzzled, and then agitated. 

He turned to the ambassador to whisper a question: “Who is this guy? Does he think we are crazy?” In other words, come whatever, we Chinese are intelligent enough to realize that war — not to mention nuclear war — with the United States would be an insane action that would destroy all China has achieved in the years since Mao’s death in 1976. 

As I see it, it’s far more likely, but certainly not as sexy, to believe that there will be no “destined” war between China and the U.S. because the Chinese might actually have a clearer reading of history than the scholars at Harvard.
Allison’s book is chock-a-block with facts.
And the impressive statistics of China’s growth in military power that Allison cites are real. 

So are its advances in technology.
Furthermore, since 1995, two years before Deng Xiaoping’s death, Beijing simply used military force to seize a maritime formation called “Mischief Reef” from the Philippines — a clear reversal of Deng’s policy of always maintaining good relations with the United States. 

By 2012, China had occupied the Philippines’ Scarborough Shoal as well, and continues to do so, while fortifying and creating islands in the South China Sea, where long runways were built for military aircraft, rockets deployed, submarines anchored, and in the East China Sea promulgating an Air Defense Identification Zone that just happened to include one Korean island China would like, and another group of such Japanese islands.
In other words, since Ambassador Lilley took his friend to hear the American professor, Chinese policy seems to have changed, but how much, and more importantly, why?
Since the attack on Scarborough Shoal, now six years ago, my own opinion is that China expected to have occupied a lot more.
Her slightly delusional view of her claims, first made explicit in ASEAN’s winter meeting of 2010 in Hanoi, was that “small” countries would all bow respectfully to China’s new preeminence. 
This has failed to occur. 
All of China’s neighbors are now building up strong military capabilities. 
Japanese and South Korean nuclear weapons are even a possibility. 
Overrelying on their traditional concept of awesomeness (威 wēi), the Chinese expected a cakewalk. They have got instead an arms race with neighbors including Japan and other American allies and India, too. 
With so much firepower now in place, the danger of accident, pilot error, faulty command and control, etc. must be considered.
But I’d wager that the Chinese would smother an unintended conflict. 
They are, after all, not idiots.
Allison also provides us with a mélange of statistics showing the great industrial might of China.
She produces tons of steel, more than markets can absorb, likewise coal, while serving as the workshop of the world where the computer on which I am writing was manufactured.
The mountains of Chinese exports that have shuttered manufacturing in America seem, like the American powerhouse of 50 years ago, set to overwhelm the world rather as Servan-Schreiber expected American-owned business to do in Europe — but did not.
China’s tremendous economic vulnerabilities have no mention in Allison’s book. 
But they are critical to any reading of China’s future.
China imports a huge amount of its energy and is madly planning a vast expansion in nuclear power, including dozens of reactors at sea.
She has water endowments similar to Sudan, which means nowhere near enough.
The capital intensity of production is very high: In China, one standard energy unit used fully produces 33 cents of product.
In India, the figure is 77 cents.
Gradually climb and you get to $3 in Europe and then — in Japan — $5.55.
China is poor not only because she wastes energy but water, too, while destroying her ecology in a way perhaps lacking any precedent. 
Figures such as these are very difficult to find: Mine come from researchers in the energy sector. Solving all of this, while making the skies blue, is a task of both extraordinary technical complexity and expense that will put China’s competing special interests at one another’s throats.
Not solving, however, will doom China’s future.
Allison may know this on some level, but you have to spend a lot of time in China and talk to a lot of specialists (often in Chinese) before the enormity becomes crushingly real.
What’s more, Chinese are leaving China in unprecedented numbers. 
The late Richard Solomon, who worked on U.S.-China relations for decades, remarked to me a few weeks before his death that “one day last year all the Chinese who could decided to move away.” Why?
The pollution might kill your infants; the hospitals are terrible, the food is adulterated, the system corrupt and unpredictable. 
Here in the Philadelphia suburbs and elsewhere, thousands of Chinese buyers are flocking to buy homes in cash.
Even Xi Jinping sent his daughter to Harvard. 
Does that imply a high-profile political career for her in China?
Probably not.
It rather implies a quiet retirement with Xi’s grandchildren over here. 
Our American private secondary schools are inundated by Chinese applicants.
For the first time this year, my Chinese graduate students are marrying one another and buying houses here.
This is a leading indicator.
If it could be done, the coming tsunami would bring 10 million highly qualified Chinese families to the U.S. in 10 years — along with fleeing crooks, spies, and other flotsam and jetsam. 
Even Xi’s first wife fled China; she lives in England.
Allison, however, misses this; “immigration” is not in his index. 
Instead, he speculates about war, based on some superficial reading and sampling of the literature, coming to the question “What does Xi want?” — which I take as meaning that he thinks Xi’s opinion matters — which makes nonsense of the vast determining waves of economic development, not to mention his glance at Thucydides — with the opinion following that somehow we should try to find out what that is and cut a deal. 
This is geopolitics from a Harvard professor?
This is the great wave of history?
How to conclude a look at so ill conceived and sloppily executed a book? 
Do not blame Allison. 
The problem is the pervasive lack of knowledge of China — a country which is, after all, run by the Communist Party, the police, and the army, and thus difficult to get to know.
This black hole of information has perversely created an overabundance of fantasies, some very pessimistic, some as absurdly bright as a foreigner on the payroll can make them.
Forget the fantasies, therefore, and look at the facts.
In the decades ahead, China will have to solve immense problems simply to survive. 
Neither her politics nor her economy follow any rules that are known.
The miracle, like the German Wirtschaftswunder and the vertical ascent of Japan, is already coming to an end.
A military solution offers only worse problems. 

