![]() ![]() ![]() Is there any equivalence however between the Stalinist Soviet Union’s conduct and Socialist China’s today? Don’t the drivers of China’s external conduct point, in fact, to a different set of outcomes? And which, in turn, should point towards a different set of ideas and strategies to cope with China?Ĭomparing Kennan’s Soviet Union to present-day China The State Department paper may make for interesting reading. Kennan had ascribed Soviet conduct, too, to its despotic Tsarist inheritance, with Marxism-Leninism serving as a moral and intellectual fig leaf. Like Kennan, the State Department authors reach back to China’s behavioral drivers in the pre-1911 imperial era: “The defining component of China’s conduct” derives from the Party’s “hyper-nationalist convictions” which are “not drawn from the Marxist-Leninist playbook”, the authors argue, but from traditional Chinese thought as well as its 21 st century model of authoritarian governance and economic dependency-creation around the world. response, based on the supposed motives of the Chinese Communist Party. Like Kennan, the State Department paper sets out an all-encompassing U.S. The most notable of these attempts is a 72-page document, The Elements of the China Challenge (with a key chapter titled The Intellectual Sources of China’s Conduct ), authored by the Trump administration’s State Department in November 2020. Its brevity, insight and rigor were irresistible and ‘containment’ effectively became the geopolitical doctrine of the Cold War age.Īgainst the backdrop of the meteoric geopolitical rise of China and the significant deterioration of U.S.-China ties, many commentators have tried to write the Chinese equivalent of The Long Telegram. Kennan did not intend the essay to be a comprehensive statement of national strategy but it quickly became one. Is there any equivalence however between the Stalinist Soviet Union’s conduct and Socialist China’s today? Boxed within its limited geographic sphere of influence, the innate deficiencies of the Soviet polity would in time weaken its own national potential and cripple the governing regime. The Kremlin was uniquely attentive, Kennan argued, to the underlying cost-benefit equation of its revolutionary adventures overseas. In it, Kennan advised his countrymen to implement a long-term policy that was designed to confront “Russian expansive tendencies … with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world”. The word ‘containment’ would enter the lexicon later in Kennan’s 1947 essay, The Sources of Soviet Conduct. ![]() Rather, America needed to remain self-confident and true to its values, relate to Moscow without fear or favor, and offer a constructive vision of an alternative world that people would prefer to live and prosper within. With such an insecurity-ridden regime that was determined to engage in a “patient and deadly struggle for total destruction of a rival power” to mask its internal weaknesses, good relations were impossible. The Stalinist dictatorship, in Kennan’s view, was only the latest in a “long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who ha relentlessly forced country on to ever newer heights of military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally weak regimes”. The Long Telegram, as it came to be famously known, was succinct and hard-hitting. It instantly struck a chord in Washington as the administration grappled to come to terms with the Soviet Union’s intransigent ways in the aftermath of World War II. The telegram contained his deduction of the philosophical and conceptual drivers of the post-War Stalinist worldview. SUGGESTED READING Huawei and the Great Decoupling By Nigel Inkster75 years ago, a young American diplomat in Moscow by the name of George Kennan dispatched a 5,300-word telegram to his superiors in which he set out practical suggestions for future U.S. Proxy wars and military threats will not work with China, especially now America is no longer at the top, writes Sourbah Gupta. The parallels are obvious but China is not the USSR and Washington cannot revert to Cold War thinking. Two decades after the fall of the USSR, there is a new Eastern, Communist challenge to American world dominance.
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