Empires Age Like Dynamite
No empire last forever. Governor-General A.C.D. de Graeff (right) with the Regent Ton That Han (center) and the Governor-General of French Indochina, Pierre Pasquier (left) in the vestibule of the residents’ house in Hué. 1930. Source.
Kant began with impossibility. Critique of Pure Reason opens with the assertion that, for much of its history, Western philosophy was dedicated to answering fundamentally unanswerable questions, to proving the existence and nature of God. He believed it was unavoidable that such metaphysical questions would arise in humanity’s struggle to understand the natural world. However, Kant argued, all knowledge is rooted in experience, and the metaphysical cannot be experienced. Philosophy’s entire reason for being was impossible. Yet, for Kant, this impossibility was productive. Free from what seemed to be the sole purpose of philosophy, Kant developed insights into reason itself that changed the trajectory of Western thought irrevocably.¹ I am not a Kantian philosopher, but, working in U.S.-China relations, I find the example of possibility created by impossibility absolutely necessary.
As the leader of a global order, the United States has entered a period of decline from which it will not likely recover. Indeed, that global order itself has shattered. Thinking about this decline and what it means for relations between America and its official “adversary,” China, should be the first priority for any advocate of international peace. The last decade of U.S.-China relations demonstrates that the options Washington is willing to consider are mere variations on a theme. Democrats dream of forming economic bloc to limit China’s economic growth, while MAGA Republicans prefer a cycle of inchoate trade war escalation and negotiation. Beyond economics, the sense from many policy experts on both sides is that some kind of conflict is inevitable even if not directly sought. Old standards of U.S.-China relations like strategic ambiguity over Taiwan have been slowly abandoned. Advocating for peace and cooperation on either side of the political spectrum in America has become impossible.
As with Kant, however, this impossibility could be productive. American organizations outside the state dedicated to peace are now free from years of talking to a brick wall. Where should they direct their efforts? If there is a new cold war between the United States and China, it will be as global as the Cold War of the 20th century. The danger is that it might be as hot. Empires age like dynamite. Across the globe, however, there are smaller states looking for a path to survive the U.S.-China rivalry. This is the possibility wrought by impossibility in Washington. If there is a new cold war, we need a new non-aligned movement.
The Dangers of Decline
To speak of decline is not to speak of collapse. First, the decline of the leader of a global order can be very protracted. The Tang Dynasty, global enough for its day, lasted for almost 150 years after the An Lushan rebellion (755-763) caused famine, depopulation, mass destruction, and the loss of territories in the west associated with the Silk Road.² Examples of decline in the modern era still take decades.
Despite the world historical significance of Haitian independence from France (1804), real decline of the French empire unfolded in Africa and Asia over several decades after World War II.³ Yet, even after formal decolonization, France maintained considerable control over much of Francophone Africa through a mixture of financial manipulations and violence. While Paris supported friendly authoritarian leaders in post-colonial Africa, French paratroopers were sent on more than 40 interventions in northern Africa between 1960 and 2002. In Gabon, French vassal par excellence, Paris supported the Bongo family dynasty and its control over the country’s incredible natural resources from 1967 until 2023 when a military coup ripped the West’s preferred, pliant leader from power. Eighty years is a long decline.
Second, the decline of most modern “great powers” has meant stasis at a still relatively powerful level. The British empire began losing colonies like Afghanistan (1919) and Egypt (1922) in the interwar period. Like France, decolonization accelerated after World War II, beginning largely in South Asia with Pakistan and India (both 1947) and moving into Southeast Asia with Burma (1948) and Africa with Libya (1951). This was not a peaceful process. Soon after British forces reoccupied Malaya following Japanese defeat, communist forces began a guerrilla war for independence that kept British and Commonwealth troops fighting from 1948 to 1960. While Britain ultimately ceded independence to its preferred Malay partisans in the conflict, British forces also committed atrocities it took seven decades for the government to formally acknowledge. Elsewhere, British forces executed, tortured, or maimed 90,000 Kenyans attempting to quell their struggle for independence, according to the Kenya Human Rights Commission. The total death toll from British imperial decline in Kenya alone may be as high as 25,000.
Like France, British decline is an identifiable moment in its imperial history, but not one that leads to collapse in any clearcut sense. France and the United Kingdom both have permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council. Both rank among the top 10 largest economies in the world, and both rank among the top 10 countries for highest military expenditure globally.
The Dangers of Ascension
Another danger of decline is the threat of violence required for a new imperial power to fill the void. The decline of European imperial powers of the 19th century also marked the beginning of the American century and the dawn of a new global order.
