Глобальна економіка

11.4. США та Китай: національні стратегії і можливі сценарії відносин

США. The National Security Strategy provides a vision for strengthening and sustaining American leadership in this still young century. It clarifies the purpose and promise of American power. It aims to advance our interests and values with initiative and from a position of strength [7, c.29].

Barack Obama, the President of the United States states that “America’s growing economic strength is the foundation of our national security and a critical source of our influence abroad. Since the Great Recession, we have created nearly 11 million new jobs during the longest private sector job growth in our history. Unemployment has fallen to its lowest level in 6 years. We are now the world leader in oil and gas production. We continue to set the pace for science, technology, and innovation in the global economy.

We also benefit from a young and growing workforce, and a resilient and diversified economy. The entrepreneurial spirit of our workers and businesses undergirds our economic edge. Our higher education system is the finest in the world, drawing more of the best students globally every year. We continue to attract immigrants from every corner of the world who renew our country with their energy and entrepreneurial talents.

Globally, we have moved beyond the large ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that defined so much of American foreign policy over the past decade. Compared to the nearly 180,000 troops we had in Iraq and Afghanistan when I took office, we now have fewer than 15,000 deployed in those countries. We possess a military whose might, technology, and geostrategic reach is unrivaled in human history. We have renewed our alliances from Europe to Asia.

Any successful strategy to ensure the safety of the American people and advance our national security interests must begin with an undeniable truth - America must lead.

Even as we meet these pressing challenges, we are pursuing historic opportunities. Our rebalance to Asia and the Pacific is yielding deeper ties with a more diverse set of allies and partners. When complete, the Trans-Pacific Partnership will generate trade and investment opportunities - and create high-quality jobs at home - across a region that represents more than 40 percent of global trade. We are primed to unlock the potential of our relationship with India. The scope of our cooperation with China is unprecedented, even as we remain alert to China’s military modernization and reject any role for intimidation in resolving territorial disputes. We are deepening our investment in Africa, accelerating access to energy, health, and food security in a rapidly rising region. Our opening to Cuba will enhance our engagement in our own hemisphere, where there are enormous opportunities to consolidate gains in pursuit of peace, prosperity, democracy, and energy security.

On all these fronts, America leads from a position of strength. But, this does not mean we can or should attempt to dictate the trajectory of all unfolding events around the world. As powerful as we are and will remain, our resources and influence are not infinite. And in a complex world, many of the security problems we face do not lend themselves to quick and easy fixes. The United States will always defend our interests and uphold our commitments to allies and partners. But, we have to make hard choices among many competing priorities, and we must always resist the over-reach that comes when we make decisions based upon fear. Moreover, we must recognize that a smart national security strategy does not rely solely on military power. Indeed, in the longterm, our efforts to work with other countries to counter the ideology and root causes of violent extremism will be more important than our capacity to remove terrorists from the battlefield.

The challenges we face require strategic patience and persistence. They require us to take our responsibilities seriously and make the smart investments in the foundations of our national power. As Americans, we will always have our differences, but what unites us is the national consensus that American global leadership remains indispensable. We embrace our exceptional role and responsibilities at a time when our unique contributions and capabilities are needed most, and when the choices we make today can mean greater security and prosperity for our Nation for decades to come [7].

КИТАЙ. The Politburo, headed by Xi Jinping, emphasized the severity of threats facing China’s national security. On January 23, 2015 the Politburo of the Communist Party of China (CPC) adopted the outline of a national security strategy. Chinese media reports did not go into detail about the strategy, but underlined the sense of urgency running through the document. The new strategy, without going into specifics, warned of “unpredictable” and “unprecedented” dangers facing China, both at home and abroad. To face these challenges, “national security must be under the absolute leadership of the CPC’s efficient and unified command.” While Xinhua’s (Chinese media) official summary didn’t provide details, it gave a general sense of the issues Beijing is most concerned about: a shifting international environment; profound economic and social changes domestically; proposed reforms entering a critical period; and a wealth of “social contradictions.” Notice that the vast majority of these concerns are domestic issues, continuing a longstanding tradition wherein Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders see China’s greatest challenges coming from within. In fact, the bulk of the Xinhua piece focused not on the national security strategy, but on the CCP’s determination to continue to fight against “undesirable work styles,” a key part of the anticorruption campaign.

That doesn’t mean China is unconcerned with external affairs, however. The Politburo announcement vows that China, even while seeking to sure its own national interests, will “promote the common prosperity of all countries.” As part of this, China continues to have three main focal points: “great power relations,” the security environment in China’s immediate neighborhood, and cooperation among developing countries. The Politburo also pledged that China will “proactively participate in regional and global governance,” a tendency that was on display in 2014 as China set the agendas for the APEC Summit, CICA, and even the BRICS Summit.

Interestingly, the Xinhua summary did not specifically mention any of the non-traditional security challenges facing China. From cyber attacks to terrorism, China’s government has been increasingly calling attention to these new threats. Strategies for dealing with these issues will be a key part of China’s national security strategy, whether or not those sections are made available to the public.

