Geopolitically this only makes sense.

I do wonder if China still wouldn't have more immediate objectives that could put them in, potentially, in conflict with the US and others regionally, whereas you're basically saying they are going to keep their powder dry and play a Sun Tzu positioning game.

Namely, in Afghanistan, to secure a pipeline route from the 'stans, (and Iran) through that little 50 mile border they share. I have "heard" there is a strong but discreet Chinese presence in Afghanistan. I do not buy that Afghanistan is "worthless" to the US strategically, for the very reason that to deny a rival resources is also a "realistic" imperative.

The same factor must at some level motivate the India/pak conflict over Kashmir. Sure, it only neighbors this little pipeline corridor, BUT how long have legalities ever stood in the way of Reasons of State?

You're no doubt correct that China will want more power in its neighborhood as its economy grows.

It must be emphasized that this change need not lead to military conflict. The British gracefully retreated from our hemisphere as our power grew, and we did not have to fight the French even when they briefly took over Mexico while we were embroiled in the War of the Secession.

The big proviso is that our leaders must be statesmen and accept the natural evolution of power balances, and not be too aggressive or too passive as these changes take place. In the past, our leaders have not always passed this test.

US has literally created this challenge from China on its own when Nixon embraced China‘s Communist dragon to counter Russia‘s Soviet bear in 1972 while Mao‘s cultural revolution was in full swing killing millions of innocent Chinese at the time.

Let us face it - China was a pariah country in the world just like today’s North Korea until anti-Communist Nixon’s 1972 visit. All the West European and East Asian countries stayed away from China following the US lead until 1972 and embraced China after Nixon’s visit. While US would not give MFN status to Soviet Union (remember Jackson-Vanik amendment?) unless Russia shed Communism, it had no problem giving it to China’s Communist dictators with a capitalist mask. Trade with China expanded by leaps and bounds during 12 years of Republican rule beginning in 1981. Bush Senior had no problem sending his national security advisor to Beijing within two months after Tiananmen massacre. After campaigning against butchers of Beijing in 1992 elections, even Bill Clinton became enthusiastic supporter of trade with China once he took lessons in foreign policy from Nixon in early 1993 during a special Whitehouse-arranged meeting. US also promoted China to a super power status by accepting it as a permanent UNSC member.

US businesses were supposed to benefit from huge Chinese consumer market. Instead that theory of American economists and China-apologists has been turned on its head and China has benefited far more from vast American and European markets. China used huge trade surpluses to buy all the military equipment in the world. And China with its foothold in US and Western Europe, spied away any technology it could not buy.

Now China has US by the tail - US businesses are hooked to huge profits that cheap Chinese products generate for them as a walk through any Walmart, Sears or Home Depot filled with cheap Chinese goods attests to and US government is hooked to huge investments that Chinese government makes in US treasuries.

Nixon’s China embrace to counter Soviet Union has come back to haunt US with the rise of China to challenge US just as Reagan‘s embrace of Islamic fundamentalists to counter Soviet Union in 1980s Afghanistan came back to haunt US in the form of 9/11 attacks.

Reagan must be squirming in his grave for his Republican predecessor Nixon being responsible for the rise of dictatorial China as a threat to US after Reagan was supposed to have vanquished Soviet Union.

The West will desperately try to reverse the rise of China but will be largely unsuccessful. Little could Mao or even Deng have imagined that their followers will beat capitalists at their own game. Lenin used to say that ’capitalists will sell us the ropes with which we will hang them’. With the West selling such ropes (in the form of technology transfers), China has proved that Lenin quote quite prophetic.

sounds like China's "old strategy" to me

One area where I'm in complete agreement with Walt. It's good to see that his commitment to his old realist principles can still lead him to the right conclusions every now & then. Nice to see that realism still means something, sometimes. Though I think his colleague Mearsheimer is still sharper in the US-China relationship and its implications (I think Walt would agree with this).

Professor Walt,

Though you describe your perspective as "gloomy," it's arguably not gloomy enough. I think this may relate to your apparent acceptance of highly optimistic economic assumptions.

For example, in a post you offered some months ago, you cited to a Harvard colleague (his name escapes me) who has forecasted that by 2030 China's GDP will still be only about 1/2 that of the U.S. In contrast, all other forecasts I've seen predict that China's GDP will be larger than America's by 2030.

A much bigger Chinese economy means a need for more resources, a larger military to ensure access to those resources and, therefore, more opportunities for confilict with the U.S.

