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How Will Trump Manage—or Mismanage—China?
In all aspects of the U.S.-China rivalry, Trump will be pulled toward both increased militancy and combativeness and a more pragmatic, transactional approach.
Dec 18, 2024
Gaza, Haiti, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, and Venezuela: President-elect Donald Trump will face no shortage of foreign-policy challenges when he assumes office in January. None, however, comes close to China in scope, scale, or complexity. No other country has the capacity to resist his predictable antagonism with the same degree of strength and tenacity, and none arouses more hostility and outrage among MAGA Republicans.
In short, China is guaranteed to put President Trump in a difficult bind the second time around: He can either choose to cut deals with Beijing and risk being branded an appeaser by the China hawks in his party, or he can punish and further encircle Beijing, risking a potentially violent clash and possibly even nuclear escalation. How he chooses to resolve this quandary will surely prove the most important foreign test of his second term in office.
Make no mistake: China truly is considered The Big One by those in Trump’s entourage responsible for devising foreign policy. While they imagine many international challenges to their “America First” strategy, only China, they believe, poses a true threat to the continued global dominance of this country.
Trump will enter office in January with a toolkit of punitive measures for fighting China ready to roll along with strong support among his appointees for making them the law of the land.
“I feel strongly that the Chinese Communist Party has entered into a Cold War with the United States and is explicit in its aim to replace the liberal, Western-led world order that has been in place since World War II,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), Trump’s choice as national security adviser, declared at a 2023 event hosted by the Atlantic Council. “We’re in a global arms race with an adversary that, unlike any in American history, has the economic and the military capability to truly supplant and replace us.”
As Waltz and others around Trump see it, China poses a multi-dimensional threat to this country’s global supremacy. In the military domain, by building up its air force and navy, installing military bases on reclaimed islands in the South China Sea, and challenging Taiwan through increasingly aggressive air and naval maneuvers, it is challenging continued American dominance of the Western Pacific. Diplomatically, it’s now bolstering or repairing ties with key U.S. allies, including India, Indonesia, Japan, and the members of NATO. Meanwhile, it’s already close to replicating this country’s most advanced technologies, especially its ability to produce advanced microchips. And despite Washington’s efforts to diminish a U.S. reliance on vital Chinese goods, including critical minerals and pharmaceuticals, it remains a primary supplier of just such products to this country.
Fight or Strike Bargains?
For many in the Trumpian inner circle, the only correct, patriotic response to the China challenge is to fight back hard. Both Rep. Waltz, Trump’s pick as national security adviser, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), his choice as secretary of state, have sponsored or supported legislation to curb what they view as “malign” Chinese endeavors in the United States and abroad.
Waltz, for example, introduced the American Critical Mineral Exploration and Innovation Act of 2020, which was intended, as he explained, “to reduce America’s dependence on foreign sources of critical minerals and bring the U.S. supply chain from China back to America.” Sen. Rubio has been equally combative in the legislative arena. In 2021, he authored the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which banned goods produced in forced labor encampments in Xinjiang Province from entering the United States. He also sponsored several pieces of legislation aimed at curbing Chinese access to U.S. technology. Although these, as well as similar measures introduced by Waltz, haven’t always obtained the necessary congressional approval, they have sometimes been successfully bundled into other legislation.
In short, Trump will enter office in January with a toolkit of punitive measures for fighting China ready to roll along with strong support among his appointees for making them the law of the land. But of course, we’re talking about Donald Trump, so nothing is a given. Some analysts believe that his penchant for dealmaking and his professed admiration for Chinese strongman President Xi Jinping may lead him to pursue a far more transactional approach, increasing economic and military pressure on Beijing to produce concessions on, for example, curbing the export of fentanyl precursors to Mexico, but when he gets what he wants letting them lapse. Howard Lutnick, the billionaire investor from Cantor Fitzgerald whom he chose as Commerce secretary, claims that Trump actually “wants to make a deal with China,” and will use the imposition of tariffs selectively as a bargaining tool to do so.
