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A S IA

The Gathering Uncertainty

Paul Monk In August, deliv ering the Michael Hintze Lecture at the Univ ersity of Sy dney , Professor John Mearsheim er of the Univ ersity of Chicago, author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics , said: Australians should be worried about Chinas rise, because it is likely to lead to an intense security competition between China and the United States, with considerable potential for war. Moreover, most of Chinas neighbours, including I ndia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and yes Australia, will join with the United States to contain Chinas power. To put it bluntly: China cannot rise peacefully. The title of Professor Mearsheim ers lecture was The Gathering Storm , which was, of course, also the title of the first v olum e of Winston Churchills m ultiv olum e history of the Second World War. I hav e called this article The Gathering Uncertainty , because I disagree with Professor Mearsheim er, but I do not by any m eans for that reason counsel ease or com placency . I will argue that Professor Mearsheim er was correct in ev ery word he used except one: the word cannot. China may not rise peacefully , but this is by no m eans foreordained. There are, indeed, reasons for concern, but the realist fram ework that Professor Mearsheim er uses to dev elop his argum ent is flawed in im portant way s. The consequence is not that we can safely ignore his warnings and rest assured that trade will trum p security concerns and that China will rise peacefully . Rather it is that we need to do ev en m ore careful thinking and dev elop ev en m ore adroit and thoughtful strategies than his outlook would suggest. And this is especially ev ident if we do no m ore than ponder the wise reflections of Winston Churchill, writing in 1 9 4 8, looking back on the antecedents to the Second World War and what he described, with reference to the 1 9 2 0s and 1 9 3 0s, as the gathering storm . I shall, therefore, use Churchills reflections as a touchstone for how to think about where we now stand and the kinds of policies we m ay need to adopt if we are to ensure that China both rises and does so peacefully . First, howev er, I wish to challenge directly one of the fundam ental assum ptions on which Professor Mearsheim ers approach to the m atter is prem ised. Mearsheim ers book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics was published in 2 001 . In Chapter 1 0, Great Power Politics in the Twenty -First Century , he laid out what he described as the fiv e assum ptions on which the realist v iew of the international order of things is based. As a graduate of the Australian National Univ ersity s departm ent of international relations, founded by Hedley Bull, I fully appreciate the basis for these assum ptions. They are, in Mearsheim ers words: States are the key actors in world politics and they operate in an anarchic system; Great powers invariably have some offensive military capability; States can never be certain whether other states have hostile intentions towards them; Great powers place a high premium on survival; and States are rational actors who are reasonably effective at designing strategies that maximize their chances of survival. He then com m ented that, especially since the end of the Cold War, experts of v arious kinds hav e argued that the nature of great power politics has changed in such a way as to prom ise a welcom e peace of a m ore or less Kantian nature in the twenty -first century : Although there are sharp differences am ong these optim ists about the root causes of this purported transform ation, each argum ent is essentially a direct challenge to one of the realist assum ptions described abov e. The only claim that the optimists do not challenge is the claim that states are rational actors (em phasis added). I do not regard m y self as an optim ist and I will not challenge any of Mearsheim ers first four assum ptions. I do, howev er, challenge precisely that assum ption, the fifth, which he say s the optim ists do not challenge. Indeed, I will go so far as to say that the actual tragedy of great power politics is closely bound up with the fact that states are not rational actors, at least not if this term is rigorously defined, as for exam ple in neo-classical econom ics, where rational actors are indiv idual, v alue-m axim ising, inform ation-com puting utilitarian agents with perfect and sy m m etrical access to inform ation. It is one of the crucial sy m ptom s of the weakness in Mearsheim ers v iew of international relations that he would hold the strange assum ption that states behav e in this m anner. But so set is he in this opinion that there is no entry in his index under the term rational actor and none under the nam es Herbert Sim on, Daniel Kahnem an or Am os Tv ersky , perhaps the best-known critics of rational-actor analy sis of hum an behav iour. I believ e that, in holding to this assum ption, Mearsheim er and those who think like him are seriously in error. States are not rational actors . They do not go to war, for the m ost part, out of a rational calculation of costs and benefits. They do so for reasons that are, at best, the product of what Herbert Sim on dubbed a bounded rationality ; they often wav er where they would do better to be decisiv e and persist in courses of action on the basis of num erous cognitiv e fallacies of the kinds identified by Kahnem an and Tv ersky or because of sev ere deficits in cognitiv e efficiency . They also quite certainly do not share perfect or sy m m etrical access to inform ation. The corollary of this is that it is not the rational self-interest of states which driv es them to engage in intense security com petitions and fight wars, but often deeply flawed, ideologically coloured and seriously inform ation-poor calculations of costs and benefits by a shifting com bination of com peting national elites and ignorant popular opinion. This is