I would be very interested in your review of a new book by Stefan Halper of Cambridge (and formerly of the Nixon, Reagan and Bush I White Houses), The Beijing Consensus. Halper's a long-time China watcher, a traditional realist such as yourself, and someone who seems decidedly more concerned about the trajectory of China's role in the international system.

Thanks.

I would just like to express my appreciation to Dr. Walt for his consistently excellent blogs, such as this one about China. It is wonderful to be able to read (at no cost) the insights and observations of a very well-informed and wise political scientist. His writings have taken me far beyond the drivel typically available in the newspapers of even quite major US cities.

Once again, Stephen Walt puts forward a theory of Chinese geopolitical strategy based on how he might see the world if he were Chinese.

He's not, obviously. Neither has he any experience living -- let alone rising to power -- in a Communist system that has always given the military a privileged role. This leads him to overlook the possibility that China's military expansion, and particularly its naval expansion, is being undertaken primarily because the resources for it are now available rather than because the appropriate use of the new forces has been thought through.

A realist rationale for a larger Chinese navy capable of force projection over large distances, of intimidating Japan, India and Vietnam, and of disrupting American naval access to the Western Pacific may emerge eventually. It is at least equally possible that the rationale for this force will be something other than realist -- in other words, that it will seek uses for a more powerful Chinese navy just because a more powerful Chinese navy exists.

This was what happened in Germany during the quarter century before World War I; a German fleet began its expansion with one justification, and continued it under a different one. German politics produced a naval policy that, so far from being realist, made enemies for Germany that had not existed before and helped drive countries concerned about Germany's growing power closer together.

The point is not that China is Germany, an assertion that would be as foolish as the analogy Walt makes between China and 19th Century America. It is that understanding China's most probable future course requires understanding the internal dynamics of Chinese politics. Substituting easy assumptions that Chinese leaders share one's own views of what a "realist" Chinese foreign policy would be is likely to produce conclusions that are clear, plausible, and wrong.

Just a short note: some one month ago, Jane's Defence Weekly reported an abrupt and unexpected drop in china's annual defence spending.

Basically, we were used to observe annual growths of 20%, roughly. In 2010, we'll have some 7%. No explanation was provided, according to JDW.

This may be just due to the financial crisis or it may reveal bigger underlying problems, aa.

Just FYI, most of the reporting on Iran is wrong by our elite media:

http://www.raceforiran.com/iraq-redux-redux-this-time-the-washington-post-is-rehashing-defectors%E2%80%99-arguments-but-now-about-iran

The Washington Post had another piece on Iran today, this time on the front page, that could easily have been run about Iraq back in 2002. We have recently criticized the Post for relying on Green Movement partisans for ostensibly objective ”analysis” about Iranian politics. Today’s piece relies almost entirely on unnamed U.S. officials and a known terrorist organization to make the Iraq-redux argument that Iranian “defectors” are providing the U.S. government with critical information that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. (The Post’s story refers specifically to three alleged, relatively recent defections.)

The Post seems to take as fact that, “Iran’s political turmoil,” created by the country’s June 12, 2009 presidential election, “has prompted a growing number of the country’s officials to defect or leak information to the West, creating a new flow of intelligence about its secretive nuclear program.” But, the Post’s journalists do not appear to have asked some basic questions about the information they are being fed by U.S. officials.

At least four main points from the Post’s story do not stand up to serious scrutiny.

1. What is the factual basis for the U.S. officials’ claims that there is any real “political turmoil” in Iran today that would prompt mass defections from an important, prestigious, and sensitive industry like Iran’s nuclear program? All the evidence at this point shows that support for the Green Movement has dropped precipitously and that the government is firmly in control.

2. What is the factual basis for linking the three alleged Iranian defections cited by the Post to the supposed “political turmoil” precipitated by Iran’s June 12, 2009 election? Two of the three defectors named in the Post piece (and the only two with any connection to Iran’s nuclear program), appear to have defected before the June 12, 2009 election.

–The only individual cited in the story who clearly defected after the June 12, 2009 election was one diplomat at the Iranian embassy in Norway, who had no access to Iran’s nuclear program.

–The second defector cited by the Post reportedly defected in 2007—two years before the 2009 election.

–The third defector named is Shahram Amiri, now 32, who supposedly disappeared in June 2009 while on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia—at about the same time as the election in Iran that supposedly prompted a mass of defections. Given the planning that would be required for someone to defect (both by the defector and by his handlers), it does not seem plausible that Amiri became so dissatisfied with the political order in Iran after June 12, 2009 that, within days, and with significant political demonstrations going on in Iran, he was able to arrange to leave his supposedly sensitive job to travel abroad and establish arrangements for his defection with Western handlers. If Amiri, in fact, disappeared in June 2009, it more likely that his decision to work with Western handlers and eventually to defect was taken well before the June 12, 2009 election.