What such a deal might look like is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard to see how Trump could win significant concessions from Beijing without abandoning some of the punitive measures advocated by the China hawks in his entourage. Count on one thing: This complicated and confusing dynamic will play out in each of the major problem areas in U.S.-China relations, forcing Trump to make critical choices between his transactional instincts and the harsh ideological bent of his advisers.
Trump, China, and Taiwan
Of all the China-related issues in his second term in office, none is likely to prove more challenging or consequential than the future status of the island of Taiwan. At issue are Taiwan’s gradual moves toward full independence and the risk that China will invade the island to prevent such an outcome, possibly triggering U.S. military intervention as well. Of all the potential crises facing Trump, this is the one that could most easily lead to a great-power conflict with nuclear undertones.
When Washington granted diplomatic recognition to China in 1979, it “acknowledged” that Taiwan and the mainland were both part of “one China” and that the two parts could eventually choose to reunite. The U.S. also agreed to cease diplomatic relations with Taiwan and terminate its military presence there. However, under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, Washington was also empowered to cooperate with a quasi-governmental Taiwanese diplomatic agency, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States, and provide Taiwan with the weapons needed for its defense. Moreover, in what came to be known as “strategic ambiguity,” U.S. officials insisted that any effort by China to alter Taiwan’s status by force would constitute “a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area” and would be viewed as a matter “of grave concern to the United States,” although not necessarily one requiring a military response.
If, however, he chooses to act “crazy” by embracing “strategic clarity” and stepping up military pressure on China, he would likely receive accolades from many of his supporters, while provoking a (potentially nuclear) war with China.
For decades, one president after another reaffirmed the “one China” policy while also providing Taiwan with increasingly powerful weaponry. For their part, Chinese officials repeatedly declared that Taiwan was a renegade province that should be reunited with the mainland, preferably by peaceful means. The Taiwanese, however, have never expressed a desire for reunification and instead have moved steadily toward a declaration of independence, which Beijing has insisted would justify armed intervention.
As such threats became more frequent and menacing, leaders in Washington continued to debate the validity of “strategic ambiguity,” with some insisting it should be replaced by a policy of “strategic clarity” involving an ironclad commitment to assist Taiwan should it be invaded by China. President Joe Biden seemed to embrace this view, repeatedly affirming that the U.S. was obligated to defend Taiwan under such circumstances. However, each time he said so, his aides walked back his words, insisting the U.S. was under no legal obligation to do so.
The Biden administration also boosted its military support for the island while increasing American air and naval patrols in the area, which only heightened the possibility of a future U.S. intervention should China invade. Some of these moves, including expedited arms transfers to Taiwan, were adopted in response to prodding from China hawks in Congress. All, however, fit with an overarching administration strategy of encircling China with a constellation of American military installations and U.S.-armed allies and partners.
From Beijing’s perspective, then, Washington is already putting extreme military and geopolitical pressure on China. The question is: Will the Trump administration increase or decrease those pressures, especially when it comes to Taiwan?
That Trump will approve increased arms sales to and military cooperation with Taiwan essentially goes without saying (as much, at least, as anything involving him does). The Chinese have experienced upticks in U.S. aid to Taiwan before and can probably live through another round of the same. But that leaves far more volatile issues up for grabs: Will he embrace “strategic clarity,” guaranteeing Washington’s automatic intervention should China invade Taiwan, and will he approve a substantial expansion of the American military presence in the region? Both moves have been advocated by some of the China hawks in Trump’s entourage, and both are certain to provoke fierce, hard-to-predict responses from Beijing.
Many of Trump’s closest advisers have, in fact, insisted on “strategic clarity” and increased military cooperation with Taiwan. Michael Waltz, for example, has asserted that the U.S. must “be clear we’ll defend Taiwan as a deterrent measure.” He has also called for an increased military presence in the Western Pacific. Similarly, last June, Robert C. O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser from 2019 to 2021, wrote that the U.S. “should make clear” its “commitment” to “help defend” Taiwan, while expanding military cooperation with the island.
