The emerging policy of viewing U.S.-China competition as a new cold war is “wrongheaded and counterproductive,” wrote Evan G. Greenberg, executive vice chair of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and the chairman of insurance company Chubb Limited, in an article published in Foreign Policy on Tuesday.
“If the United States wants to create a more favorable balance of power in the face of China’s growing challenge, it will need to adjust its approach,” Greenberg stated in the article titled “Washington’s Playbook for China Must Change.”
Greenberg noted that the U.S. and Chinese economies are deeply interdependent, adding that trade between the countries remained at nearly $700 billion in recent years though the two countries both have tried to reduce dependencies on each other.
Depicting U.S.-China decoupling in technology and critical national security sectors as “selective,” Greenberg wrote that “it would be unwise to attempt to completely disentangle the dense value chains between both countries.”
He went on to argue that such an effort would not only be virtually impossible, but also harmful to the American economy, which relies on “Chinese intermediate goods and capabilities for their products.”
In the article, Greenberg also hinted the “new cold war” policy is not popular as countries around the world are exercising agency to maximize their interests rather than choosing sides.
Taking Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya as examples, he said America’s practice of imposing its governance vision on other countries “is remarkable in its failure.”
Noting America’s global alliance network is its asymmetric advantage in its long-term competition with China, Greenberg wrote that “any actions that devalue our alliances undermine our capacity to compete with China.”
“Specifically, if America organizes its foreign policy around ceaseless confrontation with China, it will find few followers.”
(Cover via CFP)