The Necessary War

America’s Collision Course With China
By JUDITH SHAPIRO

EVERYTHING UNDER THE HEAVENS
How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power
By Howard W. French
Illustrated. 330 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.

DESTINED FOR WAR
Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?
By Graham Allison
364 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books. $28.


The Chinese superpower has arrived. 

Could America’s failure to grasp this reality pull the United States and China into war? 

Here are two books that warn of that serious possibility.
Howard W. French’s “Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power” does so through a deep historical and cultural study of the meaning of China’s rise from the point of view of the Chinese themselves. 

Graham Allison’s “Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides’s Trap” makes his arguments through historical case studies that illuminate the pressure toward military confrontation when a rising power challenges a dominant one. 

Both books urge us to be ready for a radically different world order, one in which China presides over Asia, even as Chinese politicians tell a public story about “peaceful rise.” 

French says in his exhaustively researched and fascinating account of geopolitics, China style, that the Chinese era is upon us. 

But, he asks, “How will the coming China-driven world look?” 

To what extent will China support the international order that emerged when it was suffering humiliation at the hands of foreign powers? 

What are the drivers and motivations for the new ways China projects its power? 

How best should its neighbors and its rival North American superpower respond?

French, a former reporter for The Washington Post and The New York Times, argues that China’s historical and cultural legacy governs its conduct of international relations, a legacy that sits uncomfortably with the Western notions of equality and noninterference among states. 

China’s relations with its neighbors in Japan and Southeast Asia were for millenniums governed by the concept of tianxia, which held that everything “under the heavens” belonged to the empire. 

A "superior" civilization demanded deference and tribute from vassal neighbors and did not hesitate to use military force. 

China’s testy relationship with Vietnam became fraught whenever a Vietnamese leader dared to demand equal footing with a Chinese emperor; the Japanese claim to divine origins was unacceptable.

When China lost its regional dominance at the hands of colonial powers and invading armies, it saw the situation as temporary. 

The struggle in the East China Sea over the Senkaku Islands claimed by Japan since 1895, for example, has long been a sore point in Sino-Japanese relations. 

But the reform-era strongman Deng Xiaoping advised China to “hide our capacities and bide our time” on this and many other issues. 