Trump himself has made no such commitments, suggesting instead a more ambivalent stance. In his typical fashion, in fact, he’s called on Taiwan to spend more on its own defense and expressed anger at the concentration of advanced chip-making on the island, claiming that the Taiwanese “did take about 100% of our chip business.” But he’s also warned of harsh economic measures were China to impose a blockade of the island, telling the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, “I would say [to President Xi]: if you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you at 150% to 200%.” He wouldn’t need to threaten the use of force to prevent a blockade, he added, because President Xi “respects me and he knows I’m [expletive] crazy.”
Such comments reveal the bind Trump will inevitably find himself in when it comes to Taiwan this time around. He could, of course, try to persuade Beijing to throttle back its military pressure on the island in return for a reduction in U.S. tariffs—a move that would reduce the risk of war in the Pacific but leave China in a stronger economic position and disappoint many of his top advisers. If, however, he chooses to act “crazy” by embracing “strategic clarity” and stepping up military pressure on China, he would likely receive accolades from many of his supporters, while provoking a (potentially nuclear) war with China.
Trade War or Economic Coexistence?
The question of tariffs represents another way in which Trump will face a crucial choice between punitive action and transactional options in his second term—or, to be more precise, in deciding how severe to make those tariffs and other economic hardships he will try to impose on China.
In January 2018, the first Trump administration imposed tariffs of 30% on imported solar panels and 20%-50% on imported washing machines, many sourced from China. Two months later, the administration added tariffs on imported steel (25%) and aluminum (10%), again aimed above all at China. And despite his many criticisms of Trump’s foreign and economic policies, President Biden chose to retain those tariffs, even adding new ones, notably on electric cars and other high-tech products. The Biden administration has also banned the export of advanced computer chips and chip-making technology to China in a bid to slow that country’s technological progress.
Accordingly, when Trump reassumes office on January 20, China will already be under stringent economic pressures from Washington. But he and his associates insist that those won’t be faintly enough to constrain China’s rise. The president-elect has said that, on day one of his new term, he will impose a 10% tariff on all Chinese imports and follow that with other harsh measures. Among such moves, the Trump team has announced plans to raise tariffs on Chinese imports to 60%, revoke China’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations (also known as “most favored nation”) status, and ban the transshipment of Chinese imports through third countries.
Most of Trump’s advisers have espoused such measures strongly. “Trump Is Right: We Should Raise Tariffs on China,” Marco Rubio wrote last May. “China’s anticompetitive tactics,” he argued, “give Chinese companies an unfair cost advantage over American companies… Tariffs that respond to these tactics prevent or reverse offshoring, preserving America’s economic might and promoting domestic investment.”
But Trump will also face possible pushback from other advisers who are warning of severe economic perturbations if such measures were to be enacted. China, they suggest, has tools of its own to use in any trade war with the U.S., including tariffs on American imports and restrictions on American firms doing business in China, including Elon Musk’s Tesla, which produces half of its cars there. For these and other reasons, the U.S.-China Business Council has warned that additional tariffs and other trade restrictions could prove disastrous, inviting “retaliatory measures from China, causing additional U.S. jobs and output losses.”
As in the case of Taiwan, Trump will face some genuinely daunting decisions when it comes to economic relations with China. If, in fact, he follows the advice of the ideologues in his circle and pursues a strategy of maximum pressure on Beijing, specifically designed to hobble China’s growth and curb its geopolitical ambitions, he could precipitate nothing short of a global economic meltdown that would negatively affect the lives of so many of his supporters, while significantly diminishing America’s own geopolitical clout. He might therefore follow the inclinations of certain of his key economic advisers like transition leader Howard Lutnick, who favor a more pragmatic, businesslike relationship with China. How Trump chooses to address this issue will likely determine whether the future involves increasing economic tumult and uncertainty or relative stability. And it’s always important to remember that a decision to play hardball with China on the economic front could also increase the risk of a military confrontation leading to full-scale war, even to World War III.
