James Fallows

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“No Sane American Leader Would Choose Confrontation With China”

November 22, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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James Fallows wrote these words for the Atlantic just prior to the American election: “What if China is going bad?” Now that we know the U.S. has headed boldly in that direction, the question becomes more pressing.

The journalist is moving forward the “Thucydides Trap” argument made by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, who believes insurgent powers and entrenched ones are apt to engage in war despite how little sense such clashes make. Now that the world’s greatest superpower has installed a sociopath in the Oval Office and China’s Xi Jinping works through his own “small hands” complex by ratcheting up authoritarianism, who knows where the tensions will lead?

An excerpt:

The paradoxical combination of insecurity and aggressiveness is hardly confined to China. The United States has all too many examples in its own politics. But this paradox on a national-strategic scale for China matched what many people told me about Xi himself as a leader: The more uncertain he feels about China’s diplomatic and economic position in the world, and the more grumbling he hears about his ongoing crackdown, the more “decisively” he is likely to act. “Xi is a weak man who wants to look strong,” a foreign businessman who has worked in China for many years told me. “He is the son of a famous father [Xi Zhongxun, who fought alongside Mao as a guerrilla and became an important Communist leader] and wants to prove he is worthy of the name. As we’ve seen in other cultures, this can be a dangerous mix.” Ten years ago, when I visited a defense-oriented think tank in Beijing, I was startled to see a gigantic wall map showing U.S.-affiliated encampments and weapons on every Chinese frontier except the one bordering Russia. I came to understand that the graphic prominence of the U.S. military reflected a fairly widespread suspicion that the United States wishes China ill, is threatened by its rise, and does not want to see China succeed. Almost no one I spoke with recently, however, foresaw a realistic danger of a shooting war between China and the United States or any of its allies—including the frequently discussed scenario of an unintentional naval or aerial encounter in the South China Sea. Through the past few years, in fact, U.S. military officials, led by the Navy, have engaged their People’s Liberation Army counterparts in meetings, conferences, and exercises, precisely to lessen the risk of war by miscalculation. “Naval forces are actually pretty good at de-escalating and steering out of one another’s way,” a senior U.S. Navy officer told me.

The concern about a more internationally aggressive China involves not a reprise of the Soviet Union during the tensest Cold War years but rather a much bigger version of today’s Russia. That is: an impediment rather than an asset in many of the economic and strategic projects the United States would like to advance. An example of kleptocracy and personalized rule. A power that sometimes seems to define its interests by leaning toward whatever will be troublesome for the United States. An actual adversary, not just a difficult partner. China is challenging in many ways now, and increasingly repressive, but things could get worse. And all of this is separate from the effect on China’s own people, and on the limits it is placing on its academic, scientific, commercial, and cultural achievements by cutting itself off from the world.

What is to be done? The next president will face a quandary often called the “Thucydides Trap.” This concept was popularized by the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison. Its premise is that through the 2,500 years since the Peloponnesian warfare that Thucydides chronicled, rising powers (like Athens then, or China now) and incumbent powers (like Sparta, or the United States) have usually ended up in a fight to the death, mainly because each cannot help playing on the worst fears of the other. “When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen,” Allison wrote in an essay for TheAtlantic.com last year.

No sane American leader would choose confrontation with China.•

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“The American Military Is Exotic Territory To Most Of The American Public”

December 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Thank you for your service” is born as much of guilt as gratitude. Americans feel uncomfortable about the work done by our military men and women because the overwhelming majority of us will never know such burden, nor will anyone in our families. That disengagement makes it too easy to keep sending strangers to do our dirty work. (Would we have ever invaded Iraq for no good reason beyond enriching war contractors if the draft hadn’t been abolished?) There’s also a less-obvious price: Awkwardness about this grunt class we’ve created from other people’s children makes it difficult to speak critically and reform a military that often fails to achieve its goals. More skepticism about the purpose and priorities of our armed forces might be as good for those on the ground as the rest of us on the couch. An excerpt from James Fallows’ “The Tragedy of the American Military,” an Atlantic piece I’ll have to add to my “Great 2014 Nonfiction Articles” list:

“This reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so familiar that we assume it is the American norm. But it is not. When Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a five-star general and the supreme commander, led what may have in fact been the finest fighting force in the history of the world, he did not describe it in that puffed-up way. On the eve of the D-Day invasion, he warned his troops, ‘Your task will not be an easy one,’ because ‘your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened.’ As president, Eisenhower’s most famous statement about the military was his warning in his farewell address of what could happen if its political influence grew unchecked.

At the end of World War II, nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve). Through the decade after World War II, when so many American families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. Most Americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions.

Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans ‘honor’ their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.”

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“What Is Good, And Bad, About America Is Better, And Worse, In Its Most Populous State”

May 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

From James Fallows’ new Atlantic article about Gov. Jerry Brown 2.0, a passage about how California is America writ large, better and worse than ever:

“As for the problems Brown and his state are wrestling with, they are America’s problems—but worse. Here we leave the governor for a moment to consider the environment he is working in, which is both emblematic of and surprisingly different from America as a whole.

You can go too far with the idea that California shows how all of America will look a few years from now. The state’s population is already more heavily Hispanic than the U.S. population might ever be: Hispanics, at nearly 40 percent, are about to overtake California’s ‘non-Hispanic white’ percentage to become the largest ethnic group in the state. (Nationwide, Hispanics are about 17 percent of the population.) Relative to the country as a whole, Asians also make up a larger share of California’s population—­roughly 15 percent of the state, versus about 8 percent of the country—while blacks and whites represent smaller shares. (California is about 40 percent white and 6 percent black, versus 63 percent and 12 percent, respectively, for the United States.) Largely because of these demographic shifts, the Republican Party, which a generation ago relied on California as the largest element of its Sunbelt base, now barely bothers to mount statewide races except those self-financed by political-novice millionaires like Meg Whitman, who lost badly to Brown in 2010, and Carly Fiorina, who lost badly to Barbara Boxer for the U.S. Senate that same year. In 2012, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by 3 million votes in California—and by only 2 million more in the other 49 states combined. In both houses of the state legislature the Democrats have, for now, a two-thirds ‘supermajority’ that allows them to prevail even against California’s version of the filibuster. ‘The Republicans appear to have no power,’ Jerry Brown told me. ‘Some of them are nice people, but they aren’t needed for any votes [in the legislature], and they don’t participate.’

