Bringing China Into the Fold

When the 44th President of the United States arrives in the Oval Office this January, he'll find his inbox stuffed with urgent problems, including mounting disarray in Afghanistan and Pakistan, nuclear advances in Iran and North Korea, a resurgent Russia and a worldwide economic crisis. How he deals with such immediate troubles will help determine the success of his presidency.

Yet there's an adage common in business and management literature he'd be wise to keep in mind: "Don't let the urgent crowd out the important."

Despite the urgency of the problems listed above, the single most important challenge for the new administration—one with the potential to determine the character of the 21st century—is China and U.S.-China relations.

This may sound like an exaggeration. It's not. As goes China, so go 1.3 billion men, women and children—one out of every five people on the planet. China's economy is now roughly half the size of the United States'; in three decades, the two should be about equal. What Chinese people eat, how much (or whether) they drive, where and how they choose to live, work and play: all will have an enormous impact on the availability and price of energy, the temperature of the planet and the prosperity of mankind.

China's foreign policy will have a similarly profound effect. A cooperative China could help, among other things, stem the spread of nuclear materials and weapons, maintain an open global trading and financial system, secure energy supplies, frustrate terrorists, prevent pandemics and slow climate change. A hostile or simply noncooperative China, on the other hand, would make it that much more difficult for the United States and its allies to tame the most dangerous facets of globalization.

History suggests that the emergence of a cooperative China is anything but inevitable—and, in fact, is downright unlikely. Existing powers and rising ones are natural competitors or worse. Friction tends to result from the desire of the rising power to assert its influence and the desire of the existing power to resist it. Just think of Germany's actions in the early 20th century—and the reactions of Britain and France.

The best way to bring about a cooperative relationship—which would serve both China's and the United States' interests—is for Washington to make a concerted effort to persuade Beijing (and other powers like India and Russia, for that matter) to sign up for and support a set of rules, policies and institutions needed to meet the challenges of globalization. Call it "integration."

Integration should be for this era of U.S. foreign policy what containment was for the previous one. In substance, however, the two approaches could not be more different. Whereas containment sought to keep the Soviet Union out, integration seeks to bring China in. The goal should be to make China a pillar of a globalized world, so invested in the current system that it sees it as in its interests to keep things running smoothly.