And while Taiwan and trade are undoubtedly the most obvious and challenging issues Trump will face in managing (mismanaging?) U.S.-China relations in the years ahead, they are by no means the only ones. He will also have to decide how to deal with increasing Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea; continued Chinese economic and military-technological support for Russia in its war against Ukraine; and growing Chinese investments in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere.
In these, and other aspects of the U.S.-China rivalry, Trump will be pulled toward both increased militancy and combativeness and a more pragmatic, transactional approach. During the campaign, he backed each approach, sometimes in the very same verbal outburst. Once in power, however, he will have to choose between them—and his decisions will have a profound impact on this country, China, and everyone living on this planet.
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After Running on Peace, Trump Is Filling His National Security Council With China Hawks
None of these appointments bode well for advocates of U.S. foreign policy restraint, let alone for those who voted for Trump hoping he would prioritize domestic problems over endless foreign wars.
Dec 10, 2024
On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump promised a very different foreign policy from business as usual in Washington.
He said he would prioritize peace over “victory” in the escalating war in Ukraine, pull the United States back from foreign entanglements to focus on domestic problems, and generally oversee a period of prolonged peace, instead of the cycle of endless Great Power conflict we seem trapped in.
Yet if personnel is policy, as the saying goes, then Trump’s presidency will be far more in line with his Democratic predecessor’s foreign policy than with the vision he laid out over the past year. So far, his National Security Council picks have been a series of hawks with a history of opposing diplomacy and the end of U.S. wars, as well as favoring a more aggressive posture toward China, including intervening in a possible war over Taiwan.
At best, Trump’s picks will seek to simply replace one dangerous, nuclear-tinged Great Power conflict with another.
Take Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.). Since his selection, Waltz certainly talks in line with the more restraint-oriented vision Trump campaigned on, fretting about the Biden administration’s recent escalation in Ukraine and calling for a “responsible end” to the war there.
But until relatively recently, the Florida congressman viewed the war in very similar terms to those of his hawkish colleagues on the other side of the aisle, reacting to the Russian invasion by warning it “violates the very fabric of international norms” and threatens “our Western values,” lamenting that President Joe Biden had not been more confrontational with Russia beforehand, and calling for the United States to “support Ukrainian resistance efforts” and turn the country “into a bloody quagmire” for Russia.
Over the months that followed, Waltz backed escalating the war (“Send the damn MiGs,” he tweeted in March 2022), complained that U.S. policy on the war was a “fiddle fart” that provided just enough arms “instead of going for the kill, instead of going for the win right now,” and charged that Biden was “letting fear of escalation be the primary driver of our policy in Ukraine.”
Waltz has shifted since, but largely because he sees a U.S.-China confrontation as a bigger priority. Waltz views China as “the most threatening adversary America has ever faced,” believes that Washington is already locked in a “Cold War” with Beijing and must “curb” its power, step up military aid to Taiwan, and end the policy of “strategic ambiguity” over the island nation, which has been at the core of decades of successful U.S. policy balancing deterrence without tipping into disastrous war.
He has also disparaged diplomacy with the Chinese government, and thinks U.S. forces should have stayed in Afghanistan to hang on to Bagram Airfield for possible use as a “second front” in a future U.S.-China war.
The rest of Trump’s national security team holds similar views. Sebastian Gorka, nominated for deputy assistant to the president, sees the Ukraine war in literally indistinguishable terms from hawks in the outgoing Biden administration: It is “unprovoked Russian aggression” that is not about NATO expansion but rather enlarging Russian territory; negotiations, peace, or an off-ramp are as futile as Neville Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler was; and the United States must continue military aid “to make the Russians bleed,” or Russian President Vladimir Putin will “take Poland and the Baltic states.”
Gorka is also a hawk on China, which he calls “the greatest threat to America.”
