Broad framing the combined China/Russia threat

Inevitable leadership changes will largely solve both threat vectors

Al Jazeera

Think back to what was arguably the biggest decision of the last half of the 20th century: Deng Xiaoping’s embrace of marketization (something I celebrated in an Esquire piece 16 years ago; I dubbed him the most important dead person of the 21st Century) following Mao Zedong’s long and crazy and impoverishing reign in China.

Let me count the ways it bent history:

• Pushed America’s decades-long grand strategy of creating and extending an international liberal trade order (at first, just across the West) into global majority status — a tipping point that triggered our recognition of an actual global economy (really, for the first time in human history) and globalization itself.

• Culminated America’s similar, decades-long effort to act as the security “glue” of East Asia, encouraging the peaceful rise of numerous economic great powers — a first-time-ever development in that region (Japan, Korea, China, India, etc. all rising or risen without great-power war erupting).

• Triggered an explosion in wealth creation that lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty (for the first time ever) and set in motion the emergence of a global majority middle class.

• Convinced Gorbachev’s crowd in Moscow to attempt similar reforms (albeit focusing first on politics instead of economics — a huge mistake that collapsed the USSR) so as not to be left behind.

• Later convinced India to do the same to catch up (a process unfolding now).

This is why I dubbed Deng the single most important world leader of the second half of the 20th century (FDR owns the first half for setting up the framework for US-style globalization’s spread).

Did Deng’s decision create a perfect world without tensions? Nah. But, as I like to say, we’re now living with the best problem-set yet — and that is progress.

Which brings us to today’s China, where the next steps inevitably involve greater political pluralization that achieves the following:

• Recognizes the desire for self-rule across the nation’s huge middle class (size of the total US).

• Creates enough long-term optimism among the populace to unleash a consumption boom that EVERY outside economic expert is calling for.

• Chills the region’s growing military arms race by ALL of China’s neighbors in response to Beijing’s ongoing buildup (now reaching a certain pointlessness in its sheer girth as the world collectively rockets to a Military Singularity in which drones/robots/AI make all those platforms useless) and general belligerent persona.

• Chills America’s efforts (largely futile) to contain and/or slow China’s reach for technological advancement (a very necessary development for the nation to avoid the middle-income trap).

• Recaptures China’s global luster as an agent of transformative change (versus retrenchment along ideological and authoritarian lines).

• Opens the floodgates for new generations of Chinese leaders who are — unlike Cold War baby Xi Jinping (he of the generation emotionally battered by the Cultural Revolution) — ambitious and imaginative and ready to achieve a “soft landing” as one of this century’s quartet of economic superpowers (alongside the US, EU, and rising India).