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Can the United States afford to push Pakistan over the edge? If not, we must find a way to balance our clear interest in defeating al-Qaeda and the Taliban against Pakistan’s continued stability—including our relationship with Pakistan’s government, military and citizens. Dennis Blair, forced to resign last year as director of national intelligence, has suggested coordinating drone strikes much more closely with Islamabad.
In the longer run, China’s rise will clearly be a historic challenge to the United States. Yet, while administration officials talk frequently about China in domestic contexts, the president’s policy toward Beijing is fundamentally incoherent.
Two recent books, Henry Kissinger’s On China and Aaron Friedberg’s A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia, suggest two very different interpretations of Chinese conduct and propose alternative American responses. Kissinger views China as a rising but thus far moderate power and warns against creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that could lead to zero-sum competition between Beijing and Washington. He argues that such rivalry could lead to a pre-World War I situation with potentially devastating consequences for both nations and for the rest of the world. Friedberg ridicules this approach, arguing that the United States should seek to democratize China and, if this does not succeed, should practice assertive containment. In his view, if the World War I analogy has any value, it is in demonstrating that the British were too timid in responding to Germany’s rise.
Kissinger and Friedberg offer coherent proposals that are mutually exclusive. Kissinger’s is much more persuasive to me, but there is a choice—and America must make a decision. Accordingly, it is quite troubling to see the Obama administration trying to have it both ways: building a cooperative relationship with Being while visibly siding with China’s neighbors in every dispute. At the same time,
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