“We know the regime there wishes to have every nation in the world a defeated, vanquished nation, or a satrapy, a tributary nation,” Gorka said this past October, while giving a fawning interview to Gordon Chang, a discredited “China expert” who has repeatedly predicted the imminent collapse of the Chinese state.
In his 2018 book, Gorka called China’s undoubted goal of becoming a world power, and partly doing so through economic investment in the Global South, a form of “irregular warfare” (even as he admits it is little different from the actions “of the West a couple of centuries ago”). He has repeatedly suggested that China was about to invade Taiwan, including after its wayward spy balloon; gave former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy “kudos” for taking the inflammatory step of traveling to the island; and implied that U.S. lives should be expended to defend it.
Alex Wong, Trump’s pick for deputy national security adviser, agrees. Wong believes that Americans “have to be prepared for a level of tension, regional destabilization, and—yes—possible conflict [with China] that we have not seen since the end of World War II.” Wong noted he deliberately used that destructive, hot conflict as a reference point and not the Cold War.
A former foreign policy adviser for the super-hawkish Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and the merely hawkish 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, Wong served most recently as vice chair of a congressional commission that recommended training Taiwanese troops on U.S. soil—a highly provocative move to China’s leadership.
Because China is, unlike the former Soviet Union, highly integrated into the “system of the free world,” Wong has said, the U.S.-China conflict requires not just “out-competing them but extruding”—meaning, pushing out—“China from certain systems, whether economically, technologically, politically.” What that means for Wong is not just continuing the Biden administration’s economic warfare with the country, but also “an increased U.S. military presence” in the Indo-Pacific and to “seriously look at new investments in strategic nuclear forces, intermediate-range missiles, our naval fleet, and certain capabilities tuned to turning back an invasion of Taiwan,” as well as “expand[ing] the aperture of our military alliances” in the region, specifically with Japan and under AUKUS.
Wong does seem to favor extricating the United States from Ukraine, but, like Waltz, it’s because he views “Ukraine as an unfortunate diversion of U.S. attention from the Indo-Pacific” and wants to “responsibly shift U.S. military resources eastward”—in a way that, to take his words literally, will ramp up conflict with China and see the U.S. go directly to war in the case of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
None of these appointments bode well for advocates of U.S. foreign policy restraint, let alone for those who voted for Trump hoping he would prioritize domestic problems over endless foreign wars. At best, Trump’s picks will seek to simply replace one dangerous, nuclear-tinged Great Power conflict with another. At worst, they will not do the former, and embroil the United States into two of the latter.
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Some Way Out of Here: Common Security in a World On Fire
The political will must be found to extinguish the violent conflicts that put us ever closer to nuclear annihilation.
Sep 28, 2024
This is a most unusual election season. While the media focuses on Georgia and Nevada polling, the world is aflame. Those who have the greatest power to stop the killing are either missing in action or profoundly complicit as they refuse to exercise their diplomatic leverage.
President Biden refuses to join rising European voices urging a ceasefire and negotiations for the Ukraine War and continues to deliver weapons to Israel that make the ongoing genocide in Gaza and murderous devastation of southern Lebanon possible. Donald Trump has welcomed Russia to invade NATO nations that don’t spend at least 2% of their GDP on their militaries, while he urges Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Gaza. Meanwhile Kamala Harris poses as a military hawk, promising the world’s “most lethal military” while talking her way pas serious questions.
Wars and Mounting Dangers
U.N. General Secretary Guterres warns that “The world is becoming unhinged as geopolitical tensions rise and it seems incapable of coming together to respond to mounting challenges.” There are disturbing parallels to the forces that triggered the First World War. As in 1914, there are tensions between rising and declining powers, arms races with new technologies, complex alliance structures, intensifying nationalism, territorial competition, economic integration and intense competition, and wild card actors. Yet—unlike Sarajevo in 1914—an incident, accident, or miscalculation, today could trigger escalation to thermonuclear war.
