The “longest telegram”, the umpteenth document that reels off the Washington-Beijing rivalry, combines high claims with mediocre analytical skills. But it perfectly reflects the moment America is going through.
The Oozlum is an Australian folk creature. Legend has it that, when it is scared, this bird begins to fly in smaller and smaller circles, so that it ends up crashing into itself. A similar self-referential drive runs through the United States. From now on, the country seems to be looking for its future in the past, being that its main cultural bets – superhero movies, remakes hollywodians – and politics –Donald Trump copying slogans from Ronald Reagan; Joe Biden promising a return to the age of Barack Obama– intend to recreate some happy Arcadia.
It was a matter of time until the trend affected American strategic thinking. The Atlantic Council – a recognized think tank of international relations – and the journalistic portal Politico have just published, jointly and with great fanfare, an anonymous document on the US-China rivalry. It is titled “The Longest Telegram,” in a nod to the “Long Telegram” that George Kennan sent from the US Embassy in Moscow at the dawn of the Cold War. Magazine Foreign Affairs he published it in 1947, under the signature “X” (Kennan, then a mid-level diplomat, needed to remain anonymous). This diagnosis – which predicted an eventual implosion of the Soviet Union due to its internal contradictions – is considered the cornerstone of the containment doctrine by which the US and its allies encircled the USSR, without trying to defeat it in their own sphere of influence. In the end, the Soviet order collapsed due to internal contradictions.
Telegram 2.0 is written with more pretense and less aptitude. Its author is, according to think tank Atlanticist, “a high government official [estadounidense] with deep experience [sobre China]”. There does not appear to be any reason to remain anonymous, beyond the curiosity that perhaps the comparison with Kennan provokes. It is not a telegram either, because in 2021 nobody writes telegrams. But it is “longer”: 85 pages, with an executive summary that covers almost as much as Kennan’s entire missive.
Hammer, screw, punching
According to the report, China – not the climatic disasters, economic crises or new epidemics that the future holds – is “the most important challenge” for the US and the democratic world in the 21st century. A rival at the height of the former USSR, against whom – due to the economic power of Beijing, which Moscow never acquired – containment will not be enough. A “more granular” approach is urgently needed. The plan is to “focus all the answers” around the figure of Xi Jinping, president since 2013 and alleged architect of the Chinese ideological and geopolitical drift towards more aggressive positions. If Xi and his closest associates are displaced from power, Washington will be able to maintain its global leadership.
This is the author’s idea-force, to which he returns eagerly. This is an extravagant claim. Xi is the most ambitious Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping, but its attitude would not be understandable without an economic takeoff or a military rearmament that precedes it. In international politics, a state’s intentions are largely determined by its capabilities. And Chinese capabilities accumulate four decades getting stronger. The text exclusively attributes to Xi intentions that he shares with the rest of the CCP.
The reasoning is doubly confusing. It is often said of American foreign policy that to the man with a hammer – the world’s largest defense budget – all problems look like nails – that is, opportunities for the Pentagon to intervene. Recognizing that containment against China will not work, and then circumscribing the problem to the character of the Chinese president, is like accepting that a hammer is useless for driving screws … but instead of changing it for a screwdriver, proceed to punch screws.
The fiction that the US problem begins and ends with Xi is supported by fanciful arguments. The text contrasts the Communist Party of China (CCP) –which would be a realistic monolith, capable of appreciating reality with pragmatism- with the fanatic who runs its reins, promoter of a return to the more ideological Marxism-Leninism. To affirm something like this it is necessary to understand little about Marxism-Leninism and ignore a lot about Xi’s relationship with his party, where there is resentment towards his centralization of power, but also a tacit recognition that the next decade presents immense challenges, which require a strong and cohesive leadership.
It is not the only paragraph in the report in which stereotypes come to the rescue of the analysis. America, a luminous “city on a hill”, cannot accept Chinese hegemony because it “would degrade its soul”. Ultimately, Americans do not need high strategy but coaching: they must “believe in themselves” (self-belief) to maintain its leadership in the stormy waters of global politics. The reader will discover that democracy is not incompatible with other “Confucian cultures” such as Japan and South Korea. That the Chinese are tenacious people but “respect the force”, and that their strategic culture predates Carl von Clausewitz. To illustrate this ancient truth, the text quotes The Art of War from Sun Tzu.
When it is not passing through the gardens of Orientalism, the very long telegram states the obvious. The confrontation with China requires coordinating the different branches of the US administration, as well as close collaboration between its two major parties and the maintenance of international alliances. The pillars that underpin US hegemony are the international position of the dollar, technological innovation, its military preponderance, and “values” (democratic, etc.). The most heterodox proposal of the text is to redirect the relationship with Russia to make it swing against China, in the line proposed by thinkers of the realist school such as Stephen Walt y John Mearsheimer.
Reflexivity without nostalgia
It is surprising that such a self-referential text is incapable of reflecting on the American trajectory itself. The omens about instability in Xi’s CCP are common – in 2015, for example, the sinologist David Shambaugh he bet his prestige on an imminent collapse of the party – but they never come true. US efforts to replace nagging leaders with more flexible ones often fail: they reinforce the former at the expense of the latter, portrayed as Washington’s puppets. For example, a button called Venezuela.
The highlights of the lengthy telegram are, in fact, those in which China is accused of doing exactly the same as the US. Not just in terms of intrusive foreign policy, but in their own domestic policies. Beijing, the text explains, has serious problems with growing economic inequality, waste and oppression of its ethnic minorities.
It is true that internal prosperity and stability are essential to stand out in the international arena. Also that China accumulates challenges on this front, derived from an economic model that prioritizes exports over domestic consumption and welfare. But the corollary is that the United States should focus on building internal strength, rescuing a working and middle classes laminated by decades of economic inequality. In short, recover a strength derived from their internal situation, instead of “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy”, as he criticized John Quincy Adams exactly two centuries ago.
In the twilight of the American empire, not Minerva’s owl, bearer of wisdom, takes flight, but a bird that insists on flying against its own rear. Nostalgia cannot be the guiding principle of a great power in the 21st century.
–