what Thucy dides showed in his classic history of the Peloponnesian War. It is what history after history has shown regarding the First World War. It is what Winston Churchill dem onstrated with regard to the origins of the Second World War. It is what we m ust bear in m ind with regard to China, if we are to av oid a war with that great and com plex em pire as its wealth and power increase. It is worth underscoring this point, because it has the m ost im portant im plications for how we think about the possibility of confrontation, to say nothing of m ajor war, with China or between China and an Am erican-led alliance at any tim e in the next generation. Let m e repeat: states are not rational actors . Strictly speaking, states do not exist as univocal cognitive agents , that is to say actors with a single m ind which could ev en in principle behav e in a form ally and substantiv ely rational m anner. They consist of institutions of widely v ary ing descriptions and capabilities, of interest groups and agents of influence, of populations and passions, all of which influence the m anner in which that com m only irrational and counter-productiv e thing, security policy in the national interest, is conducted. Such security policy is a witches brew of inputs like that in the cauldron of the hags in Macbeth. It is any thing but a form ally rational calculation of the interest of the polity as a whole based on perfect inform ation and specified utilitarian weightings. Yet only the latter procedure would justify us calling any one or any state a rational actor. This is not, of course, to say that the strategic behav iour of states bears no relation to their surv iv al or perceiv ed adv antages. But between form ally rational pursuit of these and no relation lies a world of difference and m any a griev ous error of policy and statecraft. This and not a fixed assum ption that states necessarily pursue their interests rationally is actually where we need to focus our attentionas rationally and critically as we are ableif we are to av oid tragedies in great power politics. But of course, our efforts will count for little if they cannot be co-ordinated with those of m any others ov er an extended periodand that is enorm ously difficult to accom plish. The failure to accom plish such co-ordination or to sustain it ov er extended periods is the chasm into which international power politics tum bles again and again, to our im m ense collectiv e cost. The m any way s in which ev en the calculations of single states fail the tests of rigorously rational analy sis are exhibited tim e and tim e again in strategic intelligence assessm ents. Consider the m iscalculations on all sides which led to the catastrophic disaster of the First World War; to the series of errors by the Western Allies in the 1 9 2 0s and 1 9 3 0s which m ade possible the resurgence of an arm ed and v engeful Germ any ; to the reckless gam bles by Adolf Hitler which put his opponents out of their reckoning again and again, but finally led to the apocaly ptic Second World War and the utter destruction of Nazi Germ any ; to the judgm ent by

Stalin that Hitler would nev er inv ade the Sov iet Union until he had settled accounts with the British em pire, because he was not a com plete idiot; to the refusal of Israels cabinet and high com m and in 1 9 7 3 to credit the plain ev idence that Egy pt and Sy ria were about to launch a war against it; to the CIAs judgm ent in early 1 9 9 0 that Saddam Hussein would not inv ade Kuwait; or for y ears before 1 9 9 8 that India would not test a nuclear weapon and so on. The list is endless. In short, it is not with the rational calculation of the Chinese state that we should be chiefly concerned in the y ears ahead, but with the possibilities for m isperception, m iscalculation, irrational com m itm ent and strategic error, whether theirs, ours or that of our great and powerful allies. And it is this consideration which m akes international relations both interestingrather than m erely form ulaicand the arena for intractably challenging problem s. In the preface to The Gathering Storm , written in March 1 9 4 8, Churchill reflected that he had been perhaps the only m an who has passed through both the two suprem e catacly sm s of recorded history in high executiv e office. This gav e him an unusually rich perspectiv e on the causes and courses of the First and Second World Wars. It is, therefore, of m ore than passing significance that, when President Roosev elt was wondering what the Second World War should be called, Churchill had responded, the Unnecessary War. There are tim es when, reading theoreticians like Mearsheim er, one gets the im pression that he believ es all wars to be necessary , because deem ed so by the states which fight them ; or because they are a natural and unav oidable consequence of the rational pursuit of self-interest by states under conditions of international anarchy . Yet Churchill wrote of the greatest war of them all that There nev er was a war m ore easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the prev ious struggle. It is this reflection that I want to interpose between Mearsheim ers proclam ation that China cannot rise peacefully and the disposition that y ou m ay hav e with regard to that grim proclam ation. The opening chapter of The Gathering Storm is titled The Follies of the Victors. In what m ight be seen as an anticipation of Mearsheim ers realism , Churchill quotes the French Marshal Foch as say ing of the Treaty of Versailles, in 1 9 1 9 , This is not peace. This is an arm istice for twenty y ears. But Churchill then proceeded to explain that there was nothing inev itable about war recurring after an interv al of twenty y ears. His erudition and wisdom prov ide food for thought in our tim e and his prose is a joy to read, redolent, as Im sure he knew, of the prose of such great English historians as Gibbon and Macaulay . He wrote: Wise policy would have crowned and fortified the Weimar