With the Ukraine War, we face the dangers of political and military miscalculations leading to vertical (weapons) or horizontal (geographic) escalation. After its many nuclear threats, what might the Kremlin’s response be if Biden gives the okay and Kyiv launches a long-range missile at a Russian city, if Ukraine actually threatens Russia control of Crimea, or if a senior Russian political leader is killed by Ukrainian drones hitting in Moscow? What would happen if Russian missiles malfunction or purposely hit Polish cities?
Putin could respond by launching low-yield nuclear warheads. In addition to the resulting unimaginable devastation of Ukraine, our lives would also hang in the balance. There is no certainty that fighting a limited nuclear war is possible. A first limited strike could easily escalate to Armageddon.
In the Middle East, unable to eliminate Hamas or the idea of Palestinian nationalism, Prime Minister Netanyahu is pressing a second and greater Palestinian Nakba, and with his campaign of assassinations, the state terrorism of exploding pagers, and with his bombing campaign he seeks ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon. Iran’s nuclear infrastructure could become an Israeli target, should the U.S. be drawn into the wider war with Netanyahu’s assassinations and bombings in Damascus and Iran.
On numerous occasions—most recently during the Iraq Wars—the U.S. has prepared and threatened to initiate nuclear attacks. What President Putin will tolerate on Russia’s southwestern flank before again rattling his nuclear sword is an unknown. But recall that in the first days of the 1973 October War Gold Meir threatened to unleash Israel’s “Temple Weapons.” We cannot expect the Arab Street to remain silent in the face of a second Nakba or that Hezbollah and Tehran will continue to calibrate their responses to Israel’s brutality.
Further east, the planet U.S.-Chinese competition for regional hegemony in the Taiwan Strait, the South and East China Seas, an accident or miscalculation could all too easily spark a great power, and potentially nuclear. The same applies to U.S.-Russian provocative shows of force in the Baltic and Black Seas. And then there are Korea and Sudan....
These wars and confrontations serve as major obstacles to the cooperation needed to address not only essential human needs like health, housing, education, jobs and more, but the other existential threat to humanity: the climate emergency. It is not for nothing that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns that it is 90 seconds to midnight.
Common Security: A Way Out of Here
Decades ago, Bob Dylan sang “there must be some kind of way out of here.” There is. It is the alternative that, buoyed by the protests of millions of people, served as the diplomatic paradigm that ended the Cold War: the ancient truth that no nation can achieve security at the expense of its rivals. With very few exceptions, and despite nations’ differences, peaceful coexistence and security can be achieved only through mutual recognition, and respectful, if difficult, win-win negotiations between rivals. It is called common security diplomacy.
Common Security is a realist, not an idealistic, approach to stop the killing, to relieve suffering, and to ensure human survival. Those who advocate common security have no illusions about how difficult such diplomacy can be or that it can address every problem we face.
In the early 1980s, as the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race and threats brought us to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Sweden’s Prime Minister Olof Palme had the wisdom to convene The Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues. It was comprised of the most senior national security advisors to Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev, including U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Georgi Arbatov Gorbachev’s senior security advisor, Egon Bahr Germany’s Secretary of State, and others. Their mandate was to develop a strategy to halt the spiraling arms race and prevent a nuclear war. After difficult but rich discussions, they recognized that fears, as well as bureaucratic and vested interests, drove the arms race. They agreed that when for defensive purposes one side augments its nuclear forces, its rival experiences that as a threatening escalation, and responds in kind, inciting new fears and fueling a spiraling arms race.
