The avoidable war | The Monthly

By Martin McKenzie-Murray

Kevin Rudd on China, the US and the forces of history

Between China and the United States, Kevin Rudd tells me, is an alarming static of incomprehension, mistrust and bad faith. Direct channels of communication are negligible to non-existent, diplomacy largely exhausted. Instead, there exists a paranoid antagonism made fuzzy by the absence of clear boundaries to their rivalry and the absence of formally declared areas of cooperation. Within this context, the risk of misapprehension and miscalculation between the two great powers is disturbingly high – and so too the risk of catastrophic escalation. “The term I use is ‘mutually assured non-comprehension’,” Rudd says. “And that’s not because the Chinese and the Americans don’t know a lot about each other. But there are aspects of their domestic political drivers which they don’t know sufficiently. And I have seen domestic factors in any country, democratic or non-democratic, often have been the decisive drivers of external policy behaviour. And we must also understand that China itself is not monolithic. Xi Jinping is the paramount leader, but the 95-million-member Chinese Communist Party contains within it a rather extraordinary diversity of views. And that’s something which Western political actors need to be aware of.”

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