Republic with a constitutional sovereign in the person of an infant grandson of the Kaiser, under a Council of Regency. I nstead, a gaping void was opened in the national life of the German people. All the strong elements, military and feudal, which might have rallied to a constitutional monarchy and for its sake respected and sustained the new democratic and Parliamentary processes, were for the time being unhinged. The Weimar Republic, with all its liberal trappings and blessings, was regarded as an imposition of the enemy. I t could not hold the loyalties or the imagination of the German people. For a spell they sought to cling as in desperation to the aged Marshal Hindenburg. Thereafter, mighty forces were adrift, the void was open, and into that void there strode a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breastCorporal Hitler. Who in their right m ind would v enture to suggest that Hitlers Germ any was a state that pursued its national interest as a rational actor? Few enough, I would like to think. But Nazi Germ any was not m erely a bizarre exception. It sim ply threw into high relief what an abundance of history shows, that states are not in any but the v aguest and m ost rudim entary of senses rational actors and that this is the real source of security dilem m as in international politics. Churchill sum m ed up his argum ent in the following term s: I t is my purpose, as one who lived and acted in these days, to show how easily the tragedy of the Second World War could have been prevented; how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous; how the structure and habits of democratic states, unless they are welded into larger organisms, lack those elements of persistence and conviction which can alone give security to humble masses; how, even in matters of self-preservation, no policy is pursued for even ten or fifteen years at a time. We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bulls-eye of disaster. We shall see how absolute is the need for a broad path of international action pursued by many states in common across the years, irrespective of the ebb and flow of national politics. I t was a simple policy to keep Germany disarmed and the victors adequately armed for thirty years, and in the meanwhile, even if a reconciliation could not be made with Germany, to build ever more strongly a true League of Nations capable of making sure that treaties were kept, or changed only by discussion and agreement. When three or four powerful governments acting together have demanded the most fearful sacrifices from their peoples, when these have been given freely for the common cause, and when the longed-for result has been attained, it would seem reasonable that concerted action should be preserved so that at least the essentials would not be cast away. But this modest requirement the might, civilisation, learning, knowledge, science of the victors were unable to supply. They lived from hand to mouth and from day to day, and from one election to another, until, when scarcely twenty years were out, the dread signal of the Second World War was given It is by way of thoughtful reflection on all these contingencies and dilem m as that I inv ite y ou to consider how all those with a stake in Chinas rise will need to act if that rise is to be peaceful. Today we do not stand at a point strictly com parable with where Churchill stood in 1 9 4 8. We hav e not just com e through a catacly sm , nor do we y et stand at the threshold of a grim Cold War. Som e of the tenacity and v ision and international co-operation the lack of which between the First and Second World Wars he lam ented, ensured that the Cold War did not end in a catacly sm , though m ore than once we cam e perilously close. The twenty y ears that hav e passed since its end hav e seen wide-ranging international co-operation and the expansion of global trade to an unprecedented extent. And y et, looking ahead, we m ight do well all the sam e to ponder Churchills som bre reflections, because the rise of Chinese wealth and power in this context could end in a catacly sm . And, short of a catacly sm , there are all too m any way s for things to go awry , if the m ight, civ ilisation, learning, knowledge and science of the society of states is unable to supply sufficient rationality to ensure that Chinas rise is peaceful. Let m e, therefore, state m y own argum ent as pithily as I can and then expound on why I see things in these term s and what we in Australia m ight m ost effectiv ely do in the circum stances. The dimensions of Chinas economic growth and military acquisitions will constitute an almost unprecedented challenge to global stability over the next twenty years which may lead to serious turbulence and possibly, but not inevitably, to major war. The key contentious word in Mearsheim ers argum ent is the word cannot. The key term in m y own argum ent is almost. Why do I say that Chinas rise presents an almost unprecedented challenge? Quite sim ply because it has fiv e key characteristics which, taken together, will surely m ake it difficult for its rise to be any m ore peaceful than that of other great powers ov er the past 500 y ears: Very rapidly growing econom ic power and weight which could transform it into the worlds single largest econom y within a generation; Very rapid dev elopm ent of m ilitary power across the full spectrum of defensiv e and offensiv e capabilities; A dictatorial and opaque sy stem of gov ernm ent; A deeply ingrained sense of historical dignity , griev ance and entitlem ent; Territorial am bitions which set the security of m any of its neighbours at risk. As the British em pire rose, it was a constitutional m onarchy in which there was far m ore transparency and accountability than there is in China right now, y et it fought m any wars and extended its power around the globe. When the United States of Am erica was rising to continental and then global power it was a dem ocracy com m itted to liberty , y et it built a