 (Copyright 2013)G-Zero: A world order in which no single country or durable alliance of countries can meet the challenges of global leadership. （下面是几个章节的摘录） CHAPTER 3 The G-Zero Impact The Middle East and Asia on the Brink The Middle East is the more imminent risk, but nowhere is the longer-term threat of armed conflict greater than in Asia. Asia is home to more hot spots, rising powers, and potential conflict than any other region and is crucial for the strength of the global economy. Increasingly dysfunctional North Korea might eventually stumble into war. It might also simply collapse, creating a refugee crisis and an enormously expensive reunification project with South Korea. Pakistan has an unpopular civilian government, a feeble economy, a military that regularly interferes in politics, activist judges with political scores to settle, tribal militants, the world's worst domestic terrorism problem, deteriorating relations with Washington, and a stockpile of nuclear weapons. Rivalry and grievance might one day generate another Indian-Pakistan confrontation. Chinese conflicts with Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines over maritime boundaries and control of natural resources have eroded relationship between China and these countries. Simply put, Asia has too many powerful states and not enough cooperation. China would like to become the dominant regional power, but India is too big to simply accept a secondary role. Japan remains one of the world's wealthiest and most influential countries. South Korea is a leading emerging power. Indonesia is becoming a major economic and diplomatic player. Hot spots and jostling powers aside, the central problem in Asia is that many countries want to maintain security ties with the United States even as they expand trade relations with China. That isn't sustainable, because Beijing's economic influence gives Chinese policymakers ever-increasing leverage with these governments. As China's consumer markets take on added weight and Americans see their purchasing power reduced, East Asia countries are rushing to expand trade tie with one another and with China. In fact, according to Xinhua, in 2010 China became the largest trading partner and the single biggest export market for Southeast Asian countries. China's agreement with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which went into effect in 2010, involves more people than any other trade deal in history. Washington is losing leverage on more than just trade. Given new limits on America's means and the scale of it's domestic challenges, officials in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and other U.S.-friendly states can be excused for questioning America's long-term staying power. In fact, China's navy has become more aggressive in defending its territorial claims in recent years in part to gauge the degree of pushback from Washington and its Asian neighbors. Japan doesn't have an army, because the U.S. presence assures that it doesn't need one, but over time, concern about the U.S. commitment to Asian security could sharpen the Chinese-Japanese rivalry - and even set off an arm race. The Obama administration has worked hard to increase U.S. leverage in Asia - with everything from an agreement to station U.S. troops in Australia to progress on a Trans-Pacific Partnership, an agreement designed to grow regional trade and investment ties among Asian and Pacific Rim countries. But a reduced defense budget will only increase the uncertainty about Washington's commitment to Asia's security. This brings us to Asia's biggest G-Zero question. One effect of a world without global leadership is that regional powers and organizations could fill the vacuum left by increasingly outdated and dysfunctional international institutions and bring some order to each region. Brazil might fill that role in Latin America. The European Commission and European Central Bank can join with international institutions to bolster the EU and the Eurozone. Saudi Arabia is using the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) - an expanding club of Arab monarchies that includes the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, and Qatar - to help maintain political and economic stability in the Gulf (though not yet, to be sure, more broadly across the Middle East). Even in Africa, a continent long considered hopelessly fragmented and politically chaotic, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Uganda are playing larger constructive roles in managing conflict in their respective subregions. But Asia has too many powerful countries and too few referees: there is no Asian Union on the horizon or even an Asia-wide security forum to resolve inevitable conflicts. The G-Zero produces paralysis at the global level, creating opportunities for coordination in most regions, but the Middle East is too divided and Asia is too big for that. As American influence wanes, the potential for conflict will grow. The Middle East crises will continue to dominate headlines and roil markets, but Asian conflict will be the biggest global hazard in the years to come. CHAPTER 5 What Comes Next? Cold War 2.0 - Or Something Worse Over the past decade, several commentators have warned that America and China are on one form or another of collision course. There's even a board game on the market called Red Dragon Rising: The Coming War with China. Strategy & Tactics magazine calls the game "a strategic-level investigation, with operational undertones, of the possibilities inherent in the first 3-or-so days of a hypothetical war between the People's Republic of China and a U.S.