As the U.S. presidential campaign barrels toward its big, traditional fall push, both contestants have found ways to emphasize the centrality of Washington’s competition with Beijing to the country’s future.
As the U.S. presidential campaign barrels toward its big, traditional fall push, both contestants have found ways to emphasize the centrality of Washington’s competition with Beijing to the country’s future.
In her acceptance of the Democratic Party nomination last Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris vowed that she would ensure “America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century.” In recent weeks, Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump has spoken frequently of China, sometimes praising the intelligence of its leader, Xi Jinping, but more often vowing to raise taxes on Chinese imports as a way of preserving U.S. leadership in the world.
The reality of this competition is something that American politicians find difficult to articulate publicly. The decades of unrivaled U.S. paramountcy that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union are not only over, but likely to never return. Second, China, by virtue of both its size and the velocity of its sustained growth since the late 20th century, now constitutes something closer to a true peer competitor with the United States than the Soviet Union ever was.
To be sure, the United States and China have different strengths. Partly due to its openness, the former has enormous soft power. Love it or hate it, America has ubiquitous cultural influence. It has far greater per capita wealth and other advantages, albeit some of them shrinking, ranging from technological innovation and economic productivity to world-leading higher education. China, meanwhile, has eclipsed the United States as a force in international trade and has leveraged its large surpluses and national savings to become the biggest global lender. As a result of massive, sustained investments in its military and many defense-related industries, from ship building to artificial intelligence, China has also become a formidable competitor in military terms.
To avoid conflict, realities like these, of tight competition between starkly different but increasingly well-matched rivals—and moreover, rivals whose economies remain substantially connected—will require tremendous creativity from those who manage the countries’ relationship. The key question is how can Washington and Beijing avoid allowing ever more of their dealings with each other to devolve into a series of zero-sum contests?
One of the most powerful avenues for serious, high-level cooperation is one that has never been pursued. It exists in the skies above: space. Currently, both countries are investing heavily in space exploration in ways that do nothing to further their sense of trust or common purpose. By law, in fact, the United States has ruled out cooperation in space with China since 2011. As two big issues amply illustrate, though—one of them a looming crisis and the other a shared human challenge—there has never been a better time to reconsider this ill-conceived restriction.
For some, mention of an impending crisis might bring to mind the dangerous ongoing problems of NASA’s present Starliner mission, whose Boeing vessel has suffered serious failures, creating an elevated sense of danger and uncertainty about the return to Earth of that mission’s astronauts. But beyond the 2011 law, national pride prevents Washington from enlisting help of any kind from Beijing with this challenge. It would be unrealistic to expect anything to change in time for China to play any role in getting the Starliner crew back to Earth safely. However, a situation like this underscores what China and the United States could gain by forming a mutual aid agreement to extend their good offices in the case of manned civilian missions in distress in the future.
There is another looming crisis, however, one with much smaller immediate stakes than the Starliner mission, and therefore one for which Beijing and Washington should be able to fashion an agenda of deep cooperation more easily. The problem is the proliferation of space debris, which poses serious risks to manned missions in orbit and to the satellites that both countries, and indeed the whole world, are increasingly reliant on. Over the years, both countries have contributed heavily to this problem, with a recent incident involving a failed Chinese rocket serving as a timely reminder of the accumulating danger.
Even without tackling something as politically challenging as shared missions, pairing crew members, or space station visits, the two countries should be able to work out a cooperation on this issue—one that could help build confidence between them, as well as reassure the rest of the world that their competition has reasonable limits.
The second potential area for cooperation—the shared human challenge—involves something of a much higher order than clearing space junk.
To the casual observer, the United States and China appear to be competing over bragging rights involving exploration of the moon. As everyone knows, the United States first landed astronauts there in 1969, making this pursuit something of an anticlimax for some, including people in Congress who authorize spending. But in fact, beyond lingering scientific aims, missions to the moon these days are largely about eventual human travel to Mars. The moon is useful as a slingshot, and especially as a source of minerals and water, the latter of which can be broken into hydrogen and oxygen and used as fuel.
Both the costs and technological challenges involved in expanding exploration of Mars, including eventual human outposts there, are orders of magnitude greater than what humans have done on the moon. The potential payoff is correspondingly great, with implications ranging from discovering whether life is unique in this solar system to the future of life on Earth.
Scientists who are involved in Mars exploration go to great lengths to rule out the possibility, however remote, of inadvertently contaminating our neighbor with life from Earth in the form of microbial stowaways on landing crafts and robots. With the stakes involved in exploring and understanding Mars this big, though, we should avoid something else: a situation where any nation one day plants a flag exclusively in the soil of our common neighbor.
Pursuing this kind of discovery jointly would build new habits of cooperation and common purpose between the United States and China. It would reduce the immense cost of this endeavor for both parties, at a time when major economic challenges hover over both countries’ futures. And it would likely hasten the day when humans can answer the big and tantalizing questions that Mars poses: Has it ever harbored life? How did it lose its atmosphere? Can its immense newly suspected reserves of water be tapped? Can it be made enduringly habitable?
One challenge of space exploration, of course, is that the technologies involved are very often so-called dual use, meaning that they can be employed for military purposes. This presents risks, but it also offers prospects of rewards. Call me naïve, but one of these rewards, again, is trust. In their military competition with each other, as in the superpower competition of the past, few things remain secret very long. If managed carefully, therefore, the dual-use risk recedes in importance compared to the positive stakes that Mars presents, offering compelling reasons to move forward together.
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