powerful nav y and took possession of far-flung m aritim e territories in order to project its power, ev en before the First World War. The Japanese em pire posed a form idable challenge to both China and the West in the first half of the twentieth century , but was ov erwhelm ed by the far greater industrial and m ilitary power of a fully aroused United States. The econom ic and m ilitary power of the Sov iet Union turned out to be far less well founded than liberal fear or m illenarian hope had im agined, y et such as it was it had the entire world balanced on a knife edge for half a century . When Japan surged back econom ically after the Second World War it was a disarm ed and dem ocratised state and only residual paranoia in Asia and the United States saw it as likely to pose a direct security threat. But this m ade it an exception and one prem ised on ov erriding Am erican hegem ony and security guarantees. Then there is the case of Germ any , first under Bism arck and the Kaiser, then under Hitler. Germ any had all fiv e of the characteristics I hav e enum erated, both in the lead-up to the First World War and ev en m ore so in the 1 9 3 0s under the Nazi regim e. But what Germ any had in those two periods, China has in spades in the early twenty -first century : it is growing m uch faster, is far m ore opaque and has a m ore deeply ingrained sense of historic griev ance and entitlem ent. Moreov er, when Germ any was rising rapidly in both econom ic and m ilitary term s, a hundred y ears ago, the British em pire was at its peak and the United States of Am erica was also rising v ery rapidly in econom ic term s. But now we see the relativ e econom ic decline of the United States, the

absence of substantial m ilitary power in the EU and indecisiv e leadership in Japan. Meanwhile, Chinas econom y is growing at a com pound rate of 1 0 per cent per annum and its m ilitary expenditures are growing ev en faster. All this should giv e us pause, though it need not for the present induce panic. It is causing growing unease am ong v irtually all of Chinas neighbours, to thoughtful people in strategic and intelligence circles in the United States and to our own defence planners, as was m ade ev ident in the 2 009 Defence White Paper. It is, at least broadly speaking, because of all these considerations that scholars like John Mearsheim er can gain an audience for declaring that Chinas rise cannot be peaceful. Now, I do not wish to suggest too literal an analogy between China now and Germ any under the Kaiser, m uch less under Hitler. China is not Germ any and the strategic circum stances of the 2 01 0s are v ery different from those of the 1 9 1 0s, to say nothing of the 1 9 3 0s. The analogy should, therefore, be taken as a prov ocation to thinking carefully , rather than as the prom pt for leaping to alarm ing conclusions. There is no serious room for doubt, m oreov er, that som e of the finest strategic m inds in China hav e pondered carefully the histories of the defeat of Germ any in both 1 9 1 8 and 1 9 4 5, of Japan in 1 9 4 5 and of the Sov iet Union at the end of the Cold War, and they do not wish to see China suffer sim ilar defeat by m aking ill-considered strategic m ov es in the great gam e in which it is now unam biguously engaged with the United States. Under the leadership that has held sway since the prim acy of Deng Xiaoping and which seem s likely to continue for som e y ears, China has play ed its hand carefully as well as relentlessly . It is play ing a long gam e and in this, at least, it differs from both the Kaiser and Hitler. But China as it is now em erging is actually in certain key respects a more formidable play er than Germ any could ev er hav e been. It is m ore than a decade since Lee Kuan Yew said of Deng Xiaopings resurgent China, This is not just another big play er. This is the biggest play er in the history of m an. In a recent speech under the auspices of the Australia China Business Council, Ross Garnaut declared that China is resum ing its natural and historic role as the greatest power in the world, which has been preponderant for the past two m illennia, except for the brief interlude of Western predom inance since the First Opium War of 1 83 9 -4 2 . He was echoing the claim by Sam uel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations , written a decade or so ago. This claim is both rom antic and m isguided in sev eral way s, but it contains a kernel of truth, which is that for m ore than two m illennia the Chinese em pire has been the single m ost persistently large and powerful territorial state. Why do I say that the idea of its being naturally and historically the worlds num ber one power is rom antic and m isguided? Because it has sev eral tim es ov er those two m illennia fallen into disarray and fragm ented; because ev en at its apogee under the cosm opolitan eighth-century Tang dy nasty it was defeated by the arm ies of Tibet, Korea and the Arab caliphatethe last of these decisiv ely defeating Tang forces at the battle of the Talas riv er in 7 51 , perm anently replacing Chinese power in Central Asia; because in its m ost sophisticated and technologically adv anced form , the Song dy nasty , it was unable to fend off first Khitan and then Mongol inv aders and did not break through to a scientific rev olution despite apparently hav ing m any of the preconditions for doing so; because under the Ming dy nasty it gav e up on the thousand-y ear Chinese attem pt to subdue Vietnam , sent an arm ada into the Indian Ocean only to then turn its back on the world, and built the Great Wall to keep barbarians out, but failed, being defeated and conquered by the foreign Manchus; because the Manchus trebled the size of the old Chinese em pire, by adding Manchuria, Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia and Taiwan, but presided ov er the long, slow decay of Chinas econom ic and m ilitary strength. History alone, therefore, suggests that there is nothing either natural or inev