It’s also clear that China will continue to reform the way its bureaucracy handles national security. After taking power, the President of the People´s Republic of China Xi Jinping moved quickly to consolidate control over national security affairs. The creation of a new national security commission (headed by Xi himself) was announced at the Third Plenum in November 2013. The new commission unites the various threads of national security, both domestic and foreign, under the authority of one organization.

At its meeting today, the Poliburo emphasized the need to continue revamping China’s national security apparatus, namely by bringing it under unified control. China must “hold fast to a centralized, unified, highly efficient, authoritative leadership system of national security work,” the Politburo said. The CCP’s vision is to “create a high-quality, specialized national security team.” Xi himself intends to “directly lead China’s political security, economic security, and homeland security” - setting him apart from his predecessors. As the threats facing China grow more dire, Xi is insisting upon ever more control of China’s security environment [8]. (Xi Jinping is also the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and the Chairman of the Central Military Commission. Xi holds the top offices of the party and the military, in addition to being the head of state through the office of President, he is sometimes informally referred to as China´s "paramount leader". As General Secretary, Xi is also an ex officio member of the Politburo Standing Committee, China´s de facto top decision-making body) [9].

In April 2015 Kevin Rudd, Former Australian Prime Minister, published his Summary Report offering the scenarios for U.S.-China relations [10].

“When China’s GDP, after decades of rapid economic growth, and despite recent slowing, eventually surpasses that of the United States over the next decade, it will be the first time since George III that a non-Western, non- English-speaking, non-liberal democratic state will become the largest economy in the world. This will reflect a profound shift in the center of global geoeconomic gravity. And with this shift in economic power there also comes inevitably a shift in political power. We have seen spectacular evidence of this in recent times with the last-minute stampede of political support from Western governments around the world to become founding members of China’s proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), in defiance of Washington’s objections.

Notwithstanding this gradual shift in the global distribution of economic power, over the course of the same decade the United States will nonetheless remain the dominant regional and global military power, and by a massive margin. While China’s increasing defense spending will continue to close the gap, there is no serious prospect of it reaching military parity with the U.S. before mid-century, if at all. China, like the rest of the world, will remain justifiably mindful of America’s overwhelming military power. This is a core assumption in Chinese strategic thinking [10, Introduction].

The shifting balance of economic power is also beginning to be seen globally, where China’s economic presence in Africa, Latin America and Europe also challenges the long-standing economic primacy of the United States. China’s growing global economic and political role will also begin to reshape international norms, rules and institutions. It will reverberate across geopolitics, global trade, investment, capital flows, reserve currency status, climate change, other environmental challenges and global people movements. And it will also influence the great questions of war and peace in the decades ahead [10, c. 2].

There is a range of different scenarios for U.S.-China relations. The difficulty lies in the fact that these are very much shaped by different assumptions, different variables and their interaction with one another. Nonetheless, given what we know, a number of broad scenarios suggest themselves for the decade ahead.

First, we can imagine a cooperative scenario in which the dynamics of an increasingly globalized economy, and growing interdependencies between the United States and China across multiple policy domains, encourage both leaderships to: avoid any possibility of armed conflict; focus on their respective domestic policy priorities; and maintain a geopolitical status quo in the region. This scenario could also feature more concerted action on individual global challenges like climate change.

A second more collaborative scenario is possible, one which resembles a more ambitious and activist version of the first scenario above. In this, both Beijing and Washington conclude that, in order to deal with a range of underlying, structural difficulties in the relationship, they must not only manage their differences, but also collaborate in difficult policy domains to resolve them. This might include: a bilateral or multilateral agreement on cyber security; an agreed strategy on North Korea with the objective of achieving the denuclearization of the peninsula; and a joint determination to rejuvenate the G20.

Third, a competitive scenario in which fundamental differences are managed, but not resolved. In this case, China and the United States would compete for strategic influence across Asia and around the world, with both sides accelerating their military preparedness to guard against the possibility of long-term conflict.

Fourth, a confrontational scenario, which sees Asia dividing between groupings increasingly aligned to either Beijing or Washington because creative ambiguity on both security and economic issues on the part of regional states is no longer tenable. In such a scenario, incidents in the East and South China seas would increase and escalate to the point that conflict between China and a regional friend or ally of the United States would become increasingly conceivable. A fully internationalized RMB would begin to challenge the privileged status of the USD as one of a number of global reserve currencies. Globally, the contest between China and the United States would become increasingly ideological between their respective democratic capitalist and state capitalist models.

Fifth, and last of all, there is the implosion scenario. In this hypothetical future, political tensions and structural economic imbalances within the Chinese system would ultimately fracture, causing China to comprehensively and radically adjust its national development strategy.

National political leadership in both Beijing and Washington, and the leadership they choose to deliver to the future direction of their bilateral relationship, can have a major, and possibly decisive, effect on which of these scenarios, or blend of scenarios, becomes the more probable. There is nothing determinist about the future relationship between China and the United States. It is a matter for leaders to decide on an approach, and to execute it, either conjointly or separately. That is why the narrative they use to describe their relationship to each other, and to their respective political constituencies, is important. And that is where the current U.S.-China relationship is lacking [10, с.38-39].