Hostility between China and Japan simmers in disputes over hierarchy, wartime apology and historical narrative, with the two “in a situation resembling galaxies locked in each other’s gravitational fields, destined to collide repeatedly only to sail past each other after wreaking their damage.” 

French shows convincingly that China’s goal is now to displace the American "barbarians" and correct historic humiliations imposed by those who dethroned China from its rightful position at the center of the world.
China’s recent spectacular land grab in the South China Sea is a fait accompli, given China’s superior power in the area and its assertion that the region is a core national interest. 

Arbitrators for the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea issued a 500-plus-page decision against China and in favor of the Philippines in a dispute over the definitions of islands versus rock formations; they concluded that Chinese arguments had no legal basis. 

But China has unilaterally determined to claim much of the sea as its own. 

The country rejected the arbitration tribunal, knowing that its growing surface naval power and nuclear submarine capability support a highly uneven contest. 

Oil rigs have been established in contested waters, while artificial “islands” constructed from coral reefs are serving as military bases just miles from the Southeast Asian coastline. 

Similarly, China’s projection of economic might through the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and One Belt, One Road initiative, which intends to bind a huge swath of Asia to China economically via new land infrastructure and consolidated control of the seas, generates “a kind of fatalism or resignation about the futility of trying to defy it.”

“Everything Under the Heavens” is splendidly elucidated by a series of maps that show the world from China’s perspective; the South China Sea is compared to a cow’s tongue or “enormous blue banner” that can be drawn as a logical continuation of China’s southeastern coastline. 

French’s book was written before Trump’s repudiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, but clearly the resulting power vacuum is nothing short of a gift to an empire bent on restoring its tributary realm.

Graham Allison’s “Destined for War,” also helpfully illustrated with maps and charts, reinforces French’s arguments with wide-ranging, erudite case studies that span human history. 

The book asks why, when a new superpower threatens to displace a ruling power, the clash of hubris and paranoia often results in war. 

Allison’s examples include the Sparta-Athens conflict of the famous “Thucydides trap,” when both sides labored strenuously to avoid war but were seemingly driven to it by forces beyond their control, as well as Germany’s challenge to the dominance of its neighbors at the start of the 20th century, which led to two world wars. 

Allison’s 16 cases also include four examples of power shifts in which war was avoided, as when Britain adjusted to the rise of the United States in the Great Rapprochement of the turn of the last century, choosing forbearance and eventually reaping great rewards through the countries’ “special relationship.”

Allison, the director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, resurrects the Samuel Huntington thesis of a coming clash of civilizations to explain that China thinks in longer time frames and with a greater sense of hierarchy than the United States. 

In order to avoid the Thucydides trap, he writes, American policy makers must reject the tendency to think that China is like us and that it will respond as we would to identical provocations. 

Numerous situations could spark military conflict between the United States and China despite efforts on both sides to maintain peace, from accidental collisions at sea to misunderstandings caused by cyberattacks to actions taken by third parties like North Korea or Taiwan. 

“Will it be more difficult for the Chinese to rationalize a cosmology in which there are two ‘suns,’ or for the U.S. to accept that it must live with another, and possibly superior superpower?” 

Allison asks in a discussion of the need for both sides to bring their brightest minds to the challenge ahead.
Both of these fine books show that China intends to evict the United States from Asia in order to restore its dominance over what it considers its historic spheres of influence. 

Unfortunately, Washington is poorly prepared to deal with a China that strategizes in terms of the symbolic undercurrents and sensitivities illuminated so dramatically by both French and Allison. Whether the resurgence of China will mean tragedy in the form of armed conflict will depend on how China, China’s neighbors and the United States understand and manage the deeper motivations and structural forces in play.

The Necessary War

A scholar-analyst makes a historical case for a U.S.-China war. 
By Albert R. Hunt

The wisdom of war

Before settling in for pleasurable summer books, read Graham Allison's "Destined for War: Can American and China escape Thucydides's Trap?"
It starts with the Athenian historian's chronicle of the conflict between Sparta and Athens in the fifth century B.C. as a way to tackle the larger question of whether war can be averted when an aggressive rising nation threatens a dominant power. 

