THE US AND CHINA

THE US MUST SHARE POWER WITH CHINA

Asian stability cannot be directed by American military force.

Paul Keating

The Sydney Morning Herald, August 7, 2012

I BELIEVE the reason Hugh White asked me to launch his book, The China Choice, was not that he wanted a former prime minister to do it, but at least one who regarded his subject as central to Australia's security and prosperity.

White reminds us that the United States has never dealt with a country which is as rich and as powerful as China, instancing that the Soviet Union was never its economic match. He asks why the US never saw it coming; how did it not see the challenge to its primacy in the Pacific developing? And he answers his own question by nominating September 11, 2001: the time when the US, at the height of its unipolar moment, decided to lay off its strategic bets in the Middle East, leaving the Chinese to the vagaries of their struggle with poverty.

The failure to understand the dispersal of global power at the end of the Cold War, of the post-colonial blossoming, of the availability of capital and technology, saw the US miss the chance to create a new and more representative world order.

But not all of us missed it. For two decades, I have been making the point in public speeches that the industrial revolution broke the nexus between population and GDP. That once the productivity-inducing inputs of capital and technology became ubiquitous, it was only a matter of time before the great states by way of population once again became the great states by way of GDP. Hugh White has long been making the same point.

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