Asia & the Pacific

GRAND RAPIDS, United States, Feb. 8 (Xinhua) -- While the United States and China may compete in economy and trade, they should also work together to combat global challenges, said a former senior U.S. diplomat here on Friday. 

In August 2018, the nonpartisan Aspen Strategy Group (ASG) convened its thirtyfourth annual meeting in Aspen, Colorado. Over the course of three days, ASG members and invited experts from government, universities, think tanks, and the private sector debated the impact of dramatic technological change over the next decade on American national security. Our conversations covered a wide breadth of emerging technologies—artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum computing, and biotechnology—and the challenges they pose to America’s military, the intelligence community, U.S. economic power, and democratic institutions. Our group grappled with the central dilemma of how the U.S. government can harness these technologies—developed primarily in the private sector and research labs—to compete with China and other adversaries in the years ahead.

A interview conducted by The Fletcher School Forum with Ambassador Nicholas Burns, Former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the guns of World War I fell silent — and nearly 20 million people lay dead. Could such a conflict happen today? After more than seven decades without a shooting war between great powers, many Americans find the thought of the United States and a major adversary like China killing millions of one another’s citizens virtually inconceivable.

But when we say something is “inconceivable,” we should remember this: the realm of what is possible is not bound by what our limited minds can conceive. Today, the intensifying rivalry between a rising China and a ruling United States could lead to a war that neither side wants and that both know would be even more catastrophic than World War I.

We have the most solipsistic president in American history offering up the most solipsistic foreign policy ever at a time when the me-me-me generation are busy taking selfies and other pols the planet over are trying to play that self-centeredness to their advantage. Have we reached Peak Solipsism? And what does that mean for the international system. We discuss in honor of and in the context of this week’s meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York City with David Rothkopf in New York, Ambassador Nicholas Burns in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Rosa Brooks in Washington, DC and Kori Schake in London, England.