The Commission’s answer was to insist on difficult diplomacy in which each side names its fears, does the difficult work of discerning win-win solutions that addressed legitimate fears and enhances each side’s sense of security. Their 1982 Common Security Report provided the paradigm for disarmament diplomacy that followed and resulted in the Intermediate Forces Treaty. The Soviets agreed to forego deployment of nuclear armed SS 20 missiles which would have held all of Europe hostage. And the U.S. committed not to deploy Pershing II missiles that could devastate Moscow and decapitate Soviet leadership in the Kremlin in eight minutes, as well as disavowing deployment of first strike nuclear armed cruise missiles in Europe. With that agreement, and the Gorbachev-Reagan 1985 statement that nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought, the Cold War functionally came to an end in 1987 two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
We should also appreciate that it was popular movements, with millions of people demonstrating in cities and towns across the West and beyond for a halt to the arms race, as well as the wisdom of statesmen, that fueled the creation of the Palme Commission and its recommendations.
The INF Treaty was followed by the Paris Charter, the NATO Russia Founding Act, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation’s 1999 Charter for European Security. Each included the commitment that no nation would seek to enhance its national security at the expense of another. These commitments were enhanced by the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
I am sorry to say that it was U.S. arrogance, beginning with President Bill Clinton, combined with the residual fears of many Eastern European nations, that led to NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders and thus to the decline and then collapse of the European Common Security order.
To prevent a catastrophic war, the Palme Commission had recognized the need to engage in diplomacy. It stressed that “A doctrine of common security must replace the present expedient of deterrence through armaments. International peace must rest on a commitment to joint survival rather than the threat of mutual destruction.” It announced its support for the United Nations’ and Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty’s “goal of general and complete disarmament.”
In 2021 and 2022, as great power confrontations again posed existential threats to survival and the Doomsday Clock approached midnight, non-governmental organizations updated the call for common security diplomacy to prevent catastrophe and to provide a foundation for a sustainable, if not perfect, peaceful international system. Led by the Palme Center, the International Peace Bureau, and the International Confederation of Trade Unions, and backed by a commission of present and former government and U.N. officials and scholars, they produced a successor report, Common Security 2022: For Our Shared Future. Drawing on the Palme Report, it reiterated that ”global peace and security are created jointly—that when your counterpart is not secure, you will not be secure either,” and they pointed to Common Security’s potential to “bring us back from the brink.”
Common Security 2022 was based on six principles that are universally applicable:
1. All people have the right to human security.
2. Building trust between nations and peoples is fundamental to peaceful and sustainable human existence.
3. There can be no common security without nuclear disarmament, strong limitations on conventional weapons, and reduced military expenditure.
4. Global and regional cooperation, multilateralism, and the rule of law are crucial to tackling many of the world’s challenges.
5. Dialogue, conflict prevention, and confidence-building measures must replace aggression and military force as a means of resolving disputes.
6. Better regulation, international law, and responsible governance need to be extended to address new military technologies.
Common Security for Middle East, Ukraine, and the Indo-Pacific Region
How might these apply to the horrors of the current Middle East and Ukraine Wars and to the new cold war across the Indo-Pacific region?.
Hamas’s October 7 massacres were indeed abominations, but by blocking nonviolent opposition and meaningful diplomacy to brutal decades-long occupations, something had to explode. Neither Hamas nor Palestinian nationalism will be eliminated, even as there is no safe place to hide for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank or for increasing numbers of Lebanese. Predictably and tragically Israelis have earned and suffer pariah state isolation. Israel’s economy is flagging, and the country’s northern and southernmost communities have become uninhabitable.
Since the UN’s 1947 partition of Palestine, the world has understood the importance of a common security solution to this legacy of colonialism. The dignity and rights to national self-determination and security must be respected for each of the two peoples as well as between Israel and its neighbors. U.N. resolutions, the Arab Peace plan of 2022, and the sometimes secret 1970s and 80s negotiations between some of Israel’s founders and senior PLO figures have all sought a path for a two-state solution.
Since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli settlements and highways have been designed to eliminate the possibility of the creation of a credible Palestinian state. But, as the former Israeli general and courageous peace campaigner Mattityahu Peled argued, what humans have created can be changed by humans. The establishment of a single secular democratic state may be an ideal worth aspiring to, but with decades of Palestinian and Israeli traumas that will reverberate for generations, such a possibility cannot be realized in the foreseeable future. It can only emerge after trust is restored following years of peaceful coexistence and mutual recognition. As the Palestinian journalist Ramy Khoury explains, with a two state agreement, the spectacular potential of each of these peoples and of the Arab world can be released and realized.