Allison, a renowned Harvard University scholar and national security expert, studied 16 such cases over the past 500 years; in 12 there was war.
For three-quarters of a century, the U.S. has been the dominant world power. 

China is now challenging that hegemony economically, politically and militarily. 

Both countries, with vastly different political systems, histories and values, believe in their own exceptionalism.
The two nations, Allison argues, are "currently on a collision course for war."

He's been sweeping in and out of government, serving five Republican and Democratic administrations from Washington and his perch at Harvard. 

He's a first-class academic with the instincts of a first-rate politician. 

He brings to the "Thucydides Trap" an impressive sweep of history and geopolitical and military knowledge. 

Unlike some academics, he writes interestingly.
Allison analyzes why so many rising powers ended up in wars with established ones, and why some didn't. 

The best contemporary examples are the German rise that led to World War I contrasted with the confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which was kept from escalating into hot war for more than four decades.
In the early part of the 20th century, the U.K. was threatened by an emerging Germany, which had been unified decades before by Bismarck, and which was blowing past Britain economically and moving up on its naval dominance. 

The political leaders in the U.K., Allison writes, were beset by anxieties and Germany emboldened by ambition. 

Mutual mistrust, an arms race and World War I followed.
After World War II, facing the menacing challenge from the Soviet Union, the U.S. fashioned the policy of containment, starting with the extraordinary Marshall Plan to rebuild war-ravaged allies and adversaries. 

With smart diplomats and presidents, from John F. Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis through Ronald Reagan's engagement with Mikhail Gorbachev, war was averted before the Soviet Union collapsed.
The rise of China offers a classic Thucydides trap. 

In 1980, China's economy was only a tenth the size of the U.S. economy. 

By 2040, Allison reckons, it could be three times larger. 

China considers itself the most important power in Asia, irrespective of U.S. commitments and alliances with allies in the region. 

With Donald Trump presiding over a White House hostile to international institutions, Xi Jinping has at least a claim on the title of premier global leader.
Allison depicts plausible scenarios of how conflicts between these two superpowers could break out: disputes over Taiwan or the South China Sea, or an accidental provocation by a third party -- it was the assassination of an Austrian archduke by a Serbian terrorist that triggered World War I -- or, less likely, a quarrel related to economic competition.
The most dangerous threat lurks in the Korean peninsula, where North Korea has nuclear warheads and is trying to develop the missile technology to hit San Francisco. 

What happens if the Pyongyang regime collapses and its strongman, Kim Jong-un is eliminated?
In March, Xi explained the nuances of the Korean situation to Trump, whose White House had warned that "if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will."
If that's a military threat, consider: An assault on North Korea would be answered by missile attacks against nearby Seoul that could kill as many as a million people. 

Imagine that followed by an invasion of the north by the U.S. and South Korea to prevent more carnage. 

Would China sit still for a unified Korean peninsula allied with the U.S.? 

The answer was no in 1950, to General Douglas MacArthur's shock, when it was much less powerful, confident and ambitious.
Allison isn't a pessimist. 

He argues that with skillful statecraft and political sensitivity these two superpowers can avoid war.
Xi is a ruthless autocrat, but a smart one with China's customary patience.
In the U.S., by contrast, the current commander-in-chief shows little interest in history and is irrational, insecure and impulsive.