itable about Chinese prim acy in world affairs. In fact, China is rapidly accum ulating what for it are unprecedented presence and potential power on the world stage. In a characteristically pungent essay in the May -June issue of Foreign Affairs , The Geography of Chinese Power, Robert Kaplan wrote that what he called Chinas blessed geography its 9 ,000 m iles of tem perate coastline with m any good, natural harbours, com bined with its v ast continental m ass and strategic location in Eurasiam eans that China will stand at the hub of geopolitics ev en if the country s path toward global power is not necessarily linear. The theoretician of geopolitics Halford Mackinder, in 1 9 04 , identified China, not Russia or Germ any , as the piv otal power in Eurasia and therefore in global geopolitics. In Democratic I deals and Reality (1 9 1 9 ), Mackinder forecast that the English-speaking powers and China would end up guiding the world to a new civ ilisation, neither quite Eastern nor quite Western. There are quite a few v oices now prophesy ing such a dev elopm ent, am ong them Zachary Karabell in his recent book Superfusion. But Robert Kaplan does not for the present see China contributing to any such laudable goal. He declares that: Chinas foreign policy ambitions are as aggressive as those of the United States a century ago, but for completely different reasons Moral progress in international affairs is an American goal, not a Chinese one; Chinas actions abroad are propelled by its need to secure energy, metals and strategic minerals, in order to support the rising living standards of its immense population. Your own v isceral response to that sentence will tell y ou intuitiv ely where y ou stand in regard to this great question. Consider, whatev er y our gut response to Kaplans talk of m oral progress, that Chinas influence, in both hard power and soft power, is spreading far and wide and at a rem arkable pace. Moreov er, Chinas geography is m ore congenial to the expansion and sustainm ent of its power than is that of perhaps any other m ajor power except the United States. And China is growing at this frantic pace at the v ery tim e when the United States is faltering in both econom ic and geostrategic term s. The decade im m ediately after the Cold War saw Am erican prestige at its acm e. The decade after that saw that prestige and Am ericas actual capabilities seriously underm ined by the m isjudgm ents of the White House and the Pentagon and the follies of Wall Street. Those m issteps hav e giv en a considerable boost to an incipient and potentially dangerous hubris in Chinese public opinion and strategic planning. They encourage the thought that Chinas hour is approaching, when it will em erge from beneath the shadow of the West and bestride the world like a colossus as a m atter of right. It is this confluence of circum stances that presents us with the policy and planning challenges we now confront and will hav e to grapple with for m any y ears to com e. Harry Gelber, writing in the Australian on August 1 9 , observ ed that we should not be unduly alarm ed by the plans China has to build three aircraft carrier battle groups and other sophisticated platform s and capabilities, because the United States has far m ore power than this and China will take decades before it can effectiv ely deploy such assets. He m ay be correct, but we would be v ery foolish to rest on our laurels until a form idable power has dev eloped m ature capabilities of this nature. And, in any case, as the prolific and brilliant historian Niall Ferguson rem arked, in an essay in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs under the title Com plexity and Collapse, there are disturbing signs that the underpinnings of Am erican strength hav e been seriously weakened and that decline could be non-linear and fairly dramatic . His central argum ent deriv es from com plexity theory and piv ots on the proposition, When things go wrong in a com plex sy stem , the scale of disruption is nearly im possible to anticipate. He warns that debating the stages of decline m ay be a waste of tim eit is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should m ost concern policy m akers and citizens. To these considerations about the geography of Chinese power, the relativ e decline of the United States, the different geopolitical agendas of the two great powers, and the findings of com plexity theory , there m ust be added y et another reason for us to pause and think hard about the nature of the challenges that we m ay face in the next decade or two. I referred earlier to the great gam e in which China is now engaged with the United States. I rem arked that, unlike Germ any or Japan in the first half of the twentieth century , China is play ing a long gam e. Now, when we think of strategic gam es in the West we tend to think in term s of chess. In China, it is m ore likely to be a gam e called Go or Wei-chi. That m ost people in the Western world, ev en in strategic policy and studies circles, are not ev en acquainted with this gam e is one sy m ptom am ong m any that we hav e giv en insufficient thought to the nature of China as a civ ilisation, a state and a strategic power. In 1 9 6 9 Scott Boorm an, a precocious undergraduate student at Harv ard, study ing applied m athem atics and Chinese, wrote a little book called The Protracted Game: A Wei-Chi I nterpretation of Maoist Strategy. The doy en of gam e theory , Thom as Schelling, com m ented, Iv e seen a num ber of efforts to shed light on strategy by the analy sis of a gam e and this is the first one that really works. It works better applied to Chinas global strategy now, though, than it ev er did to Mao Zedongs strategy . Go differs from chess in a critical respect. Whereas chess is directed at the concentration of forces at a strategic point on a board in order to attack and capture key enem y pieces, in Go the aim is to extend ones control of territory , av oiding direct confrontations, encircling the