Energy

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. 

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

THE YEAR before he died in 2017, one of America’s leading twentieth-century strategic thinkers, Zbigniew Brzezinski, sounded an alarm. In analyzing threats to American security, “the most dangerous scenario,” he warned, would be “a grand coalition of China and Russia…united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.” This coalition “would be reminiscent in scale and scope of the challenge once posed by the Sino-Soviet bloc, though this time China would likely be the leader and Russia the follower.”

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.

When President Trump demanded that China cut its $375 billion trade deficit with the U.S. by $200 billion, Chinese officials and the U.S. press shrieked. It seemed impossible. However, there's a simple way for China to give Trump this “win”: buying $200 billion worth of American oil, as well as liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Alaska, Texas and Louisiana.

China’s attempts to protect its access to energy supplies, particularly oil, are a rational strategy to shield itself from energy disruptions, particularly U.S. attempts to coerce China by constricting its oil supply.

A sampling of articles in the Fall 2017 of the Belfer Center's journal International Security.

International Security is America’s leading journal of security affairs. The International Security journal is edited at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and published quarterly by the MIT Press. Questions may be directed to IS@harvard.edu.

Although Russia can no longer exercise hegemonic power or demand exclusive rights of engagement, it is still the preponderant regional player in Central Asia.

Chinese analysts, from President Xi Jinping on down, have nominally rejected Allison’s pessimistic analysis. “There is no Thucydides Trap,” Xi has argued, claiming that he had devised an alternative “new type of great-power relations” that would avoid war by recognizing that each Asian giant had its own legitimate interests. More recently, he has shifted to arguing that “China and the U.S. must do everything possible to avoid [the] Thucydides Trap.”

Two days after presenting his credentials to President Trump, His Excellency Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry, the newly appointed Ambassador of Pakistan to the United States, expressed optimism about bilateral relations between the two countries. Respondent Adil Najam, Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was more cautious in his assessment of the relationship after years of "reset."