Not US vs. China; The Significant Issue is Reforms

The rivalry between USA and China has been frequently discussed as the biggest issue of our times. This has been debated extensively in terms of economy, technology, military strength and dominance. How will the two countries face up to each other and what will be the impact of their rivalry on the rest of the world? Will this rivalry lead to a very destructive war despite efforts made to avoid such an eventuality? Or can the two countries agree to co-exist peacefully?

The answers to these questions will depend to a considerable extent on internal reforms within these countries. In fact, from a perspective of world peace (and surely this must be the most important perspective), what is most crucial is not so much the US vs. China rivalry but instead the kind of reforms that can lead to avoiding excessive aggression.

As the USA has gone from one misguided war to another (from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Iran), generating huge costs and massive distress, increasing numbers of thoughtful people within the USA and abroad have been disturbed by the decline of reason-based discourse and decision making. Why has the USA chosen forever wars over increasing welfare and development budgets for high priority tasks within the country? Why are incredibly rude and shocking statements emanating with increasing frequency from some of the highest constitutional positions in more recent times? Why was Iran attacked recently very arbitrarily in the middle of high-level negotiations in Oman? Such questions increasingly trouble people within the USA as well as those outside who are well-inclined towards the country. No satisfactory and clear answers are available.

What is amply clear, however, is that given the responsibilities expected from any country seeking a leadership role that would be willingly accepted by most people of the world, the USA has fallen far short in recent decades. The USA must decide whether it seeks a role of enlightened leadership accepted by most people and countries, or whether it seeks a role of imposed, oppressive leadership based mainly on military strength. The former is sustainable, the latter is not. The USA at present is clearly on the second path, which is the source of all the troubles it has been creating for others as well as for itself. So its people and leaders must move from a path of imposing oppressive leadership to a path of enlightened leadership. The second path will also enable it to improve domestic welfare in many-sided significant ways.

China has registered huge economic and military gains to emerge very fast as the nearest rival of the USA. However these impressive gains are not based on finding any ideal or near perfect new model or path of development. These gains have emerged from an opportunist and shrewd mixing of communist and capitalist systems to optimize the use of certain situations at a particular time of history (such as seizing the market opportunities at a time when the USA was ‘deindustrializing’DeindustrializingThe process of social and economic change caused by the removal or reduction of industrial capacity or activity. in some ways). Such a mix of capitalism and communism has certainly brought gains in certain situations and by clever positioning, but beware of the high possibility of potential ills of both systems also manifesting in due course.

However the more authoritarian and narrow system does not allow for emerging problems to be properly debated and resolved in due course with the passage of time. The result is that intolerably huge pressures can build up behind the scenes and then blow up in ways that are difficult to handle.

While some of the worst problems and shortcomings of the US and other more open societies can be debated quite openly at several levels, such possibilities are much reduced in more closed and narrower systems like China.

Having said this, it must be added that some of the self-correcting capacities of the USA and its allies have also been eroded in recent times, and this is an important part of their decline.

On the whole, however, it is very clear that both USA and China need very important internal reforms for strengthening and improving genuine democracy as well as working out policies that link enhanced internal welfare with more sincere pursuit of the well-being of the entire world. If such sincere reform is taken up, this is likely to result in a situation in which the two great countries are more inclined to accept living in peaceful co-existence with each other, instead of pursuing rivalry in ruinous and destructive ways. This would be ideal for the well-being of the entire world too.