In other ways tangible and subjective, California is an outlier. Its median income is much higher than America’s—but so is its unemployment rate. Its prison system is large and fantastically expensive. Two of its sizable cities (Stockton and San Bernardino) have filed for bankruptcy. And it has myriad other problems. Still, California is usefully representative of the country in one very important way. What is good, and bad, about America is better, and worse, in its most populous state.”

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“Can We Ever Expect Sanity From Our Government Again?”

August 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

“How about this: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, in a freeform talk-show-type discussion. “

That excellent James Fallows of the Atlantic has just done a lengthy Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few segments follow.

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Question:

If you could have any two presidential candidates from any of the recent elections (2000-now) debate, which two would you pick and why?

James Fallows:

How about this: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, in a freeform talk-show-type discussion. That would be fun.

Fun in a different way: Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney.

Bonus point: I submit that Dick Cheney has become the most malign major figure in modern American politics. Which is interesting and disturbing because at an earlier stage of his existence he was “moderate,” open-minded, pleasant, non-vindictive, and so on. He was chief of staff under Ford, and was in charge of the transition to the Carter team (which included me as an underling). An entirely different kind of guy then. For later discussion.

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Question:

What’s your whole view on the upcoming election? How different do you think the candidates are? (They both seem to be similar to me with their plans, Romneys health care plan etc.)

James Fallows:

How different are the candidates? They (Obama and Romney) are actually more similar, as human beings, than in some previous elections. (Clinton v Dole, Clinton v George HW Bush, Obama v McCain). Both Harvard Law guys, both more introverted than classic-pol extroverts, both “left brain” rather than right brain people.

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Question:

I’m just curious, can we ever expect sanity from our government again? Even if they only consider it the last option… if they run out of options, if they run out of steam on this consensual reality kick they’ve been on, I can see a little old-fashioned honesty swaying a huge chunk of the populace, regardless of which party it comes out of. Traditionally though, or at least over the last century, the Republicans did their fair share of straight talk… I’m curious if I can expect to see that again in my lifetime or if it is more likely they become a marginal, religious, party and a new party, of a necessity, rises to replace what they’ve left behind.

James Fallows:

This is a good point and a really major question, and one that I have seen debated quite a bit among Republicans.

There has been an active theme on the right this year, arguing that the 2012 election is the GOP’s “last chance” for a while. The argument is that if Romney wins the White House, the party will have some leverage for a while. It wil probably have a few Supreme Court appointments; the modern vetting process is such that people will be chosen young, and for “reliable” views; other changes with some carry-over can be made. Meanwhile, the rural-state skew of the Senate also magnifies GOP influence there.

But if Obama is re-elected, by this argument, the Republicans are in trouble. Their recent positions have weakened them among the following voting blocs: women, Latinos, blacks, gays-lesbians, Asian-Americans, the highly educated, the young. All the growth in the electorate is in these groups. The nightmare vision from this point of view would be California — reliably Republican a generation ago, now the other way.

I would hope that if Romney loses, especially if he loses big, it would be the occasion for systematic re-thought in the party — like what happened after Goldwater (though that led to Nixon) and what happened after the Carter and Mondale defeats in 1980 and 1984, leading to Clinton. My fear is that the hard-liners in the party will say that the problem was that the 2012 GOP was not conservative enough. If only Paul Ryan had been at the top of the ticket.

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“Will Chinese Companies Ever Go From Assembling iPads To Fostering Future Apples Of Their Own?”

May 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In August of last year I put up a post entitled, “Can China, With Its Present Government And Business Structure, Ever Turn Out A Company Like Apple?” I was asking whether a nation that has famously opened countless fake Apple stores could ever create an actual company like the one birthed by Jobs-Wozniak. In the New York Times, the excellent James Fallows wonders similar things in “Can China Escape The Low-Wage Trap?” An excerpt about the downside to China’s meteoric rise:

“Some of the limits and failures are well publicized: among others, the environmental despoliation that has made cancer the leading cause of death in China; the demographic shift caused by the one-child policy that threatens to make China the first society to grow old before it grows rich; and the problems of transparency and accountability in the Chinese governing system, illustrated most recently by the Bo Xilai and Chen Guangcheng cases.

Those, at least, are the problems that get the headlines. But there’s a bigger one, which the Chinese government and public are only now starting to recognize: whether the success of China’s current model is leading toward a ‘low-wage trap,’ in which its outsourcing factories get bigger but don’t necessarily move the country toward the higher tiers of the world economic structure.

PUT differently, will Chinese companies ever go from assembling iPads to fostering future Apples of their own — or, similarly, from selling knockoff copies of Western movies, music, search engines and online apps to establishing China’s own pop-culture industries with worldwide profits and soft-power appeal?

Nearly every Apple product is ‘made’ in China, but barely 10 cents on the Apple sales dollar stay with workers, suppliers or anyone else in te country. The rest goes to designers and shareholders in the United States, component makers in Japan, machine-tool makers in Germany and retailers or shippers around the world. The problem for America with this arrangement is that it disproportionately rewards the top rather than the middle of our income scale. The problem for China is figuring out how to capture more of the rewards to begin with.”

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