By James R. Holmes
What’s in a word? Quite a lot, sometimes. Exhibit A: “management.” U.S. officials and pundits oftentimes talk about “managing” China’s rise to great power. Are they guilty of hubris – the outrageous arrogance that the Greeks of classical antiquity insisted goes before a fall? To what extent may one nation oversee another’s rise to great power?
Good question. One of my department’s gray-haired eminences raised it during a recent faculty meeting. His point of departure was a famous – or was it infamous? – Pentagon memorandum compiled in 1992 under the supervision of Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Written shortly after the Soviet Union’s demise and leaked to the press, the draft Defense Planning Guidance enjoined the United States to “endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union and Southwest Asia.”
The language in which the Pentagon document was phrased set the foreign-policy community atwitter. Sen. Robert C. Byrd pronounced it “myopic, shallow and disappointing.” For Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. the memo represented “literally a Pax Americana.” Biden prophesied that “It won’t work. You can be the world superpower and still be unable to maintain peace throughout the world.” Today, though, the idea that the United States should supervise the emergence of China, India, or some other new contender occasions scarcely a murmur. It may now be woven into the assumptions protagonists bring to strategic debates. It’s an axiom we no longer think to question.
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