For reasons outside my control, this book was delayed in transit. By an extraordinary coincidence, it finally arrived in my post box on Donald Trump’s inauguration day. I was concerned that this upsetting event may have rendered the book obsolete before I even opened it. Superficially, this does seem the case. There are 17 references to Hillary Clinton in the book’s index, but next to the six index entries under Harry Truman, there are none whatsoever to Donald Trump – the index jumps straight from Truman to US Air Force. The geopolitical scene has clearly changed since this book was conceived and written. All the evidence, at the time when this review is being written, is that it has become even more unstable and dangerous than the essays here would suggest. Even before his inauguration, Trump indicated that he has not read or taken in the contents of Chapter 15 of this book – Taiwan in USA-China Relations: Taiwan remains a major potential flashpoint. The Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership referred to in the chapter on economic relations has been torn up and there is, at the time of writing, increased naval confrontation around various oceanographic hot spots, all this within a week or so. Nevertheless, the book is still worth considering. There is plenty of meat in the 25 carefully planned essays here.
China and the USA are currently the largest political, military and economic countries in the world. In spite of President Nixon’s best efforts, their relationship has long been extremely fraught. Aside from the inevitability of rivalry between two superpowers, the major problem is that both countries have a long, deep-seated sense of self-righteous exceptionalism: neither of them accepts that the unwritten rules which govern relationships between states apply to them. China was never formally colonised, apart from coastal enclaves. Paradoxically, this means that there was never a marked moment when independence was declared. Resentment of the memory of a century of degradation is still a factor to be considered, perhaps even more than in former colonies that have a clear-cut independence day to celebrate.
The USA has, of course, an independence day. It also has the memory of a century of world dominance (as Sellars and Yeatman put it in 1066 And All That, in 1917 “America became the top nation so history came to a”). This book quotes Hillary Clinton as saying “we are now trying to find a new answer to the ancient question of what happens when an established power and a rising power meet”. The book tries to discuss this problem in five major sections: historical and contemporary contexts; strategic rivalry; flashpoints (Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the maritime territories claimed by various countries); security and defence, including some spine-chilling discussions of what would happen in a “hot” war; and some final conclusions.
There seem to me to be two omissions from this discussion. First, most of the articles are based on the idea of China as a monolithic state. My understanding of Chinese history is that there have been long periods when any nominal emperor has had little more control over outlying territories than the Holy Roman Emperor did in late medieval European history. China is currently held together by a combination of economic success and brute force – there are dissident and fissiparous movements compared to which the Scottish National Party is very small beer indeed. There are currently signs of an economic downturn in China. What would happen in the event of a serious crash is anyone’s guess.
The other omission is that of any discussion of climate change and the environment. The topic is mentioned on various occasions, but only as a subject of political concern, not as something that is actually happening. USA has a long history of drastically altering its environment – 200 years of deforestation culminating in dustbowl farming, and the process now looks like accelerating again. China similarly has gone through a dramatic period of environmental degradation, rendering some of its cities barely habitable through smog and seriously increasing desertification. The combination of USA drilling for oil in the Arctic and running the proceeds by pipeline across Alaska, on the one hand, and China damming and diverting India or Bangladesh-bound rivers in Tibet, on the other, bode ill for the rest of us. There is now substantial scientific evidence to suggest that there are likely to be major environmental events well within the timeframe of this book.
This book is therefore already dated and incomplete. Nevertheless, it provides a framework for the study of a clash of interests of vital geopolitical importance. Hillary Clinton referred to the meeting of a rising power and an established power. I would regard it more as the intersection between a rising dream and a declining dream. President Xi Jinping used the slogan “the China Dream” of a prosperous economic future in 2012; this was adopted as a goal by the Chinese Communist Party plenum in 2014. The “Great American Dream” has always, right from the start, been that however hard life may be for you, things will be better for your children. This is the first period in US history where this is quite demonstrably not true. Dreams make for effective slogans, but they can raise expectations and therefore cause deep frustrations that are likely to express themselves politically.
When I studied international relations as an undergraduate, half a century ago, China was barely mentioned, except as a brooding presence behind an imperialist war that USA was waging in Vietnam. I wonder what today’s international relations students will make of this, looking back in 50 years if any of them are left alive. In the meantime, academic libraries catering for courses in politics, international relations, economics, geography, etc. and government libraries can be advised to consider this book for acquisition.
