Thomas Shugart and Van Jackson had a mini debate. By the time they were done, they had left the readers with no better understanding of the subject they were discussing than when they started. This happened because they failed to see the forest for the trees.
You can see the last two installments of their
debate in the December 1, 2021 edition of Foreign Affairs. The installments
came as a bundle of two articles under the single title: “Who’s to blame for
Asia’s Arms Race?” and the subtitle: “Debating the Source of Growing US-Chinese
Tensions”.
First, you’ll encounter an article that was
written by Thomas Shugart under a headline that reads: “BEIJING’S BELLIGERENCE
HAS SET THE STAGE FOR CONFLIT,” in which he rebuts an article that was written
previously by Van Jackson. You’ll then see a Van Jackson response to Shugart’s
rebuttal, an article that came under a headline which reads: “AMERICAN
MILITARISM IS ENDANGERING THE REGION”.
When you’ve read both articles, you’ll feel
you gained a wealth of information about the nitty-gritty of what each
superpower is doing in terms of enhancing its military capabilities, and stand
up to what the other superpower is doing. But having gained all that
information, you’ll still feel that you’re missing something. It is as if you
ate a sumptuous-looking four-course meal but you still feel hungry. Why is
that?
You’ll feel that way because even if by gaining
all that knowledge you’ll be satisfied that you could now determine “who is to
blame for Asia’s arms race,” you’ll still sense deep down that a bigger
question was neither asked nor answered. The worst part is that you won’t even
know what the question should be, let alone what the answer would be.
The
irony is that here you have Thomas Shugart who is an adjunct senior fellow
at the Center for a New American Security, someone that served for more than 25
years as a submarine warfare officer in the US Navy, and worked in the US
Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment. And here you have Van Jackson
who is a distinguished fellow with the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, a senior
lecturer in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington in New
Zealand, and Defense and Strategy Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies.
And they are bickering about small things without giving he readers a hint as
to what is ailing the planet or what the cure might be.
So then, what should these two experts have
done to serve the audience a feast for the mind as opulent as it appeared to
the eyes? What they should have done was look at the forest from 30,000 feet up
and describe what they saw. Had they done this, they would have seen not just
the forest, but how humanity behaves under similar circumstances. It is that
human beings, like trees, have a beginning, a lifespan, and they die. But
humanity does not disappear anymore than does the forest. That’s because every
living thing cedes its place to the next individual or the next group that takes
their place, be that a society of humans or a forest of trees.
Being cognizant of the lifespan of living
things, would have suggested to Thomas Shugart and Van Jackson that America,
which is a living thing, might have reached its peak, and could now be in
decline. Rather than haggle about the minutia of the situation as it exists in
the Asia-Pacific region — a haggling that has led their debate to a dead end — Shugart and Jackson would have done much better debating where America
stands today on the curve of life.
Had Thomas Shugart and Van Jackson concluded
that America was declining while China was rising, they would have recommended
what civilized societies suggest needs to be done under such circumstances. It
would have been for the Americans to sit with the Chinese and tell them what
America has done in the past for the sake of humanity, what it is doing now,
and what it would have done in the future to keep the world safe, prosperous
and thriving. This would have been a peaceful transfer of power from the
generation of an aging America to the generation of a rising China.
A gesture of this kind does not mean that
America will then fade out and await its permanent demise. On the contrary, a
gesture of this kind would ascertain that America will remain alive and have
influence for as long as there will be a human civilization governing somewhere
on Planet Earth.
This will happen because America will have
set a precedent that will be emulated by China, decades from now, and by
whomever will succeed China, after it had completed its cycle, and taken its
turn on the Throne of Number One.
Cycle after cycle, humanity will remember that it continues to exist because it was not annihilated when it could have been. All that thanks to America’s nobility in handing the seat of power to China instead of engaging it in a deadly duel that would have taken down the entire planet.