The Kissinger move was more to diminish the power of the Soviet Union, by straying China away from them.
You're right, war is less likely among nations with strongly linked economies. The important thing to note is that, at the same time, the survival self-interest of a county to dominant the other does not go away.
Which means that economic interdependence only helps avoid war so long as war itself doesn't provide more benefits.
China loved the idea that was popular in the the US of "peaceful" rising China, it meant people ignored the long term strategic threats militarily.
China has risen economically, and now they are aiming to have a military more powerful than the U.S..
They are also growing their influence in South America and Africa to get new markets, resources, and ultimately get rid of the dependence on the US market.
So, the dependence helped deter war in the short-term, but the economic gains let China position them better to serve the self-interest of being dominant.
I agree with most of your points. However, about this ...
> The threat from China has been existent and ignored for the past 30 years, the same 30 years that China rose from 3rd world country to the superpower it is today.
... I'm moved to note that it was Kissinger, as part of the post-WWII globalization effort, who helped China industrialize.
As I understand it, the idea is that war is less likely among nations, at comparable levels of economic and technological development, whose economies are strongly linked through trade.
The Soviet Union had helped China develop militarily, with tanks, ships, planes, missiles, and nuclear weapons. But it did a shit job, overall. So diverting China from ideological military confrontation to economic interdependence seemed like a smart move.
Longer term, though -- as you argue -- we have an overall stronger adversary than the Soviet Union would likely have become. They could have, with our help, destroyed modern civilization. But they arguably would have never dominated the world as the US has since WWII. As China may.
Review the precedent. The argument that economic linkage would prevent warfare was first raised prior to World War I. Global and Continental trade failed to prevent proxy conflict in Africa, the Baltics, and all out conflict across all of Europe. Britain and Germany had a level of trade and codependent exchange far greater that of modern day China and the United States.
Not to mention that the United States and China have fought and are continuing to fight proxy conflict today in the Sudan, northern India, Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, and North Korea.
Your theory has been tested. It is false.
To assume that the United States and China simply cannot engage in warfare is a dangerous delusion. And I assure you, it is not a delusion shared by the Chinese government.
I initially wrote a fairly long piece about why this particular article is wrong, but then I went and looked into who the Hoover Institute is. Its a conservative think tank that has Kissinger as a fellow, so the hawkish attitude, anti-socialism, and mildly misleading statements of political nature all make sense.
The assumption that the US will end up in direct conflict with China is, in my opinion, contradicted by the the Chinese tendency to stay away from wars and focus on economics. They have had only minor border skirmishes and small roles in counterinsurgency in their past 50 years of existence.
I also think that we are too far in for economic warfare to be effective. Any attempt to cut off China from the US will harm the US more than China. The Hoover Institute is partially responsible for the position we are in now, as many of the US politicians that acted to encourage manufacturing abroad were fellows. They are big on free markets, and the hands of the free market determined that low cost manufacturing abroad is of greater importance than US unipolarity.
I think another major point that the article ignores is that the transition towards a market economy from a planned economy was disastrous for the USSR. The Era of Stagnation came right after market reforms, and all of the ex-Soviet countries economies tanked after the fall of the USSR
China is acting as an aggressor in the region, the US is only providing shields and containment to nations that seek their assistance.
The US strategy is to enforce peace through strength which is what you can expect from a democratic country and which is widely supported by allied nations.
Dictatorships tend to seek external enemies to boost a rally-around-the-flag narrative that boosts centralized control. It's a very old playbook that works everywhere (also in US domestic politics).
The Chinese communist party will need these distractions more and more as the GDP growth will stall due to internal corruption (they rank lower than Ghana and Tunesia in corruption indexes).
I think we can agree that whatever the communist party thinks it needs to stay in power should not lead to WWIII
That's true so long as everyone is dependent on each other. If, everyone is dependent on one country, that doesn't hold
China has a near monopoly on a lot of production. Countries that depend on them certainly won't go to war with them, but that doesn't hinder China from starting a war with those countries, and even gives them an advantage. And it doesn't stop dependent countries from warring with each other and that could even be beneficial to China.
N.B. I use China as an example only. Replace China with any country that might have a near monopoly on production of some kind. The point I'm trying to make isn't "ahhh China scary", it's that interconnectedness may only prevent war if it's actually interconnected, and not a monopoly.
I think the situation is a lot different than in the cold war. The economies of the U.S. and China are so deeply connected that neither can afford to get into a major conflict with the other.
This is written from a very USA based ideology. Unlike the USA, China doesn't have a long track record of starting wars. China is unlikely to attack anyone, but clearly cannot rule out the possibility that they might and could.
China takes a longer and less forceful approach: political and economic control are their preferred choices by far.
Wars do not benefit anyone bar the arms manufacturers for the most part.
Under apparent US hegemony, the US was wasting trillions on wars, while China’s economy grew at a much faster pace.
Their increased local suppression, political and military flexing may be helpful to those consolidating power at the top, but they are costly moves to maintain, and have upended the compounding economic power game they were quietly winning.
> “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.” [0]
The only way that China gets an upper hand economically is by selling products to the US and the Western world.
If they enter into a conflict where they are cordoned off, their export oriented economy would crash immediately.
A war between China and USA is impossible to win for either sides, due to both military size, budgets, interdependence, and nuclear weapons arsenal. And this is why it's a cold war.
We're not going to have another Cold War. For one thing, the American and Chinese economies are interdependent. For another, they'd both require multilateral support to act militarily in any significant capacity.
The US's current dependency on China is one-way. China is not co-dependent on the US. The existing dependency structure does not incentivize China to avoid war.
Besides, most of the US wars in the last half century have been started because the US was dependent on another nation. It seems a self-sufficient US may actually be less likely to go to war.
I find the extrapolation a bit extreme. This seems more like a deterrent than a threat. War with China will not be beneficial to the US even if they win. Today's economic connections make actual wars between superpowers quite unlikely.
How would conquest benefit the PRC, other than vague symbolism of "uniting the country" and depriving the U.S. of a potential base? Yes, there's power in the rally-round-the-flag effect, but that only goes so far from distracting citizens of the matters of survival.
Also, the world is exponentially more economically interdependent than it was a century ago. Was the trade between the Central Powers and the Entente really comparable to that between the PRC and the rest of the world today? Or even between modern Russia's trade with the world and China's trade with the world? I suspect these are all different cases that need to be examined in full, not brushed away with rhetorical flourishes.
An immense amount of consumer electronics are manufactured in China. But also, most of China's energy is imported by sea. Don't think their Belt and Road projects have managed to substitute those naval routes yet. So in the case of war, both China and its trading partners are at the risk of slitting each others' throats in a jiffy. Is that comparable to Russia, an energy exporter?
You're right, war is less likely among nations with strongly linked economies. The important thing to note is that, at the same time, the survival self-interest of a county to dominant the other does not go away.
Which means that economic interdependence only helps avoid war so long as war itself doesn't provide more benefits.
China loved the idea that was popular in the the US of "peaceful" rising China, it meant people ignored the long term strategic threats militarily.
China has risen economically, and now they are aiming to have a military more powerful than the U.S.. They are also growing their influence in South America and Africa to get new markets, resources, and ultimately get rid of the dependence on the US market.
So, the dependence helped deter war in the short-term, but the economic gains let China position them better to serve the self-interest of being dominant.
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