Foreign Affairs, September 2019

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The September 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine has the cover: Autocracy Now, with the images of five men *Zu front and central, flanked by leaders of the Philipines, Hungary to Xi's right and those of Turkey and Russia to Xi's left (so from left to right are Duterte, Orban (of Hungary), Xi, Erdogan and Putin.

Note: Democracy Now!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Now!
(1996- ; an hour-long news program on weekdays)
has always been based in Manhattan. Selected articles (which are locked behind paywall) in the issue are excerpted below. There is no need to read the rest, but the quotations.

(1) Odd Arne Westad, The Source of Chinese Conduct; Are Washington and Beijing Fighting a new Cold War?
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/a ... ces-chinese-conduct

Quote:

"In February 1946, as the Cold War was coming into being, George Kennan, the chargé d'affaires at the US embassy in Moscow, sent the State Department a 5,000-word cable in which he tried to explain Soviet behavior and outline a response to it. A year later, the text of his famous 'Long Telegram' was expanded into a Foreign Affairs article, 'The Source of Soviet Conduct.' Writing under the byline 'X,' Kennan argued * * *

"Today, China's economic power relative to the United States' exceeds what the Soviet Union's relative power by a factor of two or three. Although that growth has slowed, those who believe that China will soon go the way of Japan and fall into economic stagnation are almost certainly wrong. Even if foreign tariffs on Chinese goods stayed high, China has enough of an untapped domestic market to fuel the country’s economic rise for years to come. And the rest of Asia, which is a much larger and more economically dynamic region than Western Europe was at the beginning of the Cold War, fears China enough to refrain from walling it off with tariffs.  It is in military and strategic terms that the competition between the United States and China is hardest to gauge. The United States today has tremendous military advantages over China: more than 20 times as many nuclear warheads, a far superior air force, and defense budgets that run at least three times as high as China’s. It also has allies (Japan and South Korea) and prospective allies (India and Vietnam) in China’s neighborhood that boast substantial military capabilities of their own. China has no equivalent in the Western Hemisphere. * * * Even though the United States currently enjoys far greater military superiority over China than it did over the Soviet Union, Beijing has the potential to catch up much more quickly and comprehensively than Moscow ever could [this will be based on assumption that Chinese economy will not stagnate]. Overall, China is more of a match for the United States than the Soviet Union was when Kennan wrote down his thoughts.

"The US economy is also intertwined with the Chinese economy in ways that would have been unimaginable with the Soviet economy. As Kennan knew well, economically speaking, the Soviets did not need to be contained; they contained themselves by refusing to join the world economy.

"The sources of Chinese conduct, along with the current global role of the United States, point to a rivalry of a different kind than the one Kennan saw coming in 1946 and 1947. The risk of immediate war is lower, and the odds of limited cooperation are higher. But the danger that nationalism will fuel ever-widening circles of conflict is probably greater * * * Even though the pattern of conflict between the United States and China will look very different from the Cold War, that doesn’t mean that Kennan’s advice is irrelevant.

Note:
(a) The magazine's introduction to the author: "is Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and the author of The Cold War; A world history. [New York: Basic Books, 2017]"

(b) Between quotations 2 and 3 is a heading "PLUS ÇA CHANGE."
(i) plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plus%20ça
(ii) French-English dictionary:
* plus (adv): "more" (besides additional definition as a noun masculine to mean the plus + sign)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plus
* ça (pronoun): "it"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ça
* change (verb): : "third-person singular present subjunctive of changer [English: change]
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/change
* même (adj): "(used before the noun) same"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/même
* chose (noun feminine; from Latin [noun feminine] cause [cause or thing]): "thing"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chose
   ^ English has the noun chose (from French, meaning "thing") also, but is used only in the legal term "chose in action." See section 1 Chose in action in
     chose
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chose

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(2) Kurt M Cambell and Jake Sullivan, Competition Without Catastrophe; How America can both challenge and Coexist with China.
("Despite the many divides between the two countries, each will need to be prepared to live with the other as a major power. The starting point for the right US approach must be humility [read: little (influence)] about the capacity of the decisions made in Washington to determine the direction of long-term developments in Beijing")

My comment: Mr Cambell was an assistant secretary (2009-2013) in the Obama administration, which refused X's proposal for a "New Type of Major Power Relations" or sphere of influence for each. Trump is even less likely to accept either. So there is no need to read this article, which is dead on arrival.

(3) Chad P Bown and Douglas A Irwin, Trump's Assault on the Global Trading System; And why decoupling from China will change everything.
("If Trump becomes a one-term president, the next administration wukk have an opportunity to reverse many of the predecessor's trade policies * * * Although many of Trump's policies can be reversed, the tariffs on Chia are a game changer. Any future administration would have a difficult time removing them without sizable concessions from the Chinese leadership and some way of alleviating the heightened national security fears that now dominate the bilateral relationship. A Future Democratic administration may be even disinclined to change course. Many Democrats opposed to the TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership, because American unions oppose free trade in general, which caused loss of manufacturing jobs] and broadly support the president's anti-China stance. In May p2019]m Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, tweeted his support for Trump o China, urging him to 'Hang Tough' and not to cave in to a bad deal. More than a decade ago, Schumer and his Senate colleagues supported slapping even higher tariffs on Chinese goods than the ones Trump has imposed, on the ground that China was keeping its currency artificially low to boost exports. * * * The fall of Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism opened up Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to global markets. The reforms of Deng Xiaoping did the same for China. But only in the unipolar moment, which began in 2001, when China joined the WTO, were open markets truly global.. Now, the period of global capitalism may be coming to an end. What many thought was the new normal [global capitalism] nay turn out to have been a brief aberration")