3. Amiri’s case deserves more scrutiny than the Post’s journalists gave it. The reporters cite U.S. and European officials claiming that Amiri

“has provided spy agencies with details about sensitive programs, including a long-hidden uranium-enrichment plant near the city of Qom… Amiri is described by some as the most significant Iranian defector since Brig. Gen. Ali Reza Asgari, a former deputy defense minister and Revolutionary Guard Corps commander who switched sides during a 2007 trip to Turkey.”

The reporters also cite the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI) to claim that “Amiri had been associated with sensitive nuclear programs for at least a decade.” The NCRI is identified by the Post only as “an opposition group that publicly revealed the existence of a secret uranium-enrichment program in 2003” without readers being informed that the NCRI is part and parcel of the notorious MEK, which the U.S. government has officially designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

The Post reporters also have their facts wrong about the NCRI’s previous nuclear “revelation”. In August 2002—not 2003, as claimed by the Post, the NCRI held a press conference to “expose” two nuclear facilities in Iran (Natanz and Arak) that they claim to have discovered. However, the sites were already known to U.S. and other intelligence agencies and, under the terms of Iran’s then-existing safeguards agreement with the IAEA, Tehran was under no obligation to disclose the facilities while they were still under construction and not yet within 180 days of the actual introduction of nuclear materials.

Furthermore, how could it be that Amiri, who would have been 31 years old at the time of his defection, would have had meaningful access to anything sensitive about Iran’s nuclear program—much less to have had such access “for at least a decade”? Unless Amiri completed his doctorate as a teenager and was given a senior position in Iran’s nuclear program with high level access at the age of 20 or 21, this claim literally does not add up.

4. According to the Post, “Some [unnamed] observers say the Tehran government has been unnerved by the defections and point to the death of an Iranian physics professor more than three months ago as a sign that it has begun a crackdown designed to frighten would-be spies.” Their evidence for this, yet again, are claims only attributable to the NCRI, which is part of the MEK, a terrorist organization dedicated to the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.

These claims rest on the January 12, 2010 assassination in Tehran of an Iranian professor, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, who, it is implied, was killed by the Iranian government because of his knowledge of Iran’s nuclear program and sympathy to Iranian opposition groups. The Post cites only the NCRI for the ominous claim that, “The day before his death, Iranian intelligence agents had searched his home and confiscated documents and notes.” The Post fails to mention that Dr. Mohammadi was a quantum field theorist with interests in such diverse fields as condensed matter physics, cosmology, and string theory. These subjects are all quite distinct from nuclear physics, nuclear engineering in general, and nuclear weapons in particular. Therefore, the claim that Dr. Mohammadi was a nuclear physicist with access to sensitive aspects of Iran’s nuclear program is highly suspect.

Oddly, the Post then features a subheading, “Learning from mistakes,” under which the journalists report that U.S. officials are “under pressure to avoid their predecessors’ mistakes”. Unfortunately, rather than learning from “their predecessors’ mistakes” in perpetrating one of the biggest intelligence in modern American history in their bungled assessments of Iraqi WMD, U.S. officials are instead seeking to avoid a repeat of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program—which concluded, among other things, that Iran had stopped work on purely weapons-related aspects of its program. If that conclusion remained on the table, how could Washington argue for intensified sanctions against the Islamic Republic—much less keep the military option “on the table”?

It would also be constructive if reporters in America’s most prestigious media outlets sought to learn from “their predecessors’ mistakes” in helping to disseminate the manufactured “intelligence” about Iraqi WMD (much of it based on defectors’ stories) which was used to make the case for invading Iraq.

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

As is pointed out in an article on Foreign Policy that "if China continues on the course laid out here (in the article), you should expect significant security competition between Washington and Beijing in the decades ahead. To expect anything else is . . . well . . . unrealistic.".

And as is well known that foreign policy, hard and/or soft, is an extension of domestic policy, thus, foreign policy forms when dust of domestic policy settles.

Between US and China, several pathways may lie ahead, and among which, include cooperation vs. competition, or, in business terms, friendly merger vs. hostile takeover, less an open war.

The decision would come from the leaders of the two nations, weighing on the best interests of each and both, based on domestic policy or interests. And On a global scale, a mechanism needs to be formulated for the survival of the world as a whole.

Then again, it's best not to let history repeat itself, that is, not to go on the "Cold War" pathway between US and China, like that of the US-USSR cold war, which would be detrimental to all parties of concern.