America Is Fumbling Its Most Important Relationship
China is an increasing problem for the United States. But the latest reactions and assumptions about China among America’s political-media leadership class hold every prospect of making China-related problems much worse. How can this be? It involves the familiar tension between short-term political shrewdness and longer-term strategic wisdom. Here’s the pattern I see:
Back in the 1980s, when Japan was on its path of industrial ascent, I was based there for The Atlantic. In those days the longtime U.S. ambassador in Tokyo, former Senator and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, said in virtually every speech that U.S.-Japanese interactions were “the most important bilateral relationship in the world, bar none.” Mansfield, a great politician and patriot, used this phrase so reliably and relentlessly that “bar none” became among the Japan crowd an air-quote shorthand. “We had a great time at that sushi place last night. The unagi was the tastiest—bar none!”
Mansfield’s maxim doesn’t seem true anymore, and probably was not accurate even at the time. (What about the Soviet Union, then in the depths of its Cold War standoff with the United States? What about China, just beginning its reforms?) But I’ve often thought about the assertion as a useful rhetorical device. It’s instructive to think about the relationships for the US that are “most” by a range of a variety of standards.
I would assert that as of 2018:
- America’s most volatile relationship is with North Korea, for obvious reasons.
- Its most damaging relationship would seem to be with Russia.
- Its most dangerously relationships would be (a four-way tie) with Mexico, Canada, the European Union as an economic group, and NATO as a strategic alliance. Each of these relationships is crucial to America’s long-term economic, diplomatic, military, and national-security
