Why the United States should help China get more involved in world affairs

Now that the election is over we can get back to thinking about the future, and that includes thinking about China under its new leader, Xi Jinping. Last Sunday the New York Times ran a provocative piece suggesting that Xi’s close ties with the Chinese military will make him a "force to contend with." The article also quoted a a Chinese academic, Jin Canrong, saying that Washington needs to make room for China’s rising power. In his words: "China should shoulder some responsibility for the United States and the United States should share power with China." U.S. elites won’t like it, he says, but "they will have to accept it."

Well, count me as one member of the U.S. elite that would like to see China shoulder more burdens (emphasis on that last word). Instead of focusing lots of effort on confronting China directly, a smarter strategy would be to saddle China with the same sort of burdens that U.S. elites have so eagerly taken on in recent years. How about letting Bejing try to fix Afghanistan, or encouraging them handle a post-Assad mess in Syria? Or perhaps China can show its diplomatic mettle by dealing with the Somali pirates, global narcotics traffickers, and the recurring crises in Sudan. Not to mention North Korea.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying we should helping China gain lots of influence in places that are of vital strategic importance, though we ought to recognize that we won’t be able to prevent China from gaining influence as its power rises. Rather, I’m saying that smart great powers pass the buck to others when they can (including their allies) and try to maneuver potential adversaries into taking on costly burdens that bring few benefits. During the Cold War, the U.S. wisely invested in rebuilding and protecting the industrial areas of Europe and Japan, and wisely forged close ties with a number of Persian Gulf oil producers. It erred by squandering resources on a lot of minor conflicts in the developing world; fortunately for Americans, the Soviet Union followed suit and wasted money it didn’t have on its own feckless clients and profitless quagmires (e.g., Afghanistan).

The lesson for today is obvious: the outcome of a future Sino-American rivalry will be partly based on which country manages its economy best (because that it is the ultimate source of national power). It will also depend on which state can elicit useful support from other important countries.  But it will also be affected by which nation gets stuck defending allies that aren’t worth much and which one gets bogged down trying to solve intractable and costly problems in places that ultimately don’t matter very much in geopolitical terms. Winning the competition to stick others with costly burdens requires more brains than brawn, and a capacity to spot a quagmire before you’re in it. The United States used to be pretty good at that, and it’s a skill we would do well to rediscover in the years ahead.