In 1946, George Kennan, who was acting as the head of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, wrote a message to the Secretary of State, known as the “Long Telegram”. In the Long Telegram, Kennan laid out a theory of how Soviet power could be defeated. He argued that Soviet leaders would always be hostile to the U.S., but that they were also cautious — they wouldn’t recklessly start a world war like Germany had. He also argued that the Soviet system was weak and unstable, and that given enough time, it would collapse from its own internal contradictions. This became known as the doctrine of “containment”, and it ended up being exactly the strategy that the U.S. used to win the Cold War. It took 45 years for the strategy to work and the USSR to fall.
I am certainly no George Kennan. I’ve never lived in China, I haven’t been there in many years, I don’t speak Chinese, and I certainly don’t talk to any leaders there. I’m also not a career diplomat or a professional geopolitics guy of any kind. So although I’m going to write a blog post with the same general goal as Kennan’s Long Telegram, I don’t want to suggest that it’s anywhere near as authoritative or insightful.
But I’m still going to write a post about “how to beat China”, because I think it’s useful to think through these sorts of big strategic questions. This post is also an important follow-up to a series of posts I wrote about geopolitics during the Biden years, about U.S.-China competition:
