Posts Tagged ‘rivalry’
“Whenever we discover a dislike in us, toward anyone, we should ever be a little suspicious of ourselves…”*
The United States’ strategy towards China is premised on an unending rivalry. Yet history tells us that strategic competitions do end– and America needs, Mike Mazarr argues, to imagine how its conflict with China might one day do so…
The American rivalry with China continues to deepen, characterised on both sides by zero-sum expectations and paranoia. Tensions are rising over Taiwan and the South China Sea. There is an increasingly bitter contest for the commanding heights of science and technology, disputes over economic and cyber strategies, and much else. More concerning may be that neither side appears to have any vision of a world beyond their rivalry. America’s strategy seems predicated on relentless, unending competition; its definition of success is getting and staying ahead of China in a dozen areas. There is no concept, in other words, of how this rivalry might end.
Yet most rivalries do end. In 1805 the leaders of Britain and France could hardly have imagined that within a few decades they would transcend their age-old hostility to become geopolitical partners. Not every rivalry produces such comprehensive reversals, but even the most intractable stand-offs can evolve into something less volatile. In How Rivalries End, Karen Rasler, William Thompson, and Sumit Ganguly explain that, of all great power rivalries since 1816, only three endured for a century. On average, they lasted about 60 years. If we take the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 as the starting point, the current US-China contest has already lasted longer than that. Even using the more recent intensification of the rivalry of around 2010 as a starting point, we’re almost a quarter of the way through the average length.
It is a mistake, therefore, to approach this rivalry without any theory of how it might conclude. The case for competing vigorously to deny certain Chinese ambitions is self-evident, and the US-China relationship has distinct features – such as stark cultural differences – that will complicate any effort to transcend the rivalry. Adding a conception of an endgame would strengthen the US hand in the ongoing competition and help steer the contest in ways that prevent disaster.
American strategy today focuses on progressively outperforming China in a series of ongoing competitions: military, economic, technological and diplomatic. Endgames are left mostly unstated, out of a belief that too much focus on outcomes is pointless and may even be counterproductive.
Current National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell laid out a version of this approach in a 2019 essay in Foreign Affairs. ‘Rather than relying on assumptions about China’s trajectory’, they wrote, ‘American strategy should be durable whatever the future brings for the Chinese system. It should seek to achieve not a definitive end state akin to the Cold War’s ultimate conclusion but a steady state of clear-eyed coexistence on terms favorable to US interests and values.’
A steady state of clear-eyed coexistence – this is the long-term vision, an endless struggle for predominance with elements of self-interested cooperation mixed in. Coexistence, they concluded, ‘means accepting competition as a condition to be managed rather than a problem to be solved’.
The same concept has cropped up in multiple administration statements and speeches and arguments by outside analysts. Rush Doshi, until recently the senior China official at the National Security Council, explained that current policy embodies a rejection of the idea that ‘the contest with China can end as decisively and neatly as the Cold War did’. Rather than seeking to transform China, ‘the United States can compete intensely by blunting Chinese activities that undermine US interests and building a coalition of forces that will help the United States secure its priorities – all while managing the risks of escalation’. Analysts David Santoro and Brad Glosserman have argued that ‘for now, pursuing a specific endgame with China is pointless and problematic’. American strategy should aim to ‘keep the United States in and ahead of the game, i.e., in a competitive and dominant position vis-à-vis its strategic rival’.
Much of this view is clearly correct. There is no way to know how the rivalry will end or how China’s ideology or character will evolve. American actions can’t force ideological or behavioural change onto China, and talking up a future that assumes such change can imply existential threats to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It might take decades for all this to play out; discussions about endgames today are mostly theoretical. It makes sense to focus on competing as a persistent challenge, adjust as the situation changes, and let the endgame define itself.
Yet a strategy of open-ended competition without a clear endgame has many downsides. For one thing, it magnifies the risk of getting caught in an endless cycle of competing for competition’s sake on almost every issue. The lack of a clear picture of a world beyond the rivalry leaves American officials at a loss to prioritise: because they can’t be sure what factors are likely to determine the favoured outcome, every square mile of the competitive landscape has to be contested…
… The problem with American strategy today is not that the United States should not compete. It is that persistent contestation alone is an incomplete recipe for success. Unmoored from any concept of an endgame, American competitive instincts can run out of control and guide US grand strategy rather than serving it…
[Mazarr considers options and suggest a framework for thinking about an endgame…]
… The United States can’t know precisely when or why the rivalry will mellow, but it can have a strong sense of how it will happen: a mutual decision that both countries’ interests are best served by winding down the confrontation. Such a development isn’t likely soon – but history suggests that it is inevitable at some point. Managing the trajectory to that point is the great challenge for America’s China strategy – and embracing the idea of an endgame would inject new energy into the American approach to its most potent competitor…
On the importance of ends, not just means: “Imagining the endgame of the US-China rivalry,” from @MMazarr in @EngelsbergIdeas.
* Herman Melville
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As we take the long(er) view, we might recall that it was on this date in 2005 that the Provisional Irish Republican Army (the IRA) called an end to its thirty-year-long armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.
“Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love”*…
Or is it? The web– and the world– are awash in talk of the Mimetic Theory of Desire (or Rivalry, as its creator, René Girard, would also have it). Stanford professor (and Philosophy Talk co-host) Joshua Landy weights in with a heavy word of caution…
Here are two readings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Which do you think we should be teaching in our schools and universities?
Reading 1. Hamlet is unhappy because he, like all of us, has no desires of his own, and therefore has no being, properly speaking. The best he can do is to find another person to emulate, since that’s the only way anyone ever develops the motivation to do anything. Shakespeare’s genius is to show us this life-changing truth.
Reading 2. Hamlet is unhappy because he, like all of us, is full of body thetans, harmful residue of the aliens brought to Earth by Xenu seventy-five million years ago and disintegrated using nuclear bombs inside volcanoes. Since it is still some time until the practice of auditing comes into being, Hamlet has no chance of becoming “clear”; it is no wonder that he displays such melancholy and aimlessness. Shakespeare’s genius is to show us this life-changing truth.
Whatever you make of the first, I’m rather hoping that you feel at least a bit uncomfortable with the second. If so, I have a follow-up question for you: what exactly is wrong with it? Why not rewrite the textbooks so as to make it our standard understanding of Shakespeare’s play? Surely you can’t fault the logic behind it: if humans have indeed been full of body thetans since they came into existence, and Hamlet is a representation of a human being, Hamlet must be full of body thetans. What is more, if everyone is still full of body thetans, then Shakespeare is doing his contemporaries a huge favor by telling them, and the new textbooks will be doing us a huge favor by telling the world. Your worry, presumably, is that this whole body thetan business is just not true. It’s an outlandish hypothesis, with nothing whatsoever to support it. And since, as Carl Sagan once said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” we would do better to leave it alone.
I think you see where I’m going with this. The fact is, of course, that the first reading is just as outlandish as the second. As I’m about to show (not that it should really need showing), human beings do have desires of their own. That doesn’t mean that all our desires are genuine; it’s always possible to be suckered into buying a new pair of boots, regardless of the fact that they are uglier and shoddier than our old ones, just because they are fashionable. What it means is that some of our desires are genuine. And having some genuine desires, and being able to act on them, is sufficient for the achievement of authenticity. For all we care, Hamlet’s inky cloak could be made by Calvin Klein, his feathered hat by Diane von Furstenberg; the point is that he also has motivations (to know things, to be autonomous, to expose guilt, to have his story told accurately) that come from within, and that those are the ones that count.
To my knowledge, no one in the academy actually reads Hamlet (or anything else) the second way. But plenty read works of literature the first way. René Girard, the founder of the approach, was rewarded for doing so with membership in the Académie française, France’s elite intellectual association. People loved his system so much that they established a Colloquium on Violence and Religion, hosted by the University of Innsbruck, complete with a journal under the ironically apt name Contagion. More recently, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, loved it so much that he sank millions of dollars into Imitatio, an institute for the dissemination of Girardian thought. And to this day, you’ll find casual references to the idea everywhere, from people who seem to think it’s a truth, one established by René Girard. (Here’s a recent instance from the New York Times opinion pages: “as we have learned from René Girard, this is precisely how desires are born: I desire something by way of imitation, because someone else already has it.”) All of which leads to an inevitable question: what’s the difference between Girardianism and Scientology? Why has the former been more successful in the academy? Why is the madness of theory so, well, contagious?…
Are we really dependent on others for our desires? Does that mechanism inevitably lead to rivalry, scapegoating, and division? @profjoshlandy suggests not: “Deceit, Desire, and the Literature Professor: Why Girardians Exist,” in @StanfordArcade. Via @UriBram in @TheBrowser. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Friedrich Nietzsche (an inspiration to Girard)
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As we tease apart theorizing, we might spare a thought for William Whewell; he died on this date in 1866. A scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science, he was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
At a time when specialization was increasing, Whewell was renown for the breadth of his work: he published the disciplines of mechanics, physics, geology, astronomy, and economics, while also finding the time to compose poetry, author a Bridgewater Treatise, translate the works of Goethe, and write sermons and theological tracts. In mathematics, Whewell introduced what is now called the Whewell equation, defining the shape of a curve without reference to an arbitrarily chosen coordinate system. He founded mathematical crystallography and developed a revision of Friedrich Mohs’s classification of minerals. And he organized thousands of volunteers internationally to study ocean tides, in what is now considered one of the first citizen science projects.
But some argue that Whewell’s greatest gift to science was his wordsmithing: He created the words scientist and physicist by analogy with the word artist; they soon replaced the older term natural philosopher. He also named linguistics, consilience, catastrophism, uniformitarianism, and astigmatism.
Other useful words were coined to help his friends: biometry for John Lubbock; Eocine, Miocene and Pliocene for Charles Lyell; and for Michael Faraday, electrode, anode, cathode, diamagnetic, paramagnetic, and ion (whence the sundry other particle names ending -ion).
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