This week, a former, though anonymous, US administration official “with deep expertise and experience dealing with China” drew another strategy for US to deal with China. Published by US think tank Atlantic Council, the strategy document, titled The Longer Telegram says the US should target Chinese president Xi Jinping at the core of its strategy

by Indrani Bagchi

NEW DELHI: As Joe Biden takes charge in Washington, the US’ China policy is likely to remain just as hard-nosed as it was during the Trump administration.

In November, US State Department brought out its own version of George Kennan’s Long Telegram, but with China in its crosshairs. Elements of the China Challenge set out its own blueprint of how the US should deal with China.

This week, a former, though anonymous, US administration official “with deep expertise and experience dealing with China” drew another strategy for US to deal with China. Published by US think tank Atlantic Council, the strategy document, titled The Longer Telegram (yet another riff on George Kennan) says the US should target Chinese president Xi Jinping at the core of its strategy. Incidentally, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, Matt Pottinger’s notes on China were leaked in the dying days of the Trump administration.

“For the United States, its allies, and the US-led liberal international order, this represents a fundamental shift in the strategic environment. Ignoring this profound change courts peril. Xi is no longer just a problem for US primacy. He now presents a serious problem for the whole of the democratic world.”

The document states, “Given the reality that today’s China is a state in which Xi has centralized nearly all decision-making power in his own hands, and used that power to substantially alter China’s political, economic, and foreign-policy trajectory, US strategy must remain laser focused on Xi, his inner circle, and the Chinese political context in which they rule. Changing their decision-making will require understanding, operating within, and changing their political and strategic paradigm. All US policy aimed at altering China’s behaviour should revolve around this fact, or it is likely to prove ineffectual. This strategy must also be long term…”

The document observes, correctly, that the Kennan document of 1946 pre-supposed a deep insight into the working of he Soviet system, thereby identifying its inherent flaws. China is much more careful, and has studied the causes of the destruction of the USSR much more than the USSR’s erstwhile enemies.

“The uncomfortable truth is that China has long had an integrated internal strategy for handling the United States, and so far this strategy has been implemented with reasonable, although not unqualified, success. By contrast, the United States, which once operationalized a unified strategy to deal with the challenge of the Soviet Union, in the form of George Kennan’s containment, so far has none in relation to China. This has been a dereliction of national responsibility.”

The author says an “operationalised strategy” should comprise 7 components: rebuild the economic, military, technological, and human-capital underpinnings of US long-term national power; agree on a limited set of enforceable policy “red lines” that China should be deterred from crossing under any circumstances; agree on a larger number of “major national security interests” which are neither vital nor existential in nature but which require a range of retaliatory actions to inform future Chinese strategic behaviour; identify important but less critical areas where neither red lines nor the delineation of major national interests may be necessary, but where the full force of strategic competition should be deployed by the United States against China; prosecute a full-fledged, global ideological battle in defence of political, economic, and societal freedoms against China’s authoritarian state-capitalist model … among others.

The document says the areas of strategic competition against China should include “sustaining current US force levels in the Indo-Pacific region; stabilizing relations with Russia and encouraging the same between Russia and Japan; concluding a fully operationalized Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) with India, Japan, and Australia by inducing India to abandon its final political and strategic reservations against such an arrangement, among other suggestions.

The trouble with all of these is the nature of current US politics and economy. The document acknowledges that the US needs to work on itself before it works on China. Other analysts have suggested many of the same things to the US. But this document also focuses on one important issue: “In the final analysis, the major problem facing the United States in confronting Xi’s China is not one of military, economic, or technological capabilities. It is one of self-belief.”