-led counter-alliance." Let's hope it doesn't come to that. But if China and the United States are headed for more direct forms of conflict, and if they have far more economic, political, and military power than any other country or bloc of countries in the post-G-Zero order, then we are more likely to see a scenario we might call Cold War 2.0. This is not a war likely be to waged with fighter jets launched from aircraft carriers. The new weapons of war will probably be economic: market access, investment rules, and currency values. We could also see a series of cyberattacks and counterstrikes designed to disrupt information flows or even to target the other side's critical infrastructure. We should not assume that we have any idea who would hold the advantage in such a face-off - or that those who might wage this war do either. Cold War 2.0 could develop in several ways. Chinese policymakers come to believe that an increasingly cash-poor Washington no longer has the resource for a fight halfway around the world, and the Chinese military elite uses its leverage within the leadership to exert economic pressure intended to drive the United States from its Asian sphere of influence. Washington then decided that, given U.S. interest in the region, it can't afford not to push back. Or one side absorbs a destructive cyberattack on its military, its financial markets, or its electrical grid and becomes convinced, rightly or wrongly, that the other side has committed a premeditated act of war. Retaliation follows, and the conflict spirals. Or maybe a defective Chinese product kills dozens of U.S. consumers, igniting a trade war that takes on a life of its own. A seemingly endless number of such potential flash points could provoke many different forms of fighting, and this confrontation might force other states to take sides. As to what any confrontation might look like, it's tempting to fall back on the Cold War model - two superpowers staring one another down from behind their nuclear arsenals with only the threat of mutually assured destruction stilling hands. But that scenario ignores an important point. During the U.S.-Soviet conflict, the Iron curtain was not just the prison wall that kept invaders out and prisoners in. It was a buffer between the capitalist and communist worlds. The Soviet Union was an important energy supplier for Europe, but other East-West trade ties were extremely limited. The world was more zero-sum place in which one side could inflict harm on the other without damaging its own interest. Today's U.S.-China relations, on the other hand, will continue to rest on a degree of interdependence - a "mutually assured economic destruction" - that makes it difficult for the two sides to damage each other without damaging themselves. The United States needs China to continue to finance U.S. debt. China needs to be sure that Americans can and will pay them back - and that the currency they use will be worth more than the paper it's printed on. That's a stabilizing force in the relationship. It's also important to keep this interdependence in mind when looking over the more traditional list of supposedly likely U.S.-Chinese flash points. In 2006, author Ted Galen Carpenter published America's Coming War with China: A Collision Course over Taiwan, in which he sketched a scenario in which a U.S.-Chinese conflict over Taiwan in 2013 provokes a quarter century of confrontation as "the world's two leading powers [become] locked in a Cold War...at least as intense as the earlier surly confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union." Taiwan has enough friends in the U.S. Congress to ensure that U.S. arms sales to the island will continue, provoking the occasional diplomatic dustup. But China has long since co-opted much of Taiwan's business elite with offers of sweetheart commercial deals on the mainland and by signing up an unprecedented trade agreement with the island in 2010. In the process, Beijing has ensured that many of Taiwan's most influential voices sing the praises of steady cross-strait relations. Only a Taiwanese declaration of independence could provoke an open conflict, and that won't happen because Taiwan knows that Washington won't support it, Taipei can't afford it, and most Taiwanese don't want it. This scenario also depends on the relative weakness of the world's other states. The beginnings of an all consuming U.S-Chinese conflict could force other countries to take sides or try to hedge between the two. But it's much harder for a pivot state to play one side off another when the two sides are engaged in some form of direct conflict. A militarily aggressive China might drive Japan, South Korea, and even India toward much closer ties with the United States, and Washington could then afford to extend its presence in Asia by pooling its strength with these and other regional powers. That's the importance of the fact that Asia is too big to dominate, even for China. It could also unite the United States, Europe, and Japan into a tighter economic alliance designed to protect free-market capitalism from China's state capitalist expansion. China is unlikely to fare as well in this scenario as the Soviet Union did, because domestic priorities will probably ensure that it is simply too expensive for Beijing to build a soviet-scale global military presence, and because China has nothing like the ideological and cultural appeal that the Soviet Union once held for many in the developing world. China has earned a lot of friends within cash-hungry governments in both the established and the emerging worlds, but it has little chance of capturing the hearts and minds of the people who live in these countries. The United States would also lack some of its advantages of the last century. Without the kind of unity imposed by the aftermath of WWII, there will not be a new Breton Woods to align countries' economic policies, no Washington Consensus that gives the United States global institutional dominance, no hunger in the rest of the world for U.S. exports or investment, and nothing like the ideological appeal that came from the thirst for democracy after years of fascist dictatorship or fear of a Soviet advance. To be sure, Cold War 2.0 is more likely to emerge than either the G2 or concert scenarios, but many factors limit the risk of a direct and destabilizing U.S.-Chinese conflict. 注: 前两天副总统的演讲让我想到了去年读的这本书（2013年出版的书）。 这段时间有关中美冷战的论调可能会铺天盖地，所以把上面的内容摘出来分享一下。 --- 拙林 |
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