美对华政策“零和假设”将导致灾难
2022-04-07 09:12阅读：
我向诸位推介一位名叫杰里·布朗的美国政治人物。他本周年满84岁，但活力不减。我敬佩他，并且认为这位资深政治家正在成为中国问题领域的重要人物。
布朗现在的主要事业是研究美中之间的紧张关系，对此他可以发表长篇大论。
在担任加利福尼亚州州长的两个八年任期中，布朗被戏称为“月光州长”。加州是美国人口最多的州，也是检验新政策理念的前沿场所。在环境方面，他大力推行风电、太阳能及其他先进技术，让加州一直走在潮流前沿——他称之为“地球现实主义”。他甚至希望启动属于加州的太空计划。
尽管没少遭到媒体批评，但布朗获得了选民的支持。在首次竞选加州州长近30年后，他获得了第二个八年任期。如今，布朗值得被尊称为一位杰出的政策思想家。他现在从事的领域正是美国急需的——与中国建立更加复杂的关系。
他最近在《纽约书评》上发表了一篇文章，题为《华盛顿的疯狂现实主义》。人生经历让布朗的脾气日趋温和，他在文中对自鸣得意的东海岸权力精英进行了深刻剖析。
布朗坚信美国正在推行错误的外交政策，并对此感到担忧。美国坚持实施毫无意义的对抗和遏制政策，这种策略似乎不是事先谋划的，而是根本缺乏思考，尤其是在美中竞争终局之战的问题上。
布朗说，当前美国对中国的看法之所以“几乎完全基于零和假设”，原因在于“来自各个政党和意识形态、本意良好的聪明人全部陷入所谓‘理性’的决策过程，从而导致灾难性后果”。
布朗在文中称赞美国对华政策的批评者，他们反对哈佛大学教授格雷厄姆·艾利森关于美中“注定一战”的理论，该理论往往被用于增加防务开支。他称赞会讲普通话的澳大利亚前总理陆克文对国际政治的宝贵贡献。陆克文反对脱钩、遏
制和对抗的政策，认为其“终将造成难以想象的后果”。
布朗认可经济学家弗雷德·伯格斯滕的观点，后者的新书《美国与中国：追求全球经济领导权》与建制派观点决裂。布朗总结伯格斯滕的立场是：“如果（美中）不合作稳定世界经济，就有可能出现上世纪30年代大萧条那样的灾难。”无论是否情愿，中美需要彼此。
互相指责有损于外交所需的互信，将带来刺骨的寒意。正如中国谚语所言，冰冻三尺非一日之寒。不难想象，中国政府已经预料到，美国精英阶层肯定不愿看到中国外交的胜利。西方的一些“政治现实主义者”甚至可能有意挑起战争。
布朗警告说：“许多‘政治现实主义者’把中国挑战形容为无可救药的对抗，这种观点忽视了这样一个现实：为了繁荣甚至是为了生存，两国必须一边合作一边竞争……轻视中国的军事力量是愚蠢的，但刺激这种力量更加愚蠢。”
我们现在需要在地缘政治和生态两方面推行“全球现实主义”改革政策。中国甚至也可能加入进来。美国应该谦卑地询问中国的意见。
US-China relations need 'planetary realism' to avoid
geopolitical and ecological apocalypse
Tom Plate
I submit for your consideration an American political figure named
Jerry Brown. He turns 84 this week but is somehow still flamboyant
and relevant, if sometimes slightly annoying. I have not only grown
to admire him but come to feel this lifelong politician is becoming
an important world figure on the issue of China.
His primary cause nowadays is America’s fraught relationship with
China, and he has a great deal to say about this. Across the
decades, his mind would spin new policy ideas like a one-man think
tank, and not everyone could keep up.
During his two eight-year terms as the governor of California – the
most populous US state and a leading-edge setting for testing out
new policy ideas – he was mocked as “Governor Moonbeam”.
Fighting on the environmental front – or “planetary realism”, as
Brown calls it – he would tout windmills to generate electricity,
solar panels on roofs to warm homes and other advanced technologies
to keep California hip and edgy. He even had a dream of launching
California’s very own space programme. Elon Musk was so
behind.
While the critical media rarely gave him a break, he was no
moonbeam with voters. Nearly three decades after his initial run as
governor, voters gave him a second eight years. Launching
high-profile but ill-fated runs for the White House, Brown tamped
down his ego with unrelenting public service.
Today, he merits the title of a distinguished policy thinker. He is
now on the soapbox of what America urgently needs: a more
sophisticated relationship with China.
His latest dive into this area comes in an essay in The New York
Review of Books called “Washington’s Crackpot Realism”. Brown,
whose youthful temper is now more tempered by experience, peels
away layers of smugness within the East Coast power elite to
spotlight a continuing pattern of thought across US administrations
capable of sucking the two powers into a radioactive
apocalypse.
Brown has no doubt that American foreign policy is wrong-headed –
not to say that China’s is much better – and appears to be truly
scared. The US insistence on confrontation and containment makes no
sense and looks to be an approach slapped together less with malice
aforethought than no thought at all, especially about what might be
a sensible endgame to US-China competition.
Brown says that what makes current groupthink on China, “based
almost exclusively on zero-sum assumptions”, so alarming is that
“very bright people with the best of intentions, no matter their
party or ideology, get caught up in ‘rational’ processes that lead
to disastrous outcomes”.
In his review, he praises critics of US policy towards China for
pushing back on the Harvard-style “destined for war” types
fronting, inadvertently or not, for even more defense
spending.
He spotlights the invaluable contributions of Kevin Rudd, the
Mandarin-speaking former prime minister of Australia, who rejects
the combustible brew of decoupling, containment and confrontation
that might lead, in Rudd’s words, to “ultimately the unthinkable
itself”.
Brown also calls attention to the views of economist C. Fred
Bergsten, whose new book The United States vs China: The Quest for
Global Economic Leadership breaks with establishment wisdom. He
sums up Bergsten’s position as, “work together to stabilize the
world economy or risk a disaster on par with the Great Depression
of the 1930s”. Both need each other, like it or not.
The timing of these assertions merits greater context. With Beijing
evidently eager to hide the level of its diplomacy with Russia from
the eyes of outsiders, the inevitable image of China in the West is
that Beijing is doing nothing positive about the Ukraine tragedy
and does not care what Russian President Vladimir Putin does.
Only a few Western commentators, including myself, have called on
President Xi’s government to help staunch the river of Ukrainian
blood with a diplomatic initiative worthy of a great power. China,
the world’s second-largest economy and most populous nation, is
evolving its diplomacy much like it is doing with its
economy.
However, playing the blame game takes the warmth of mutual trust
that is needed for diplomacy and sinks it to a deep chill. As one
well-known saying goes, it takes more than one cold day to
freeze three feet of ice.
It is not hard to imagine the Xi government calculating that the
elite US establishment would scarcely countenance a triumph of
Chinese diplomacy. Some “political realists” in the West might even
be itching for a fight.
Brown warns that, “Framing the China threat as irredeemably
antagonistic, as many ‘political realists’ are currently doing,
misses the reality that both countries – to prosper and even to
survive – must cooperate as well as compete … It would be
foolish to minimize the military dangers that China poses, but it
would be even more foolish to act in ways that actually exacerbate
them.”
Brown is showing one way for the US to get back to its best old
self of sincerely trying to be on the right side of history. Our
past was far from perfect, but our future will be dreadful beyond
calculation without the grounding of new self-realisations.
What is needed is a reform policy of “planetary realism” in both
geopolitical and ecological terms. China might even want to pitch
in somehow. The US should ask, with humility.