World War III Casualties
	2016 Population	Killed		Survivors
CHINA	1 373 541 278	1 057 119 689	77%	316 421 589
UNITED STATES	323 995 528	19 089 783	6%	304 905 745
EUROPEAN UNION	513 949 445	371 356 958	72%	142 592 487
RUSSIA	142 355 415	30 924 816	22%	111 430 599
INDIA	1 266 883 598	1 158 499 174	91%	108 384 424
PAKISTAN	201 995 540	175 747 473	87%	26 248 067
JAPAN	126 702 133	114 241 889	90%	12 460 244
VIETNAM	95 261 021	84 340 688	89%	10 920 333
PHILIPPINES	102 624 209	92 732 902	90%	9 891 307
KOREA, NORTH	25 115 311	21 141 050	84%	3 974 261
KOREA, SOUTH	50 924 172	47 636 302	94%	3 287 870
TAIWAN	23 464 787	22 278 490	95%	1 186 297
	4 246 812 437	3 195 109 214	75%	1 051 703 223

Chinese Fifth Column At Harvard, And The Proposed Pro-China Unified Korea

• Professor Allison states that the crisis could be solved by first, China removing the Kim regime, and unifying North and South Korea under a pro-Beijing Seoul, second, removing U.S. troops, and third, ending the U.S.-South Korea alliance.
• It is revanchist appeasement on a grand scale. It is a realism ready to throw international law, democracy and human rights away for a fleeting moment of safety.

By Anders Corr

Graham Allison at Harvard University mooted a solution to the North Korea conflict in the New York Times on May 30. 

Allison starts by scaring us with a high likelihood of war, about 75%, in similar conflicts between a major power and a smaller rising power in history. 

That I believe. 

He implies a 33% chance that the North Korea crisis, like the Cuban missile crisis, could spiral into a nuclear war. 

That I doubt.

A photo taken on May 21, 2017 shows an art installation featuring propaganda loudspeakers arranged to read: 'Peace', at the Peace dam, north of Hwacheon near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating North and South Korea. Contruction of the 'Peace Dam' was intermittent from 1987 to 2005, reportedly as a response to the threat of accidental or intentional flooding from the North Korea's Imnam Dam which lies further up river, across the DMZ. North Korea on May 22 confirmed the 'successful' launch of a medium-range ballistic missile, Pyongyang's state media reported, adding the weapon was now ready to be deployed for military action.

After shocking us with the threat of catastrophic war, Allison uses that risk to justify his proposal to avert the crisis. 

Allison states, in a manner that sounds like he has first-hand knowledge, that “some people in Mr. Xi’s circle” say the crisis could be solved by first, China removing the Kim regime, and unifying North and South Korea under a pro-Beijing Seoul, second, removing U.S. troops, and third, ending the U.S.-South Korea alliance. 

Like Xi reportedly provided to Trump, these “people in Mr. Xi’s circle” even give a historical justification to buttress the Chinese proposal for China’s administration and shaping of Korean unification. 

In the core of his argument, Allison says, “Had North Korea not attacked the South in 1950, the United States would never have intervened. So if China were to assume responsibility for removing the Kim regime, denuclearizing the country, and reunifying the peninsula under a government in Seoul friendly to Beijing, would the United States remove all its bases from the South and end its military alliance?”
In other words, Allison appears to advise, or at least uncritically repeat Chinese advice, that China and North Korea are threatening us with nuclear war, so give in and give up South Korea. 

That advice is buttressed by an ostensible lack of U.S. historical presence on the peninsula. 

Allison’s proposal dovetails nicely with Trump’s understanding after Xi’s history lesson, in which “Korea actually used to be a part of China.”
These questionable interpretations of history lead to Allison’s surprising proposal for what amounts to capitulation. 

It is revanchist appeasement on a grand scale. 

It is a realism ready to throw international law, democracy and human rights away for a fleeting moment of safety.

That is not the America of Paul Revere and George Washington, who risked it all for liberty. 

And, what of other proposals, such as an election in North Korea, or economic sanctions against China until China forces the North to stop its nuclear weapons development? 

If China can remove the Kim regime and unify the peninsula, surely it can remove North Korea’s nuclear weapons. 

Surely tough economic sanctions against China would not result in nuclear war.

These options are not mentioned by Allison, who focuses his opinion piece on fear and allied concessions.
China has taken slivers of territory in the Philippines, Vietnam and India, and since 1972 the U.S. has shown acquiescence, fear and a lack of resolve to defend that territory, and along with it democracy and international law. 

