US-China cooperation matters

Transnational threats such as pandemics and climate change threaten everyone and the US should change its zero-sum mentality with regard to China

In 2017, US President Donald Trump announced that his new national security strategy would focus on great power competition with China and Russia, but such a strategy is inadequate. Under the influence of the information revolution and globalization, the world is changing. Even if the United States prevails as a great power, it cannot protect its security acting alone. COVID-19 is the latest example. It has already killed more US citizens than wars after 1945.

And regardless of the potential setbacks to economic globalization caused by trade disputes and the pandemic-induced global recession, environmental globalization will continue to increase.

Pandemics and climate change threaten everyone, but no country can manage the problems alone. A successful national security strategy starts with the fact that our size means that the two largest economies, the United States and China, have to lead the global cooperation. A classic problem with public goods that all can share and which none can be excluded from is that if the largest consumers do not take the lead, others will free-ride and the public goods will not be produced. The US government's National Security Strategy says little about these increasingly important transnational threats to national security. Tariffs and border walls cannot solve these problems. Success will require the cooperation of others.

On transnational issues such as COVID-19 and climate change, power becomes a positive-sum game. It is not enough to think of power over others. We must also think in terms of power to accomplish joint goals which involve power with others. On many transnational issues, empowering others can help us to accomplish our own goals. The United States benefits if China improves its energy efficiency and emits less carbon dioxide or improves its public health systems and vice versa. Today, institutional networks and connectedness are an important source of national power. In a world of growing complexity, the most connected states are the most powerful.

If the key to the US' future security and prosperity is learning the importance of "power with" as well as "power over", our current strategy is not up to the task. As I argue in my new book Do Morals Matter?, every country puts its interests first, but the important moral question is how broadly or narrowly those interests are defined. Recent events have shown an inclination toward short-term and zero-sum transactional interpretations with little attention to institutions and allies. The US current administration has stepped back from the long-term enlightened self-interest that guided the multilateral order designed by Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower after 1945.

Since former US president Richard Nixon and late Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong met in 1972, China and the US have cooperated despite their ideological differences. Rapid Asian economic growth has encouraged a horizontal power shift to the region, but Asia has its own internal balance of power. Chinese power is balanced by Japan, India, and Australia among others. The US will remain crucial to that Asian balance of power. If the US maintains its alliances, the prospects are slight that in the traditional interstate competition China can drive the US from the Western Pacific, much less dominate the world. The US holds strong cards in the traditional great power competition, but that misses the importance of the new transnational issues.

The more difficult question for an effective national security strategy will be whether the US and China can develop attitudes that allow them to cooperate in producing global public goods while competing in the traditional areas of great power competition. Exaggerated fears and worst-case analyses may make such a balanced policy impossible. Talk of a cold war is misleading and could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The US-China relationship is a cooperative rivalry where a successful strategy of "smart competition" will require equal attention to both aspects of that description. But such a future will require good contextual intelligence, careful management of the competition by both sides and no major miscalculations. That will be hard tests of the skills for the two countries' leaders in the context of rising nationalism in both countries.
During the real Cold War, some people joked that the differences between the US and the Soviet Union could only be overcome if there were an external threat by a creature from Mars.

Today's novel coronavirus is the equivalent of that external threat. A virus does not care about the nationality of the human it kills. Yet thus far the human response has been denial, protectionism, and blame-shifting rather than enhanced international cooperation. There may be a second wave of this pandemic, and there will certainly be more pandemics in the future. In 1918, the influenza pandemic killed more people worldwide than did World War I. We have to hope that attitudes toward cooperation may change before the world encounters a second wave or the next pandemic.

The author is a professor at Harvard University and the author of Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump. The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.