In the age of Trumpian politics, nationalistic jingoism in the West, and intermittent escalation in the Xi-Trump wrestle for global power, Jeffrey Sachs stands out as amongst the most vocal public intellectuals on the subject of US-China relations and economic development. His latest work, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2018), offers a brief glimpse into the staggeringly expansive worldview of the scholar, shedding insights into areas ranging from the opioid crisis to Sachs’ vision of the future rise of Africa, classical international relations theory to the political psychology underpinning Trump’s insurgence. It is thus with genuine interest and excitement when I found myself on a Skype call with Sachs as I was in Hong Kong, a focal point of China and the West’s careful navigation for dominance and power.
Our conversation opened with an exploration of Sachs’ thoughts on the US-China trade war. The political theorist in me prompted me to explore the question of whether the trade war was caused predominantly by structural causes, or the actions of individual political agents, such as the rather vocal Commander-in-Chief in the White House and the taciturn and meticulous Xi at Zhongnanhai.
As a veteran in policymaking and governance (he currently serves as Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, as well as having advised many post-communist regimes on their politico-economic transition), Sachs swiftly responds with an extended answer; he notes that even during the Obama administration, there existed a push within American policymaking circles to “get the better of China in trade”, as evidenced by proposals such as the TPP, which Sachs appraised as “a proposal to create a coalition of countries that would write trade rules with the explicit idea of excluding China.” With Trump’s rise, he observed that the new White House occupant has rendered US-China relations far less predictable, and the paranoia instilled by American political hacks – particularly in the trade war – far less fact-based. The growing American anxieties about China’s increasing size and power manifested in aggressive, unstable policymaking, epitomised by Trump’s fixation upon one-person decision-making.
Sachs boldly dissents from many of his compatriots, who would hold a relatively favourable conception of America’s involvement in the trade war. Unlike most public economists, Sachs did not loath to air his normative judgments and evaluations of governmental morality, as evidenced best perhaps by his recent interview with the South China Morning Post on his commentary on the Huawei controversy. In our conversation, Sachs further clarified the stance he had expressed earlier. He saw China as “making up for lost time”, seeking to offset the disadvantage that it had been left with since the Opium Wars, and the injustices it had confronted during the “140 years” of foreign imperialism, civil war, and instability stretching from 1839 to 1978, when Deng Xiaoping came to power. Having experienced disaster after disaster during this long period, China was seeking to – and did manage to, to a large extent – get back on its feet and move forward to make up for the massive lost time and technology gap between it and its counterparts in the West.
There is nothing wrong with China’s process of catching-up – it should be celebrated. After 140 years of foreign incursion, invasion, civil war and domestic upheaval, celebration of China’s resurgence is in order.
Jeffrey Sachs
Drawing from his well of in-depth Chinese historical knowledge and battle-hardened quips about Western paranoia, Sachs noted that there was “nothing nefarious” about China’s rise under Deng Xiaoping and subsequent economic liberalisation. Sachs confidently parried against the suggestion that there might have been some grounding to the allegations made against China: “All the accusations are vastly overblown; if we were to look at the historical record, China has a lot to complain about.”
Our discussion naturally turned to Sachs’ assessment of American diplomacy; here Sachs was unabashedly critical – he lamented that “an American predilection for global dominance” had infiltrated its public psyche and foreign policy, with an unwarrantedly pervasive belief that what China was doing was ostensibly nefarious and unfair because it threatened America’s dominance.
“It’s become a meme, but I think it’s a bunch of nonsense.”Sachs had little time for concocted post-truths. Here he drew upon a core tenet that he advanced in his latest book, which called for the recognition of the case for multilateral, multipolar, cooperative synergy between China, Europe, the US, and other regions. He emphasised that we must reject the belief that the US’ conception of capitalism or politics is the only possible political system, characterising this belief as an absurdity that ought not be respected.
We should want a multipolar world, we should not want a minority within the US dominating the world, and surely we do not want a new Cold War.
Jeffrey Sachs
I pressed Sachs on his critique of realism as a school of thought, particularly in A New Foreign Policy. We had been discussing how Chinese technological advances (enacted under self-interest) had pressured America into a quasi-benign, largely productive attempt to match Chinese production. Surely, I argued, examples like this are evidence for non-liberalist yet non-toxic relationships of cautious agonism. I argued that whilst the works of Mearsheimer or Waltz may no longer be the defining paradigm of realism in 2019, there must be room for realism in how we interpret international relations.
Sachs efficiently launched into his primary criticism of realism – realism, he saw, made the claim that “the other side” was necessarily competitive rather than cooperative, and thereby tended to rule out the possibility for sustained cooperation through diplomacy and jointly agreed actions. Dealing with the conventional schools of realism in international relations (though perhaps not with more recent works that integrated constructivist insights and analysis of soft, cultural power, a critic may note), Sachs saw them as condoning arms build-up – a classic and reasonable challenge to hard-lined, offensive realism that hawks and neoconservatives alike enjoyed. Sachs saw arms control agreements and non-proliferation as instrumental for greater peace and stability, as well as citing the expensiveness and tendency to overreact as the critical harmartia of realists.