Given demonstrated U.S. fear, why shouldn’t China go for an entire nation like South Korea? 

In the process, did “some people in Xi’s circle” nudge a Harvard professor to write an opinion piece in the New York Times to soften up public opinion beforehand?
What I will call Allison’s proposal, because he is the first I know to make it publicly, lacks any mention of democracy and human rights in South Korea. 

And what of democracy and human rights in the North? 

Would Allison’s proposal mean that the North Korean police could, with support or as part of his “government in Seoul friendly to Beijing”, root out democratic opposition in the South? 

Does Allison really think that China would disassemble North Korea’s police state apparatus, which appears much more like Beijing’s government than does South Korea’s democracy? 

If China is really to make Seoul pro-Beijing, which appears to be a nondemocratic Chinese condition in Allison’s proposal, then one should expect Kim Jong-un’s regime to be transported to Seoul, with or without Kim Jong-un, rather than democracy transported to Pyongyang.
Don’t expect Beijing to deal fairly with pro-democracy South Koreans, or even to honor any protections for South Koreans in this telling Chinese future for the Korean Peninsula. 

We learned our lesson in Hong Kong, where China violated its promise to respect democracy after it took over from the U.K. 

China cannot be trusted. 

Hong Kong citizens who thought they would get democracy are now literally ground into the pavement as Hong Kong police, who answer to mainland authorities, suppress their brothers and sisters in pro-democracy demonstrations with arrests, pepper spray, tear gas, and beatings.

People watch a screen showing news coverage of the Pukguksong-2 missile rocket launch at a public square in central Pyongyang on May 22, 2017. North Korea declared its medium-range Pukguksong-2 missile ready for deployment after a weekend test, the latest step in its quest to defy UN sanctions and develop a weapon capable of striking US targets. 

The proposal from Allison is contrary to principles such as democracy, human rights, and freedom of speech that I, as a graduate of Harvard University, thought my school represents. 

I was frankly shocked when I read the opinion. 

But perhaps I should have expected this. 

Harvard gets significant revenues from Chinese students, including Xi Jinping’s daughter, who graduated in 2014. 

Harvard has a lucrative Harvard-branded school in China itself, and a Harvard China Fund that is seeking $50 million to support Harvard’s presence in China. 

Only four of the Fund’s Web pages actually mention democracy or human rights. 

The Belfer Center at Harvard, which Allison directs, gets millions of dollars annually in corporate and other funding, including from what appear to be Chinese, Saudi, and Singaporean sources. 

The 2013 announcement by the Belfer Center of a new focus on China completely disregards human rights and international law, applauds an authoritarian leader, mentions democracy only once and tangentially, and appears flippant or even accepting of the prospect of China replacing the U.S. as the number one power in the world.
It is unclear whether Harvard, in its engagement with China, is following the United Nations principles on corporate social responsibility. 

They are outlined in the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. 

Robert Precht writes that U.S. universities operating in China have a duty to follow them, according to which, “an enterprise’s corporate responsibility entails making a clear and public policy commitment, implementing due diligence processes, and providing or cooperating in the creation of remedies for human rights violations. 

Due diligence requires assessing risks of human [rights] violations by both the enterprise itself and by its business partners.”
While my pointing to authoritarian funding sources will be called a “cheap shot”, or the equivalent of an ad hominem attack by academics who benefit from corporate and authoritarian funding, I think that as Chinese influence in the U.S. increases, it is increasingly important for elite institutions of foreign policy to refuse authoritarian funding and return to pure foreign policy research driven by professors not donors. 

It is my belief that corporate and foreign funding of elite institutions lull their foreign policy analysts into a somnolent approach to defense, democracy and human rights, especially when it comes to China. 

The optics of corporate and foreign financial entanglements hurt Harvard’s image of rigorous academic impartiality.
Given that the Harvard Kennedy School of Government is one of the top U.S. foreign policy establishments, we should all be very worried that Allison’s proposal issued forth from those hallowed halls. 

