Beijing’s great geopolitical photo op over Labor Day weekend gives a picture of U.S. strategic fears, with three major powers standing, at least visually, in alignment against us.
The event, including Wednesday’s parade, was indeed a photo op. There were reportedly no agreements of substance, and Xi Jinping did not name the U.S. as an adversary. India’s attendance was avowedly not in systemic opposition to America. Even Chinese-Russian relations are likely situational, with plenty of room for divergence later. Still, the fact that China could host such a gathering, in the name of a world order more to its liking, puts a high relief on its challenge to U.S. influence. So how do we approach China?
Democrat Rahm Emanuel would use the Chinese threat, in the still-novel credibility of its capabilities, as the common foe that should unite our polarized domestic factions. He calls for reversal of Donald Trump’s divisive practices, and a return to the “qualities that have long made us ‘the shining city on a hill.’” But can a partisan, using partisan terms of reference, close America’s divisions?
Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times, notes how artificial intelligence demands a common agenda to control it, and that both the U.S. and China have an interest in that control. But China and the U.S. seem to have different approaches to AI. Would they see the common interest that Friedman cites? Do we?
Either or both might not, and the reasons just might point to the core of our conflict with China today. China, per a Wall Street Journal report, is more interested in AI as a super-application of computer technology, and on reaping its capabilities now, in every possible arena including industry and, yes, the military. It is a tool to advance the nation, and they would use it to surpass the U.S. American firms, in this analysis, focus on long term goals, notably the development of true intelligent thinking in computers. What that focus might portend for the U.S. global competitive position seems outside their scope.
This reported divergence makes a certain, clear, sense. China, as an ethnic, traditional nation and as a Communist regime, exists, by its own self image, to maintain a stability that benefits a nation rather than disparate individuals. It bestows tangible benefits and brooks no dissent. This stance rests on the ancient view of the human being as creature of material self interest. Concepts like “freedom,” to Chinese rulers, may denote some helpful operating methods, for example liberalized markets. But it is, at most, a means to the end of collective stability. Which also fits the interests of the rulers.
America was conceived in an abstract principle, that individuals all hold inherent rights, and that government exists to secure those rights. This nation exists for people, in whatever quirks and drives they may have, subject only to the need, mutual among us, for social order to protect and nurture these rights for all.
Artificial intelligence that really thinks like a person may well out-think its rulers, which would be anathema to the Chinese Communist Party, and to any Emperor in the grand sweep of their history. Any free thinking could well de-legitimize the regimes’ very idea of government. Thinking AI would also portend huge problems for Americans, but the ambition to create it fits those pursuits of happiness that we hold as persons’ unalienable rights. American government has a duty, probably to regulate the development and use of AI for the sake of safety, but regulation must respect – and protect – developers in their own rights. Our nation’s legitimacy comes from the people, not over them.
There, in those differing interests, lies the core of incompatibility and potential conflict between the PRC and the USA. Each faces different existential questions that reflect this incompatibility. Do Americans really value our freedom, and are we willing and able, as free persons, to maintain a strong, competent nation? On the other hand, won’t Chinese persons, human beings who are today gaining scope to look beyond survival’s short term demands, start to demand the rights with which they too are endowed?
The challenges of these questions fall, in America’s case, on our own shoulders as citizens. We need to figure out how to work in comity – comity in our core principles that transcends yet embraces differences among our outlooks – and on that basis formulate disciplines as we develop our AI; strategies to engage with China (and anyone else); and institutions that meet our needs as a society. China’s regime needs to figure out how to satiate and numb, or suppress, its constituents’ interest in personal rights.
In these divergent core interests, how should we engage China? Much will depend on the political mandates we give our political leaders. But a certain methodological formula bears mention. Col. John Boyd, according to biographer Robert Coram, believed that we
should always hold the moral high ground (and) … tighten our alliances, pump up our resolve, drain away our adversary’s resolve, and attract the uncommitted.
Boyd drew in no small part on Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, and this method fits with the “long game” approach that many attribute to Chinese strategic thought. Historically, this formula applies to warfare, in an aim to impose favorable conditions before battle, and even to win without a shot being fired. In this post-modern world, it seems intellectually reasonable to extend it to international relations in general, especially for our nation, founded on a principle of personal rights.
That foundation, on people’s freedom rather than interests of personal sovereign or subsuming collective, names our moral high ground. Not only do we believe it to be right, but it is dangerous to unfree regimes. Their fear of dissidence amounts to a fear of humanity’s unpredictable, un-controllable nature, and necessitates suppression and manipulation of their populations. So long as we exemplify our founding premise competently and sincerely, that unpredictable human drive, for freedom, has a living beacon. IF we build alliances with other peoples who know freedom’s blessings, keep up our growth to show freedom’s value, and expose the oppression of other regimes, no persons will fear or oppose us. Unfree regimes already do, because they know. Our resolve should grow as we see our appeal. And adversaries – those unfree regimes and not their people – will lose resolve as we clarify our nature. Freedom, if we embody, protect and nurture it, obviates any people’s opposition. Regimes could find it in their interests to accommodate and adapt to us even before competition becomes overtly evident.
Of course any core principle will demand hugely extensive measures for worldly effect. In engaging China, America will have to develop and maintain appropriate military power, economic capacity, and policy focus. These will entail myriad judgement calls, trade offs in the deployment of resources and efforts, choices among various courses of action and policy, and fortitude to carry out all the choices and stances we settle on. This complexity, though, is much more easily managed in comity in our core purpose, and our founding creed affords that comity if we keep fidelity with its Truths. Our creed also opens the future to the explorations, management, and adaptations that free people devise in our enterprises. As explorers, we can not only digest, but sometimes spark radical dislocations, whereas new truths can debase all the tenets that underpin regimes based on traditional ordinations. Such as new truths that artificial intelligence might promote.
China is much more susceptible to future disruption than America is, so long as Americans maintain competence and fidelity to our nature. No assembly of regime leaders will wrest our moral high ground from us unless we allow it. Holding that ground, knowing it, we can build our resolve and win any contest, if our moral stature has not already pre-empted it.
People’s drive to liberty sets the true long game.
Common Conviction 