opponents pieces and, when they are surrounded, sim ply rem ov ing them collectiv ely from the board. The point I wish to m ake is this: we hav e at present an uncanny situation in play , in that the United States and China are m ore and m ore clearly engaged in a great gam e of geopolitics, but they are apparently play ing the gam e in different way s. The United States is play ing chess, while China is play ing Go. Although the gam e is far from ov er, m any things appear now to be going Chinas way , as it were. Now, y ou m ight ask, if I dispute that states are rational actors, how can I claim that these two great states are consciously play ing grand strategic gam es, ev en if they are play ing according to different perceptions of what the gam e is and how to play it? Well, of course, I do not m ean that either state is a unitary rational actor deliberately play ing out a gam e according to a clear set of rules and with an unwav ering goal. Rather, I m ean that, just insofar as the strategic decision-m akers on either side think at all coherently about the interests of their state, they tend to think roughly in term s of these gam es. But m ost of the citizens and leaders of both the United States and China do not think with any coherence at all about grand strategy . They respond to all m anner

of incentiv es, perceptions, passions and distractions. And ev en as between the two sets of strategists, the different perceptions of what gam e is being play ed prov ide rich possibilities for m utual m isunderstanding and strategic m iscalculation. In such a context, accidents will happen and the effects of such accidents can be far greater than any one anticipates. Finally , all of this is occurring am id technological changes of com pletely unprecedented scope and swiftness. The im plications of these changes are alm ost bey ond the grasp ev en of specialists. When I was running the China desk for the Defence Intelligence Organisation in the m id-1 9 9 0s, one of the m ost thoughtful and prescient strategic analy sts with whom I m ade contact was Paul Bracken at Yale Univ ersity . He had written a fascinating paper for the Pentagon called The Arm y After Next. In 1 9 9 9 he published a little book called Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age. In it, he m ade the following opening rem arks: For two hundred years the world has been shaped by the fact of Western military dominance. Gunboats as agents of national power have been supplanted by warplanes and they, in turn, by missiles and satellites and computers, but until very recently all were a monopoly of Europeans and North Americans. Now that monopoly is coming to an end. Missiles carrying atomic and biological warheads will, within the decade, be within the reach of as many as twelve Asian nations, from I srael to North Korea. The world the West has knownconstructed in part for its own conveniencewill change enormously. Whether that change will also be catastrophic is the subject of this book. The decade to which he referred has passed. Much of what he anticipated has started to occur. The ongoing and acute concerns about North Korea, Iran and Pakistan rem ain with us and the United States has been fighting expensiv e and inconclusiv e sm all wars in Afghanistan and Iraq throughout m ost of that decade. But the rise of China is what m ost tellingly resem bles Brackens forecast. Its recent acquisition of Dongfang 2 1 D carrier killer long-range m issiles is but one of m any signals as to the power shift that is under way . Whether it will be catastrophic m ust be our concern. And here I return to m y opening observ ation about whether China can or cannot rise peacefully . Chinas present leadership m ay hav e ev ery intention of seeing their country rise peacefully . Now, it could well be their unexam ined assum ption that this m eans the United States gracefully abdicating its longheld sway in the Western Pacific, starting with the Yellow Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. Howev er, senior Am erican figures, such as the com m ander of Pacific forces, Adm iral Robert Willard; the Chairm an of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm iral Mike Mullen, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hav e all been m aking clear in the past six m onths or so that this is not the intention of the United Statesnor is it the wish of Chinas neighbours. Here is the piv otal consideration that is in play : China will rise peacefully if and only if it accepts certain restrictions on its rise consistent with the preferences and concerns of other powers and pre-eminently those of the United States. It seem s reluctant to accept this, especially with the recent rapid shift in the econom ic relationship between the two great powers. We should rem ind ourselv es, m oreov er, that, as Thucy dides pointed out alm ost two and a half m illennia ago, m ajor wars do not start because a rising power becom es expansiv e. They start because status quo powers choose to resist such expansion. If they do not resist, if they appease and giv e way , the expansiv e power can, indeed, rise peacefully . It is not clear that China will, therefore, rise peacefully . Norand this is crucial to Australian policy debatesis it at all clear that we should wish it to do so, if this entails appeasem ent and the end of Am erican prim acy in the Western Pacific. To think clearly in this m atter necessarily m eans to be able to hold com plex and ev en apparently contradictory ideas in our heads without losing our coherence. Let m e draw an analogy , which I think throws into sharp perspectiv e the kind of challenge we m ay well face in the decade or two ahead of us. In the 1 9 2 0s, there was a great debate in Japan between those who argued that Japan should av oid confrontation with the British em pire or the United States and rise peacefully through co-operation with them , gradually inheriting a secure and powerful place in Asia and the Western Pacific; and those, chiefly