If this pro-China approach is on the surface at Harvard and elsewhere, what lurks beneath? 

I believe the same applies to other foreign or corporate-funded elite foreign policy establishments in the U.S., such as the Council on Foreign Relations, Asia Society, National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

While all of these establishments have great people, and elements within them that are pro-democratic and pro-human rights, there is a palpable defeatism and lack of emphasis on these liberal topics, and an acceptance of authoritarian realist arguments, that I find disturbing. 

Realism is not tough when it promotes appeasement, it is weak. 

By showing fear, it invites attack. 

Appeasement actually increases the risk of war.
Elite foreign policy think tanks like the Belfer Center are environments largely devoid of the oxygen of the billions whose human rights are violated, and who yearn for more democracy. 

In these institutions, pro-authoritarian proposals such as Allison’s can be made, unopposed. 

Human rights and democracy can be largely ignored while enjoying Champagne and canapés with corporate and authoritarian Chinese donors. 

By falling over themselves in search of ever greater funding, these establishments are out of touch with the people. 

But they are very much in power. That is a threat to democracy.

Their elite myopia causes a bias toward corporate preferences in international relations. 

And these corporate preferences are for a symbiosis of peace, trade and profit. 

Prima facie, that sounds splendid. 

Academics and policymakers alike applaud, even luxuriate in, this positive effect of international trade on keeping the peace. 

But their elision of billions of humans who suffer under the “peace” of increasingly authoritarian governments is inexcusable. 

In Allison’s proposal, for example, the Chinese-manufactured risk of nuclear war with North Korea leads to the implied conclusion that peace should be purchased at any cost, including the cost of suspending democracy and human rights for South Korean citizens, because they would lose those rights under a stipulation of rule by a pro-Beijing Seoul. 

This begs the question. 

If South Korea is not worth fighting for, what is? 

Japan? 

Hawaii? 

America west of the Mississippi? 

In his panicked embrace of peace, that has been left unanswered.
Allison has written a piece that I have made a case in point for a much larger issue of increasing Chinese dominance through violence, threats of violence, and economic influence. 

The increasingly global dominance of China is no minor threat. 

Allison’s proposal is a testament to that. 

China uses violence and economics to seek territorial expansion and increased global influence, and does so through direct attacks on our values of liberal democracy, even in the heart of our most prestigious universities.
Allison makes China’s argument, with absolutely no mention of costs to democracy or human rights. 

He focuses on the threat of nuclear war as if we should run scared at the very mention of this horrific outcome. 

No. 

We and our values must stand resolved before such threats. 

The U.S. and our allies are far more powerful than North Korea and its allies, including China. 

It would be foolish to allow North Korea and China to threaten us with nuclear weapons, and then give concessions as a response. 

That will only encourage more threats down the road, and more concessions. 

That is not peace, it is the failed strategy of appeasement.

The Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group, including the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70), operate with the Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group including, USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76), and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ships in the western Pacific region June 1, 2017. 

It is time for Harvard to stop allowing professors to take corporate or foreign funding for foreign policy research. 

With an endowment of $36 billion, Harvard has enough money to fund these projects. 

If Harvard truly cares about education, Harvard should encourage donors to give to other far less fortunate universities where dollars will stretch further and cover education, not catering and the compensation of its fund managers. 

Seven of them made a total of $58 million in 2015. 

Perhaps the decrease in political bias, or appearance of such, that results from a principled refusal of foreign and corporate money will help clarify education at Harvard. 

Clarity is all-important during these dangerous times.
The motto of Harvard is Veritas, Latin for “Truth.” 

The Chinese government methodically suppresses truth through disinformation and draconian restrictions on freedom of speech. 

Harvard, per its motto, should take a far more principled stand against the authoritarianism that China, and especially Xi Jinping, is increasingly attempting to foist upon not only Asia, but the world. 

There can be no place for elision or appeasement. 

If you are not against China’s aggression and violation of human rights, you are not Harvard.