Khoury also reports that the destruction of Israel has never been Hezbollah’s ambition. Rather it has been to defend Lebanon’s long marginalized Shiite population, especially from Israeli attacks. That it would act in solidarity with Gazans under Israel’s indiscriminate massacres should come as no surprise,
Then Ukraine. Over the centuries it has been a divided nation. Its borders have constantly changed. It has been part of the Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian empires. It has been divided by language, religion, and economic ties. It is the borderland over which armies flowed in both directions. In addition to the devastation of Ukraine and its people, the post-Cold War security architecture was shattered on February 24, 2022. With it went all but a few remnants of trust and strategic stability established over sixty years
We now have numerous proposals for Ukrainian peace or an end to the war: Russian and Ukrainian, Chinese, Brazilian, and more. Most urgently we need a ceasefire and interrelated common security negotiations in three dimensions: Ukrainian-Russian leading to a Ukraine which is a neutral sovereign nation with credible security guarantees and as the Czech president recently acknowledged, territorial compromise; U.S/NATO- Russian negotiations for a new European security architecture; and U.S.-Russian negotiations to restore a modicum of trust and strategic stability, including renewal of arms control and even nuclear disarmament negotiations.
In conclusion and turning to the competition for regional and potentially global hegemony, there are the growing dangers of war across the Indo-Pacific region. A working group comprised of engaged scholars and national peace movement leaders from South Korea, Japan, India, Mongolia, the Philippines, the United States and the International Peace Bureau in Germany will soon release a Common Security report for the Indo-Pacific Region.* It identifies off ramps from the sleepwalking marches to what Australia’s former Prime Minister and current ambassador to the U.S. Kevin Rudd terms an “avoidable war.” The report’s key recommendations include:
1. Commitments to common security diplomacy and war under any circumstances must be prevented. Build common security via negotiations, diplomacy, trust, tolerance, and understanding of other cultures.
2. The U.S., China, and Taiwan take actions simultaneously to lower tensions in the Taiwan Strait to avert war. The Strait should be demilitarized, with a shared understanding that the solution to the Taiwan issue should not be by military means. There are specific recommendations for Beijing, Taipei, and the U.S.
3. Declare the end of the Korean War and conclude a Peace treaty. Reduce conventional armaments in Northeast Asia, denuclearize the Korean Peninsula and establish a Northeast Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone. War prevention and peacebuilding forums are needed that involve all parties to the Six Party Talks.
4. Demilitarization and denuclearization of the South China Sea. Respect the security interests of all nations involved in the Law of the Sea Treaty and the U.N. International Court of Arbitration decision. Multilateral and bilateral ASEAN-Chinese negotiations for a South China Sea code of conduct.
5. The legitimate security interests of small states must be respected by the major powers. The role of small states in facilitating regional security cooperation must be recognized.
6. Universalization of No First Use nuclear policies, Resumption of U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations. Strategic stability diplomacy between the U.S., China, Russia, and Japan. Establishment of nuclear weapons-free zones. Freeze in military spending as well as a halt to high-tech weaponization research, development, and deployment.
7. Avoid crystallization of strategic bloc building and related military alliances.
8. Active engagement of the peace movement - nationally and internationally.
How to achieve a second common security order? Several years ago, Noam Chomsky put it well, reminding us that we know the solutions to the existential threats facing humanity. The question, he said, is whether we have the political will to bring them into being.
This article is based on a talk given at a side event organized by the International Peace Bureau and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung during the United Nations Summit for the Future.
*Common Security In the Indo-Pacific Region is scheduled for release on October 8, 2024 and will be found here as well as on other websites.Keep ReadingShow Less
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