Arthur Kroeber: belief

Transcript context

…I worry that this sort of cycle of escalation will seem in retrospect to people—especially if it leads to a hot conflict—as mystifying as World War I seems to us now. If it's instigated by something in Taiwan, that's a different story there. You can just tell a very direct through line. But you look back at World War I, why did Germany do what it did? Was it worried about encirclement? Why was it worried about encirclement? There's this weird thing with the Russian ambassador who didn't get back in time or something. It would just be this kind of thing where it's like, “Why did we have to have this adversarial relationship with China again?” Explain it to me when we're 50 years removed and the sort of day to day news isn’t as salient. I basically agree with that. We should be spending a lot more time trying to figure out how to make this a workable relationship. There's going to be competition, there's going to be conflict. There are some real conflicts of what we define as core interests on either side which are tough to resolve. This is not easy. But we basically both have to recognize… This is more of a problem on the US side. I think the Chinese recognize that the US is not going anywhere. There is a little bit of a meme in Chinese foreign affairs circles with the decline of the US and the rise of the east. That is very officially popular. I think most people don't really believe that because they just have too much confidence in the long-run resilience of the US system. I think they're basically right about that. I think we on the US side have to get a little bit more attuned to the idea that there is no end point to this. This is a relationship which will go on forever. There's no winning, there's no losing, there's just managing. We need to do a much better job of figuring out how to manage it and keep the conflicts and friction in as contained a zone as we can. It’s not easy to do. There is this interesting volatility in how people think China is doing. Some piece of news will come out about electric vehicles and people will be like, “China will obviously dominate us”. Then maybe some economic data will come out and they say, “China is collapsing.” People in their own countries have this sense that a lot of things are happening. Some things are going well, some things are not going well. But in 20 years, America's not going to collapse and it's also not going to have destroyed every other country. There's a long-run trend. Whether China has 1% higher growth rate or 1% lower, it's just going to be a powerful nation at the technological frontier. There's no sort of very immediate implication of what exact growth trajectory they are on, with respect to the most important questions about how we should engage with them and so forth.…

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