Key Takeaways

• 75 years ago this month, the American diplomat George Kennan published an essay in Foreign Affairs titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in which he introduced the strategy of ‘containment’ to the Western world. Kennan advocated the firm containment of Soviet expansionism, which was being advanced under the banner of communism, at every critical strongpoint at which it encroached upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world order.
• Kennan’s advocacy of containment was based on his reading of the philosophical drivers of the Soviet Union’s postwar foreign policy worldview. Moscow viewed the capitalist system of production to be nefarious and exploitative, as innately antagonistic to socialism, and in need of destruction as a rival center of ideological authority and geopolitical competition.
• The China Challenge today is vastly unalike that posed by the early Cold War era Soviet Union that Kennan had surveyed. The Party’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ aims to take advantage of capitalism’s strength as a means of resource allocation and efficient market exchange – not its supposed weaknesses of class conflict and violent spillovers. Besides, Chinese socialism is not an instrument of geopolitical aggrandizement.
• More to the point, Kennan’s strategy of containment was premised on Washington remaining the dominant global economic power and using this abundance, and leverage, to exert collective discipline among the West in its dealings with Moscow. In China, by contrast, it will face a peer whose economic size and material capabilities at the government’s disposal will outstrip that of the United States. This will heap a collective action problem of the first order on the West. It will also test a core proposition on which U.S. primacy has rested: that America could meet the strategic challenge of the day from a position of national strength.
• From an Indo-Pacific systemic perspective, the currency of competition in the age of the China Challenge will primarily be economic and technological, and less military or ideological. The gravitational pull of China’s domestic market will dictate that Washington embrace a light touch approach when crafting selectively decoupled supply chain strategies. Allies must be treated as co-equals; not appendages leashed to the immediate American economic self-interest.
• Interminable maritime and military competition within the first and second island chains of the western Pacific will remain an inescapable feature of U.S.-China relations. Taiwan, in particular, will remain a powder keg for the foreseeable future. By the same token, there is no reasonable basis for an armed U.S.-China conflict to spill over into geographies that Beijing deems as lying beyond the anti-access, area-denial range essential for its prosecution of a first island chain-specific contingency. The Indian Ocean and the south Pacific will remain as sideshows.