Does the United States need to devise a “containment” strategy for China?

Kennan, in a telegram, presented a clear view of the goals and methods of work of the Soviet Union and assumed that it would eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. He argued that the Stalinist regime’s need to view the outside world from a hostile perspective was a vital excuse “for a dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for atrocities that they did not dare to commit, to the sacrifice they felt obligated to demand. “Containment” became, in the words of Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, “the basis for US strategy toward the Soviet Union throughout the remainder of the Cold War.” Less than a month later, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave a speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he referred to several European countries that were at that time in the “Soviet realm,” and declared that “an iron curtain had slid across the continent.” It casts a shadow over US foreign policy. He came to denounce how his vision of “containment” – driven mainly by political and economic pressure – was replaced by a history of US military deployment around the world. Meanwhile, generations of policymakers have searched for a “Long Telegram” To draw lessons from their own moment, and this is true now as it is at any time during the past three quarters of the century.Last month, the Atlantic Council published what it called a “Longer Telegram,” an article attributed to an anonymous former senior US official, which called for A comprehensive strategy to confront China and for policymakers to remain “laser-focused” on Chinese President Xi Jinping, his “close circle, and the Chinese political context in which they govern.” The report concludes that the US goal should be a scenario where the states continue The United Nations and its close allies will “dominate the regional and global balance of power across all major indicators of power” by the middle of this century. Moreover, the hard-line Chinese president will be replaced by a “more moderate party leadership” and there will be signs that the Chinese public has been ready for a more liberal political system. This is a difficult task, and the “Longer Telegram” newspaper received expected opposition. From different sides. Chinese officials and state media have criticized the study as a “malicious attack,” while some experts in Washington pointed to perceived flaws in its analysis, including an exaggeration of the ideological threat Beijing poses to the global order and an excessive focus on Xi’s profile in the attempt. To express the way China’s mysterious political system works, the anonymous author of the report recognized that times had changed. The author wrote: “When George Kennan wrote The Long Telegram … focusing his analysis on what would ultimately lead to the failure of the Soviet Union, he assumed that the American economic model would continue to succeed on its own.” “The difference between the past and the present is that the assumption is no longer possible. The task at hand goes beyond concern for China’s domestic vulnerabilities, and extends to America’s vulnerabilities as well. Without doing both, the United States will fail.” President Biden and his allies have repeatedly emphasized that their foreign policy begins at But they are also facing a political climate in Washington where talk of great-power rivalry with China is spreading and bipartisan increasing. Nevertheless, many experts – including Kennan’s legacy scholars – warn against applying the same cold war logic to the current challenge. A kind of strategic challenge the United States has never faced before, a peer competitor competing across all dimensions “The world is no longer bipolar,” said Thomas Graham, a former White House adviser on Russian affairs in the George W. Bush administration. To the Cold War dynamic that characterized much of the twentieth century. . “The alternatives to US dominance – or leadership, as Biden wants it – are clearly not worse.” Meanwhile, global crises like the Coronavirus pandemic and climate change are forcing Washington and Beijing to confront the same threats. “All of these problems require collaborative solutions, not unnecessarily deepening antagonisms,” wrote Daniel Nixon, professor of governance at Georgetown University. “When it is adopted as a foundational model for external relations, competition between great powers relegates cooperation to an afterthought, or worse, rejects it as something naive.” “The enduring coexistence of the United States and China requires acceptance of each other’s reality. Flexibility,” Ali Win, a senior analyst at the Eurasia Group, wrote this week. “The Biden administration, then, has a compelling opportunity to present a confident and forward-looking vision of America’s role in the world – a vision in which strategic competition with China is an important component, but not the decisive factor.”