During the Cold War, the United States attempted to overthrow a foreign government 72 times, according to political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke. Sixty-six of these attempts were covert efforts, and only 26 of which were successful. In most successful cases, the U.S. government and CIA achieved their goals through election interference. The Cold War, however, was not only the stuff of Le Carré novels.
As it fought the Soviet Union, China, and anti-colonial movements, the United States helped create a transcontinental killing field that stretched from the Korean Peninsula, through Southeast Asia, and into the Middle East. Seventy percent of all deaths in a violent conflict during the Cold War occurred in this region along the rim of Eurasia.
America came into conflict with China via proxy wars beginning in the early 1950s. Ho Chi Minh, leader of communist and anti-colonial forces in Vietnam, appealed to the Chinese Communist Party for assistance in his fight against France in late 1949, which Mao Zedong, then in Moscow securing his own aid, quickly approved. In 1950, Paris turned to Washington for aid, claiming it could not afford to fend off communist forces on its own. American aid to French efforts began that year at $10 million and rose to $400 million in 1952. By 1954, the United States was paying for 78% of the war effort, roughly $1 billion according to historian Sandra Taylor.⁴
While Washington and Beijing were providing personnel, weaponry, and other forms of aid to their allies in Vietnam, American and Chinese troops were directly fighting each other on the Korean Peninsula. Initially ready to exclude Korea from its vision of post-WWII protections, the United States entered the war in Korea following North Korean invasion of the south in June 1950. The U.S. Congress voted against efforts to support the South Korean government directly, which compelled the national security establishment to enter the war by providing most of the weaponry, funding, and troops used by United Nations Command, an organization created specifically for South Korea’s protection.
Beijing became convinced of a potential U.S. threat to its own security and entered the war in October 1950 in an equally pseudonymous fashion. Mao created the Chinese People’s Volunteers, a military force constituted by People’s Liberation Army units but distinct enough from China’s official armed forces to prevent declaring war with the United States. The initial force included 250,000 men, but the total number of Chinese veterans from the war is closer to three million. By the Geneva Conference of 1954, which resulted in formal Vietnamese independence and stalemate in Korea, these two wars of imperial transition had cost the lives of millions. As many as 400,000 Vietnamese civilians died in the First Indochina War, and, in the deadliest single conflict of the entire Cold War, civilians were the majority of the three million casualties on the Korean Peninsula.⁵
American imperial decline has also been accompanied by war. Casualty figures for the Iraq War, a common starting point for American decline among Chinese scholars, vary widely. The Watson School at Brown University, in its Human Cost of Post-9/11 Wars, estimates 315,000 casualties from the Iraq War and another 176,000 from the war in Afghanistan. Across these two wars and conflicts in Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen, estimated casualties of the War on Terror in the Middel East total 940,000. Other studies have placed the death toll of the Iraq war alone above 600,000. Recent bipartisan support for Israel and both Trump administrations’ unilateral acts of war against Iran suggest that the pattern of violence is likely to continue.
While China’s trans-national repression of dissidents and recent adventures in Myanmar’s civil war cannot be ignored, it has not yet risen to meet the level of violence that accompanied imperial transitions of the 20th century. This is not to say that it never will, but doing so would be an extreme departure from its international behavior over the last four decades.
China is, contradictorily, a manufacturing powerhouse, a leader in scientific and technological innovation, and a quite precarious economy. For now, Beijing does not seem interested in or capable of building the kind of power America wielded in the 20th century. American military spending is still larger than the next nine countries combined, including China as a distant second according to a recent report from the Transnational Institute. It boasts only 10 military bases abroad compared the America’s 800. Nonetheless, American leaders remain committed to the idea a rivalry with China, a commitment which ought to send those working for peace scouring the globe for an alternative.
The Impossibility of U.S.-China Relations
Last year, a study of almost 500 think tank professionals in the United States found what it reported as a wide range of views on how to manage increasingly fierce competition with China. That China was a competitor that needed management, however, was a near consensus view. Roughly 20% of respondents reported experiencing social pressure to adopt “certain views” on the United States’ position toward China, leading to widely acknowledged “hawkflation.” Both the diversity and conformity found in the study describe the impossibility of advocating for long-term U.S.-China stability and peace.
Currently, many China experts in American think tanks are critical of the Trump administration’s use of tariffs and ham-fisted attempts at negotiations. All eyes are on Trump’s efforts to rip all the copper out of the walls of every American institution not dedicated to policing before the contractor shows up in the morning. This is as it should be. The overwhelming trend so far is that the current administration seeks to extract more money and commitments from U.S. allies while allowing its financial and military products and platforms to slowly deteriorate. Traditionally critical of NATO and congratulatory of Vladimir Putin, Trump has recently agreed to sell weapons to Ukraine provided that European allies pick up the tab.