in the m ilitary , who argued that Japan could not rise peacefully , but would hav e to confront and defeat the Anglo-Saxon powers sooner or later. We all know how that debate ended. We also know that the strategists in Beijing know how it ended. But what is less well known is that Japan went to war despite there being explicit and detailed warnings that it could not win. In 1 9 2 7 a brilliant nav al analy st called Hector By water, who worked for Frederick Jane of Janes Fighting Ships and at tim es for British Nav al Intelligence, wrote a book called The Great Pacific War. He laid out a scenario in which Japan went to war, starting with a surprise attack on the Am erican Pacific fleet and a blitzkrieg offensiv e against the Philippines and Guam , but was ov erwhelm ed by the United States in a great am phibious island-hopping counter-offensiv e. His was not eccentric thinking; it was m ainstream and professional thinking. The Japanese nav al attach in Washington between 1 9 2 6 and 1 9 2 8 was one Isoroku Yam am oto. He was fluent in English, had studied at Harv ard between 1 9 1 9 and 1 9 2 1 , and had m et By water at the great Washington nav al power conference of 1 9 2 1 . He took a keen interest in The Great Pacific War, not least because he had learned, by 1 9 2 8, that the United States was expending colossal sum s to dev elop a huge nav al facility at Pearl Harbor and was planning to m ov e its Pacific Fleet from southern California to the m iddle of the Pacific Ocean. Shortly after his return to Japan, in March 1 9 2 8, he gav e a lecture at the Im perial Nav y Torpedo School, in Yokosuka, in which he declared that, in the ev ent of a war with the United States, som ething Japanese strategists had been contem plating for alm ost two decades, Japans only chance of v ictory would be to begin with an attack on Pearl Harbor. In short, he was suggesting that Japan adopt precisely the strategy outlined by By water in his book and that Japan actually adopted in Decem ber 1 9 4 1 despite the fact that By waters conclusion had been that Japan would lose such a war. Shortly thereafter, Yam am oto was com m issioned as com m ander of Japans brand new aircraft carrier, the 3 4 ,000-ton Akagi, which By water him self had described as m ore powerful in ev ery way than the largest British and Am erican carriers. Yam am oto represented Japan at the 1 9 3 4 and 1 9 3 53 6 London nav al power conferences and in 1 9 3 9 becam e Com m ander-in-Chief of the Com bined Fleet. In this capacity , although he expressed grav e m isgiv ings to his political m asters about the wisdom of going to war with the United States, he orchestrated the 1 9 4 1 attack on Pearl Harbor and the attem pt to bring the war to a decisiv e outcom e at the 1 9 4 2 battle of Midway . Why do I tell this story ? Because few m ilitary professionals in Japan knew better than Yam am oto the asy m m etries in productiv e potential and latent m ilitary power between Japan and the United States and few had studied m ore closely the thinking of the best nav al strategists in the United States. Yet he becam e the architect and com m ander of the assault on the United States. He was shot down ov er the Solom on Islands in an am bush by Am erican fighters on April 1 8, 1 9 4 3 , based on signals intercepts. Yam am oto was a brilliant, civ ilised and patriotic citizen of his country and y et he took this course of action. We need to ponder the fact that there are Chinese counterparts to the y oung Yam am oto right now, serv ing as attaches and diplom ats and m ilitary strategy instructors and fleet com m anders. It is with their m inds, careers, v isions and capabilities that we should be concerned, as m uch as with any other single aspect of the com plex em erging strategic env ironm ent in which we find ourselv es. Now, all that I hav e said pertains to the world at large and m ight hav e been said to an Am erican or Japanese audience. But we are Australians. And we need to think specifically about the im plications for this country of the rise in Chinese power and the possibility of a precipitous decline in Am erican power or willingness to use it. For the m om ent I shall confine m y self to three key observ ations. First, Australias geography and natural endowm ent are such that we m ay consider it im probable that ev en a m uch m ore powerful China would undertake a conv entional inv asion of this country . The danger is less one of a large-scale m ilitary threat than of the gradual constriction of our freedom to operate in the m anner to which Anglo-Am erican nav al prim acy has long accustom ed us. Second, because our econom ic relationship with China has becom e so great and China has becom e increasingly dependent on supplies of m inerals and energy from this country , we will find ourselv es faced with potentially excruciating policy dilem m as in the ev ent that nav al and diplom atic riv alries in the region increase. Third, as we hav e begun to realise, Chinese influence and efforts to exert influence in our dom estic affairs are increasing. They can be expected to increase appreciably and perhaps exponentially ov er the com ing decade or two. We are ill-prepared to deal with this. The Fitzgibbon affair just ov er a y ear ago was a foretaste of what we can expect. The enorm ous size and talent of the worldwide Chinese diaspora, the im m ense com m ercial and industrial interests generated by Chinas rise and the particularly opaque nature of the Chinese Com m unist Party and its intelligence agencies, will confront countries around the worldour own not leastwith form idable diplom atic, counter-intelligence and public relations challenges. In short, we stand on the threshold of a profoundly uncertain new era in our security affairs. To the extent that China builds what it calls its string of pearls from Hainan to Zanzibar, in em ulation of the fabled exploits of Adm iral Cheng Ho in the early fifteenth century , and seeks to assert sov ereignty ov er the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea and Taiwan itself, Australia will find itself in a m ore com plicated world of trade, diplom acy and security concerns than it has faced in its history . To the extent that Japan, India, Indonesia, Vietnam , the Philippines and Singapore seek to bandwagon with the United States to hedge against such Chinese power, our world will becom e fraught with possibilities for tension and confrontation at m ultiple points. This is what has started to com e about already and we are only at the beginning of the shift. The challenges we faced from Japan in the early 1 9 4 0s and the Sov iet Union during the Cold War were sim ple by com parison. Japan was unam biguously an enem y and the Anglo-Am erican powers v astly stronger. Sov iet intelligence was able to penetrate Western intelligence to an astonishing extent between

