Restoring America's technological supremacy

At PJ Media, Spengler reviews a book by Graham Allison entitled Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? Spengler writes,

Allison makes the case for appeasement. If you want peace, I counter, prepare for war. That means restoring America's technological supremacy.

...A professor and outgoing director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School, Allison can’t be faulted for timing. In July and August of this year, North Korea’s tests of nuclear-capable missiles with range sufficient to strike American territory put the China problem at the top of our strategic agenda: apart from a military confrontation no one wants, America seems to have no alternative but to ask China to use its good offices to restrain North Korea. As a result, China has more influence in matters that bear on vital American interests. In an August 2017 Wall Street Journal essay that drew public praise from National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Henry Kissinger argued for strategic cooperation with China in the Korean peninsula. McMaster distributed a dozen copies of Allison’s book to senior National Security Council staff earlier this year.

...“Many Americans,” he adds, “have sought refuge in the belief that for all its size and bluster, China’s success is still essentially a story of imitation and mass production.” In fact, “China will surpass the U.S. to become the world leader in research-and-development spending by 2019.”

Allison concludes, “In the three and a half decades since Ronald Reagan became president, by the best measurement of economic performance, China has soared from 10 percent the size of the US to 60 percent in 2007, 100 percent in 2014, and 115 percent today.”

If the current trend continues, China’s economy will be a full 50 percent larger than that of the US by 2023.

Allison observes that China already possesses surface-to-ship missiles that can destroy American aircraft carriers hundreds of miles from its coast, diesel-electric submarines that can run silently on battery power, and satellite-killer missiles.

Allison raises the prospect of a trade war with China that might lead to a shooting war. This is possible, but also most unlikely, for the simple reason that China is prepared to make tactical concessions in the service of longer-term strategic objectives. Beijing does not want to drop the American frog into hot water, but rather to boil it gradually. Nothing would please China more than for the United States to approximate the export profile of Brazil, concentrating on agriculture, extraction, and basic industries, while China dominates high-tech manufacturing.

China can innovate, as Graham Allison reminds us, but it should be added that China cannot innovate nearly as well as the United States. American ingenuity backed by the resources of American government and industry created virtually all the new technologies of the past half-century. We should make China cautious to test us out of fear that American innovation will neutralize their enormous investments in high-tech manufacturing.

America should not fight a trade war with China over declining industries like steel, and should not conjure the specter of rebel provinces by promoting Taiwan’s independence. But we should make China believe that it cannot overtake America’s technological edge for a very long time to come, and fear that American innovation will send its vast investments in existing technologies to the scrap heap.

If we do not rise to China’s challenge, then Allison’s approach will become the default response. We will in fact have no choice but to accept Chinese economic supremacy, including a global lock on manufacturing and trade in high-tech electronics. Our living standard will fall and we will be vulnerable to foreign military threats. Those are the implications of the book that now sits atop the desk of the National Security Council’s senior staff. One would hope and pray that the United States of American can do better.

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