Asia & the Pacific

"Despite its economic slowdown, Japan retains impressive power resources. It is a democracy that has been at peace for 70 years, with a stable society and a high standard of living. Its per capita income is five times that of China, and Beijing residents can only envy Tokyo's air quality and product safety standards. Its economy remains the world's third largest overall, sustained by highly sophisticated industry."

"China holds dollars that it receives from its exports to America, while the US, by keeping its market open to Chinese products, helps to generate growth, employment, and stability in China. Yes, China could bring the US economy to its knees by dumping its dollars, but not without taking a serious hit itself."

"Decline is a misleading metaphor that assumes there is an organic life cycle for countries as there is for individuals. We know little about the life cycle of states. It took three centuries for the Western Roman Empire to decline from its apogee to collapse. After Britain lost its American colonies in the 18th century, writer Horace Walpole lamented that Britain was reduced to the insignificance of Sardinia. He missed the fact that the Industrial Revolution was about to produce Britain's greatest century. Put simply, we do not know where the United States is in its supposed life cycle."

“Debating the pros and cons of government policy, applying scientific methods to pressing national challenges and teaching the next generation...that’s ultimately what gets me out of bed in the morning” says Michael Beckley, a research fellow with the Belfer Center’s International Security Program. According to Beckley, who expects to receive his Ph.D. from Columbia University later this year, “It is clear to me that public policy, both domestic and foreign, has a tremendous effect on people’s lives and that individuals armed with information, can and should work to improve those policies.”

"When Jean Monnet proposed the first integrative steps for Europe to take, he was thinking of creating a powerful economic instrumentality that would contend on equal terms with the then superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.  Now, if Europe and America pursue the closer economic union that Angela Merkel envisions, Europe can think of a new united West which can deal on equal terms with a rising but disunited East." 

"The real test will be whether China moves away from the dollar in any significant manner. While it makes modest adjustments to its reserve holdings, there are few good alternatives to the dollar. And while it calls for an international basket of currencies to replace the dollar, there are few takers. Of course, China might move toward opening its currency and credit markets in an effort to make the yuan a reserve currency, but the authoritarian political system is unwilling and unprepared to move to that degree of economic freedom."

"...Asia has its own internal balance of powers, and in that context, many states continue to welcome an American presence in the region. Chinese leaders have to contend with the reactions of other countries, as well as the constraints created by their own objectives of economic growth and the need for external markets and resources. Too aggressive a Chinese military posture could produce a countervailing coalition among its neighbors that would weaken both its hard and soft power. A poll of 16 countries around the world found a positive attitude toward China’s economic rise, but not its military rise."

"Judging whether economic interdependence produces power requires looking at the balance of asymmetries, not just at one side of the equation. In this case, interdependence has created a "balance of financial terror" analogous to the Cold War, when the US and the Soviet Union never used their potential to destroy each other in a nuclear exchange."

"The United States is the most developed and strongest nation in the world. China is the largest and fastest developing nation. In the multilateral effort to overcome these challenges, a good and productive relationship between the United States and China is essential. Indeed, no bilateral relationship among major powers today would be more crucial in shaping global order and agenda than the one between China and the United States."