In Asia, a similar dynamic is taking place. In May, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went to Singapore to announce the United State’s policy of peace through strength in the Indo-Pacific. He emphasized shared security relationships with Japan, Australia, and the Philippines and the revitalization of America’s defense industrial base. Never mind that defense contractors already make up the majority of the top ten U.S. government contractors. The point is to sell weapons systems to U.S. allies in the Pacific as Washington demands they increase their defense spending and make diplomatically high-risk commitments to defending Taiwan against Chinese invasion.
The futility in drafting policy papers for the current administration asking for U.S.-China peace and cooperation is obvious. While few in Trump’s administration probably actively seek to provoke a war with China, many are happy to sleepwalk into one. That there is criticism of this situation in Washington expresses the diversity of the policy world. The blindness to the absence of an alternative on the Democratic side expresses its conformity.
The current rivalry is not a product of either Trump administration. Few would make that case, but few appreciate the continuities in U.S. policy toward China. U.S.-China relations have been in tatters for a decade. The Obama administration’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, signed in February 2016 but never ratified, was seen by its critics as an attempt to halt China’s international economic rise and shift power in the Pacific to the United States. Whether one dates the decline of U.S. empire from the Iraq war or 2008 financial crisis, China’s rise was already a hot topic in academia in the first decade of the 21st century and a major multilateral policy initiative by the second.
In 2018, when the first Trump administration began issuing tariffs on billions of dollars of imports from China, it was reacting, however wrongly, to the same dynamic of imperial decline that was driving the late Obama administration’s China policies. Trump’s first trade war lasted until the Phase One trade deal of 2020 – a calm quickly shattered by COVID-19. By the end of the first Trump term, U.S.-China relations were bad enough for U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to describe China as “the most existential threat to the United States and its prosperity and security.”
The flip to another Democratic president under the Biden administration, however, was not an improvement. Biden maintained Trump’s tariffs, increasing them on certain products and introducing export controls on advanced chips. It is under Biden that a “state-capitalist geopolitics” began to emerge. What scholars like Jessica DiCarlo observed was a struggle between the U.S. and China to build a new cold war not around political ideologies or territorial control but around supply chains and trade networks. Effectively, the tendency on both sides was to divide the world into economic blocs, to try to maintain a form of globalization while neutralizing the economic advantages of the enemy. It is an idea to which many foreign policy experts on the Democratic side cling, arguing, as Rush Doshi has, that America’s allies can unite economically to overcome China’s advantages in manufacturing and exports.
The resumption of the trade war under the second Trump administration, while boorish, is a variation on an old idea. China’s economic rise must be countered through decoupling into economic blocs. Trumps recent claims about trade with Vietnam are a confirmation. On July 2, Trump announced that Vietnam would remove all tariffs on U.S. goods while facing a permanent 20% tariff when exporting to the United States and a 40% tariff on all transshipped goods. That Vietnam had not agreed to the deal does not matter. The point is the attempt to continue decoupling with China by building economic blocs. Even the Trump administration’s expectations involving allies with explicit commitments to defend Taiwan must be seen in the shadow of Biden’s multiple promises to defend the self-governing island. As American decline continues, this general trajectory of U.S.-China relations will continue as well.
Synthetic A Prioi
When Kant declared philosophy’s raison d’etre of proving God’s existence and nature impossible, it should have halted the project of philosophy entirely. It did not. Instead, it advanced the project. Kant looked at reason (thought) itself and discovered what he called synthetic a priori, things that are grounded in experience but nonetheless exist solely in thought – something like how we know that matter can neither be created nor destroyed without having to create or destroy all matter. It was radical for its day.
What does the impossibility of advocating for U.S.-China peace in Washington during a period of American imperial decline make possible? Southeast Asia, site of so many atrocities during the last transition from one global order to the next, offers some potential answers. Despite Trump’s announcements about discouraging transshipments from China through Vietnam to the United States, Vietnam is both militarily and economically intertwined with both powers. The same is true across the region. Fully aligning with either China or the United States would cripple Southeast Asian economies and leave them in very difficult defense situations. Neither Vietnam nor the Philippines could maintain any claim to the South China Sea without some form of support from the United States. Yet, both places would also benefit greatly from maintaining close economic relations with both sides of the Pacific.
The result across Southeast Asia is hedging, a strategy of trying to exist between the United States and China that inadvertently thwarts their ability to decouple and maintains economic integration. This is, of course, a survival strategy, but there remains the possibility that it could become an intentional, international movement with added internationalist support – a non-alignment for the 21st century. The beauty of Kant’s discovery of the synthetic a priori was that it was already extant and obvious and yet no one had noticed. The same will likely be true of our way out of repeating the horrors of declining modern empires. We just need to accept impossibility.