the 1 9 2 0s and the 1 9 80s and so-called united front groups sought to exert influence within Western countries during the Cold War. China, by com parison, is unlikely to em ulate Japan in launching a frontal assault on Am erican power and it will hav e considerably m ore scope for expanding soft power, espionage and influence than did the Sov iet Union. On both counts, it presents us with a m ore complex challenge than those earlier ones. We would be v ery naiv e to assum e, for exam ple, that the Chinese intelligence serv ices, which are gigantic, hav e not carefully been placing sleepers and cultiv ating agents of influence here and elsewhere for quite a few y ears already . Despite the rudim entary dev elopm ent of new capacities in ASIO in the past few y ears, we are not equipped to handle this challenge. This should be a m atter of grav e, if thoughtful and reticent concern to all of us. The central thesis with which I began was to take issue with the contention of John Mearsheim er that China cannot rise peacefully . I did so on a basis he seem s not to hav e considered closely . I argued that the problem is not that states are rational actors and that they seek to m axim ise their chances in an anarchic world. Rather, it is that states are not rational actors. Let m e conclude by drawing attention to those characteristics of the Chinese state which could m ost contribute to things going awry and putting us out of our reckoning in the y ears ahead. The Chinese state was ruled by a m aniac of ferocious genius in Mao Zedong until 1 9 7 6 . He was succeeded by a rem arkable and tough-m inded statesm an in Deng Xiaoping, who m ight reasonably be com pared to Bism arck in nineteenth-century Germ any . Like Bism arck, he sought to m ake his country econom ically strong, in the belief that from such strength would com e the wherewithal for an increase in m ilitary power. Like Bism arck, he also sought to suppress effectiv e political opposition to the established order. Indeed, he did so m ore relentlessly and thoroughly than Bism arck did. In Bism arcks case, these policies led to a rapid increase in Germ any s power, but under a leadership that was m onarchical and m ilitaristic, and this m ay reasonably be described as the single m ost im portant cause of the catastrophe of August 1 9 1 4 . In Chinas case, in place of a m onarchy and a m ilitaristic order, there is the Com m unist Party and its dependence for legitim acy on both rapid econom ic growth and increasingly assertiv e nationalism . But the econom ic m odel on which it depends for continuing rapid econom ic growth has alm ost certainly run its course and the dev elopm ent of an alternativ e m odel would appear to require the opening up of dom estic capital m arkets and priv ate consum ption on a scale which is highly likely to lead to sustained and serious challenges to its m onopoly of political power. Its nationalism , at the sam e tim e, runs the risk of leading it into confrontations with its neighbours or the United States from which it m ay find it v ery difficult to back down. In all these circum stances, there is no coherent rational, utility -m axim ising actor who can calculate the odds and guide China wisely . Deng Xiaoping cam e close, but he is long dead and no one in the Party or the PLA now has his stature or authority . So it was in Germ any after the y oung Kaiser dism issed the ageing Bism arck. There are m any way s in which the Com m unist Party could falter in the y ears ahead, and ev en a transition to m ulti-party dem ocracy , should it occur, would not of necessity prov ide stability . Moreov er, the difficulties faced by the United States, which will not quickly be resolv ed and m ay not be resolv ed well at all, add greatly to the uncertainties in the geopolitical equation. There is a growing appearance of gridlock and rancour in the Am erican political sy stem which bodes ill for the Am erican role in world affairs in the near future. The problem we face, in short, is not one of a clear and present danger, but of a gathering uncertainty and the potential for the com parativ e stability we hav e enjoy ed for m any y ears com ing unglued in unpredictable and cascading way s. Those who believ e they can safely predict how the future will play out are sadly ignorant alike of serious history and of cognitiv e science. We cannot predict the future with any certainty and we would be unwise to blithely v enture into it m erely hoping for the best. Rather, we need to take what m easures we can to better equip ourselv es to be able to deal flexibly , intelligently and resourcefully with a highly uncertain future and to appreciate that our great and energetic neighbours in China are, in their own way , endeav ouring to do the sam e. How they do so is rapidly becom ing acutely im portant to us and we m ust, therefore, galv anise our own efforts to understand what they are doing, thinking and im agining. This is an edited version of Paul Monks contribution to the Conversazione on the Rise of China which was held at the Melbourne Club in September.
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