Andrew Nathan discussed Henry Kissinger’s On China and Aaron Friedberg’s A Contest for Supremacy in a review article for Foreign Affairs. Nathan argues that Kissinger and Friedberg both exaggerate Chinese power to make the case for their respective calls for accommodation and confrontation, and says that Chinese power is not as great as many suppose:

By focusing on intentions, Friedberg, like Kissinger, leaves out any serious accounting of China’s capability to achieve the goals that various writers propose. Such an audit would show that China is bogged down both internally and in Asia generally. At home, it devotes enormous resources, including military ones, to maintaining control over the two-fifths of its territory that comprise Xinjiang and greater Tibet, to keeping civil order throughout the densely populated and socially unstable Han heartland, and to deterring Taiwan’s independence. Around its borders, it is surrounded chiefly by two kinds of countries: unstable ones where almost any conceivable change will make life more difficult for Chinese strategists (such as Myanmar, North Korea, and the weak states of Central Asia) and strong ones that are likely to get stronger in the future and compete with China (such as India, Japan, Russia, and Vietnam). And everywhere on its periphery, on land and at sea, China faces the powerful presence of the United States. The U.S. Pacific Command remains the most muscular of the U.S. military’s six regional combatant commands, after the Central Command (which is managing two ongoing wars), and it continues to adjust its strategies as China’s military modernizes.

All of this seems right, which is one more blow to the Friedberg-citing Paul Ryan‘s warnings about the possibility of Chinese hegemony.

Nathan points to some of the flaws in Friedberg’s argument:

Friedberg is also imprecise. His title, A Contest for Supremacy, means one thing; part of his subtitle, the Struggle for Mastery in Asia, means another — and neither idea is vindicated by the body of the book. He is on firmer ground when he writes that “if China’s power continues to grow, and if it continues to be ruled by a one-party authoritarian regime, its relations with the United States are going to become increasingly tense and competitive.” But friction is not conflict.

And all this assumes that China’s rise will continue unabated. Friedberg reasonably enough makes this assumption for the purposes of argument. But it is unlikely to prove correct in the long run because China’s economic and political model faces so many vulnerabilities. To add to the worries of Chinese leaders, as Friedberg points out, there are U.S. intentions: “stripped of diplomatic niceties, the ultimate aim of the American strategy is to hasten a revolution, albeit a peaceful one, that will sweep away China’s one-party authoritarian state.” This helps explain why Chinese leaders act more like people under siege than like people on an expansionist warpath.

Nathan claims that there is no struggle for mastery or contest for supremacy in the offing:

Even if China does stay on course, it cannot hope for anything that can reasonably be called supremacy, or even regional mastery, unless U.S. power radically declines. Absent that development, it is implausible that, as Friedberg predicts, “the nations of Asia will choose eventually to follow the lead of a rising China, ‘bandwagoning’ with it . . . rather than trying to balance against it.” Instead, the more China rises, the more most of China’s neighbors will want to balance with the United States, not against it.

Friedberg and Nathan largely agree on policy recommendations and on pressing China regarding human rights. It is the latter that is the real point of contention between Friedberg and those inclined to Kissinger’s view. Nathan critiques Kissinger on human rights advocacy:

Speaking of the immediate post-Tiananmen period, Kissinger says that “the American advocates of human rights insisted on values they considered universal” and that such universalism “challenges the element of nuance by which foreign policy is generally obliged to operate.” He continues: “If adoption of American principles of governance is made the central condition for progress in all other areas of the relationship, deadlock is inevitable.” These statements combine three fallacies: that the universality of international human rights is a matter of opinion rather than international law, that human rights equals American principles of governance, and that promoting human rights means holding hostage progress in all other areas.

The universality of human rights may be enshrined in international law, but that doesn’t contradict the argument that insisting on such universality is going to be blunt rather than nuanced. It is still likely to provoke resistance. Human rights may not equal American principles of governance, but the judgment that deadlock will result still seems reasonable. That is entirely consistent with Kissinger’s understanding of Chinese diplomacy as Nathan has just described it earlier in the review:

Whereas Americans believe that agreements can be reached in one sector while disagreements are expressed in another, Chinese prefer to characterize the whole atmosphere as warm or cold, friendly or tense, creating an incentive for the other side to put disagreements on the back burner. Whereas Americans are troubled by deadlocks, Chinese know how to leverage them to keep pressure on the other side. American diplomacy is transactional; Chinese diplomacy, psychological.

Nathan also sees the advantage for the U.S. in keeping human rights front and center:

Friedberg’s counterargument is persuasive. Showing softness on core values will reinforce the view of many Chinese that the United States is in decline, thus encouraging China to miscalculate U.S. resolve [bold mine-DL]. As Friedberg writes, “Soft-pedaling talk of freedom will not reassure China’s leaders as much as it will embolden them.”

Embolden them to do what? If U.S. power in the region is as structurally sound as Nathan insists elsewhere in the review, how would China get the impression that the U.S. is “in decline”? What is it that the U.S. has resolved to do that would be put in doubt by “showing softness”? Let’s remember that “showing softness” would mean not deliberately provoking the other side by hectoring them over their domestic affairs.

Nathan concludes:

It is no wonder that Chinese statecraft aims to establish the cultural relativity of human rights and to pose talk of human rights as the enemy of friendship. After all, the failure to respect human rights is a glaring weakness of Chinese power both at home and abroad, whereas promoting human rights has been among the United States’ most successful maneuvers on the wei qi board of world politics [bold mine-DL]. What is surprising is that the United States’ master strategist wants to play this part of the game by Beijing’s rules. Would it not make more sense to emulate Chinese strategy than to yield to it? Emphasizing the principled centrality of the human rights idea to American ideology and keeping the issue active in bilateral relations even though it cannot be solved would seem to be — along with exercising the United States’ strengths in other fields — a good way to set the boundaries within which a rising Chinese power can operate without threatening U.S. interests.

It is debatable just how successful the maneuver have been for the U.S., and it is even less clear how China’s horrible human rights record is actually a weakness for it abroad. If “keeping the issue active in bilateral relations” has no prospect of solving the issue, it promises instead to make it that much more of a permanent irritant. This may set boundaries of a sort for China, but it will also severely limit what the U.S. can expect to achieve in other areas of bilateral cooperation.