Conclusion
China’s rise has been a positive development in so many ways – for the half billion Chinese who have been lifted out of poverty, and for people all over the world who benefit from Chinese products, culture and talents in global governance. Yet China’s rise also has some worrying implications for the future of the liberal international order, and for the ability of the transatlantic partners – notably, the US, Canada and Europe – to work together to protect that order.
Americans should recognize that, perhaps more than ever before, the US has a strong interest in European unity. Washington should put an end to any ambivalence it may have about the emergence of Europe as a powerful global actor. It should throw its support behind tightening economic and political union, because ‘a chaotic, unstable Europe’, notes Jeremy Shapiro, ‘would be unable (and probably unwilling) to help the US confront geopolitical challenges around the world’.56
A comparison with the Cold War era provides valuable insights. Dealing with the China challenge will prove far more difficult for transatlantic partners today relative to Cold War cooperation, which itself was beset with inefficiencies and divisions. In Cold War Europe, countries shared a serious security threat, and geography encouraged collective security. Despite this, as regards economic containment for example, the transatlantic partners, Japan and others struggled to coordinate what was a contested and porous sanctions regime.57 Any attempt at economic containment of China today faces far greater problems of coordination and defection, particularly given that China, unlike the Soviet Union, is a major trading partner and lender for most of the countries that would be asked to cooperate in sanctioning it. Furthermore, the desire to preserve the liberal order has faded over the years since it was first created by leaders traumatized by economic depression and a savage world war. As Elliot Cohen notes, for example, the US ability to eschew nationalism and embrace a globalist agenda ‘required the lived experiences of those who had witnessed the poverty of the Depression and the destruction of the war years firsthand. Today, however, those lessons are no longer living truths.’58
Cold War cooperation is instructive in another sense. During that time – though US leaders took great pains to obscure it – the Europeans faced a much more direct and serious threat from the Soviet Union. However, because American leaders decided that the US shared an interest in containing the Soviet Union, the US and European countries bound themselves together economically and militarily to reduce the asymmetry of their interests. Today, the situation is reversed: whereas the US’s Asian alliances put it on the front lines with respect to China, the Chinese threat to Europe is much less direct. Some recent signs suggest that Europe is starting to take a harder line towards China; French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, recently declared that ‘[t]he period of European naivety is over’, and that the relationship between the EU and China must not be primarily about trade, but ‘a geopolitical and strategic relationship’.59 If European leaders agree that China poses a significant challenge to the global order, then they will need to decide if they want similarly to bind themselves to the US (and liberal countries in East Asia) to condition – albeit not yet contain – China’s behaviour.
56 Shapiro, J. (2016), ‘Britain Might Leave the EU. Here’s Why Americans Should Care’, Vox, 15 April 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/4/15/11405658/brexit-europe-america (accessed 2 May 2019).
57 Mastanduno, M. (1992), Economic Containment: COCOM and the Politics of East/West Trade, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
58 Cohen, E. (2018), ‘America’s Long Goodbye: the Real Crisis of the Trump Era’, Foreign Affairs, 97(6) (accessed 2 May 2019).
59 Blenkinsop, P. and Emmott, R. (2019), ‘EU leaders call for end to “naivety” in relations with China’, Reuters, 22 March 2019, https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-eu-china/eu-leaders-call-for-end-to-naivety-in-relations-with-china-idUKKCN 1R31H3 (accessed 22 May 2019). Also see Small, A. (2019), ‘Why Europe Is Getting Tough on China And What It Means for Washington’, Foreign Affairs, 98(2); and Peker, E. (2019), ‘EU Strong-Arms China Into Trade Promises’, Wall Street Journal, 9 April 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-pushes-china-to-fulfill-promises-on-trade-11554805741 (accessed 2 May 2019).