America's China war

THE AVOIDABLE WAR: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict Between the US and Xi Jinping’s China

Author: KevinRudd

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Price: $32

Pages: 432

Here is one way the American era could end: China, on a pretext or piqued by some provocation, orchestrates an invasion of Taiwan. Beijing launches a shower of missiles toward Taipei, crippling its American-supplied military, followed by attacks on Okinawa and Guam. More than 200,000 People’s Liberation Army troops climb ashore at 20 different beachheads along the Taiwanese coast. American submarines sink some Chinese ships; still, it’s not enough to slow the onslaught of paratroopers and helicopters. Slowly — then swiftly — the pitched fighting tilts in favour of the Middle Kingdom, altering the military and political balance in East Asia. The result, which ultimately reduces a world superpower to one weakened player among many, comes to be seen by historians as the “American Waterloo.”

It is not such a far-fetched scenario: According to Kevin Rudd’s penetrating and sensible new account of the United States-China relationship, some reports have shown Washington losing to Beijing as many as 19 straight times in desktop war games simulating a conflict over Taiwan. Mr Rudd, who is a former prime minister of Australia and now president and CEO of the Asia Society, has spent four decades trying to understand the machinations of the Chinese and argues that President Xi Jinping is “a man in a hurry when it comes to Taiwan,” having concluded that his predecessors’ “gradualist approach has failed.” Beijing, Mr Rudd believes, now sees “the time as ripe … to change the nature of the order itself.”

The path that Mr Rudd has followed in his career is certainly unorthodox. After leaving office, at age 60 he enrolled at Oxford University to study for a doctorate focusing on understanding Mr Xi’s worldview. Mr Rudd, who has visited China more than 100 times and speaks fluent Mandarin, is one of the few foreign politicians who have had a chance to get to know Mr Xi personally; on one occasion the two men spent hours conversing in Chinese before a winter fire in Canberra. Those talks, among other impressions gleaned from his travels, have left Mr Rudd with a rare feel for China’s cultural flashpoints. “Our best chance of avoiding war,” he writes, “is to better understand the other side’s strategic thinking and to conceptualise a world where both the US and China are able to competitively coexist, even if in a state of continuing rivalry reinforced by mutual deterrence.”

That task feels particularly urgent in the shadow of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Already the post-World War II order that underpinned the American Century appears to be fraying, with 19th-century-style power politics supplanting it. Russia, moreover, is a relatively weak power, with an economy smaller than that of Italy. Should Moscow succeed, through its diplomacy or its progress on the battlefield, in persuading Beijing to join its efforts in reshaping that order, the global landscape could shift dramatically. Mr Xi has worked harder than his predecessors to court Russian leaders, flattering Mr Putin by implying that the two countries are peers and bolstering joint military exercises.

Until now, however, the Chinese president, Mr Rudd observes, “recognises great value in Moscow being prepared to act far more adventurously than China itself” — not only in Ukraine but in Syria as well. Quietly, however, China has been working to reorganise the strategic chessboard. It invested, for example, more than $90 billion between 2012 and 2017 into building ports and coast guard hubs along a maritime route through the Arctic known as the Northeast Passage that would cut the voyage from Asia to Europe by more than two weeks and nearly 5,000 miles. The route would also allow Chinese forces to avoid bottlenecks like the Straits of Malacca, which are vulnerable to American naval forces.

Mr Rudd structures his book like a white paper or policy brief. We get plenty of good grist for a presidential daily brief; it would have also been nice to hear more of the kinds of tales he might tell over a beer. Almost nobody has enjoyed the kind of access he has had to Chinese officials, and those encounters could have proved as revealing as any intel briefing. He mentions in passing that he once listened to Jiang Zemin, when he was a top party official, belt out a tune from the stage at an empty Sydney Opera House — but dispatches the scene in a sentence or two. He briefly recounts a boozy evening over “much maotai” with several Chinese generals, but we hear little beyond the fact that they displayed a high level of “professional prudence” over the East China Sea.

The core of Mr Rudd’s argument, however, remains unimpeachable: The consequences of a full-scale war with China are almost too grave to contemplate. The American statesman Dean Acheson liked to complain that Americans too often think of foreign policy problems as “headaches” for which they can just “take a powder” and make them go away. Mr Rudd understands better than most that there will be no wishing away of Xi Jinping and his transformative worldview, at least in the short term. The headache is chronic; Americans will need to use all their ingenuity if they hope to manage the pain.

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