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in a passage that should be inwardly digested not just by American diplomats but also by American businessmen before they land in Beijing, “use diplomacy to weave together political, military, and psychological elements into an overall strategic design.” American diplomacy, by contrast, “generally prefers ...c to be ‘flexible’; it feels an obligation to break deadlocks with new proposals— unintentionally inviting new deadlocks to elicit new proposals.” We could learn a thing or two from the Chinese, Kissinger implies, particularly Sun Tzu’s concept of shi, meaning the “potential energy” of the overall strategic landscape. Our tendency is to have an agenda of 10 different points, each one to be dealt with separately. They have one big game plan. We are always in a hurry for closure, anxiously watching the minutes tick away. The Chinese value patience; as Mao explained to Kissinger, they measure time in millennia.
Such fundamental cultural differences may give rise to conflict with China in the future, Kissinger warns: “When the Chinese view of preemption encounters the Western concept of deterrence, a vicious circle can result: acts conceived as defensive in China may be treated as aggressive by the outside world; deterrent moves by the West may be interpreted in China as encirclement. The United States and China wrestled with this dilemma repeatedly during the Cold War; to some extent they have not yet found a way to transcend it.”
Could the United States and the People’s Republic come to blows again? The possibility cannot be excluded. As Kissinger reminds us, war was the result when Germany rose to challenge Britain economically and geopolitically 100 years ago. Moreover, the key factor that brought America and China together in the 1970s—the common Soviet enemy the Chinese called “the polar bear’—has vanished from the scene. Old, intractable differences persist over Taiwan and North Korea. What remains is “Chimerica,” a less-than-
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