Unlike some other figures whom I’ve previously interviewed, Sachs was reasonably open-minded and frank in engaging with my challenge – he saw my challenge as reasonably pointing to a kind of realism that “leads to a positive spiral of development”, but argued that in general, he would see such positive cases as exceptions and not the norm, and that better, alternative solutions would exist – such that no competition or rivalry would in fact be necessary. He warned of the prospective race to the bottom, particularly in areas such as the militarisation of digital technologies – with which Sachs was greatly concerned.
There are indeed cases of non-cooperative but mutually beneficial behaviours, but it does raise the question of whether or not we should try to find more ways of cooperating.
Jeffrey Sachs
Sachs’ vision of liberalism and internationalism is all very theoretical and rhetorically sound, but one cannot but doubt the viability of such a vision in light of recent events in the UK and the US. Thus I probed him for his thoughts on Brexit, Trump, le Pen – and how the nationalist xenophobia sprouted by such politicians would interact, if at all, with his account. Would his account be too utopian and lacking in realism?
Sachs was optimistic. He diagnosed that the fundamental root causes for the recent global wave of populism were our psyches – more specifically, our being primed for an “Us vs. Them” frame to our personal and social lives. The crux lied with our “identity-based, identity-prone” proclivities, which rendered us susceptible to a binary, dichotomised worldview.
“At the core of international relations”, Sachs argued in game-theoretical terms, “we’re always facing multiple equilibria and multiple possible outcomes.” Whilst individual countries might find “defecting” – i.e. not cooperating, shunning diplomacy, and instead pursuing greater escalation and militarisation – somewhat rational, when all countries engaged in such behaviours, it would be the individual citizens that ended up suffering. Cooperation’s place as a possible and certainly preferable outcome ought to be recognised.
These waves of nationalism around the world today have a massive self-fulfilling character to them. There is nothing intrinsic about our times such that we must fall victim to these divisions.
Jeffrey Sachs
As an optimistic thinker renowned for his conventional emphasis upon theoretical parsimony (a trait evidenced perhaps most strongly in Sachs’ steering of the Millennium Villages Projects and his past works on foreign aid and development), Sachs suggested that we did not need a “really deep explanation that is specific to our times”, arguing instead that outcomes such as the 2016 US Election and the Brexit referenda had always been lurking, but “could well get out of hand”.
This hostility to cooperation really can get out of hand, and that’s why reprehensible people like Trump need to be overcome politically and resisted.
Jeffrey Sachs
Sachs’ interest in China had been long-standing, perhaps in connection with his prolific advocacy and successful advising of large numbers of post-communist, former-USSR states, whose shift from state-controlled economy to capitalism was mirrored to some extent by China’s economic reforms and remarkable rise since the 1980s. I specifically asked Sachs for his thoughts on the Belt and Road Initiative and Made in China 2025 schemes.
In response to the former, Sachs again deviated from the orthodox, conforming mainstream ‘wisdom’ as he argued that whilst the initiative was “certainly bigger than China can manage on its own”, he saw the vision as being largely “correct”, reflecting an ambitious vision that would help to integrate Europe, Asia, Latin America, and East Africa. The economist was nevertheless nuanced and forthcoming in criticising particular aspects of the vision – he lamented the “mixed quality of some of the projects so far”, which lacked systematic analysis of what investments would be optimal or maximally efficient. Sachs wished that China would take more seriously questions over the allocation of investment and their environmental sustainability – particularly with regards to China’s current support and funding for large coal plants and gas pipelines (as opposed to investing in sustainable energy sources, such as wind and solar energy).
On the other hand, Sachs swiftly admonished the US for its attitude of hoping that the Belt and Road Initiative would fail – “It’s a mindless but not atypical US response.” He quipped, arguing that the US viewed international economics mistakenly as a zero-sum struggle, rather than a potentially shared and joint undertaking for global improvement.
The view that Belt and Road is a deliberate Chinese ploy to hook other countries on debt, and thereby make them subservient to China, is a fantasy of Western propaganda or ignorance.
Jeffrey Sachs
As for the other initiatives that China is undertaking, Sachs was more optimistic about Made in China 2025, which he saw as being more likely to succeed qualitatively, given that it would take place largely within the boundaries of China. Half-jokingly, half-critically, Sachs observed that the Made in China 2025 vision did “freak out US policymakers because it clearly declared China’s intentions to go to the frontline of key, cutting-edge technologies.” Always the optimist, however, Sachs saw the silver lining in this, as he noted that the US administration had recently begun to respond to China’s challenge by launching its own production-centric initiatives – such as recent stirrings of White House support for electric vehicles.
I raised a common objection that many had previously – directly or indirectly – launched towards Sachs: his new book characterised the primary motivations for both American and Chinese ‘signs of aggression’ as in fact a response to American expansionism. My question was simple, “Do you think that there exist alternative motivations such that even independent of American expansionism, undue aggression from China could still be expected?”
Sachs cautiously noted, that whilst he was unsure about the specific answer to this question, he would stress that the key was there was no inevitability in China’s aggressive approach to the world. “I personally think that Chinese aggression is far less likely to occur than not [in a world without American belligerence], but such aggression is certainly not impossible.” Sachs warned of the unnecessary provocation of hard-liners in China by American hard-liners, and the dangers of letting radical politicians play off one another. Sachs would not read China’s history as one constituting expansionism; if anything, he reasoned, the US better fit that case.
I don’t like the US being the one pointing fingers at China […] We should all have cooler heads, we need to live together peacefully, we should abide by the principles established in the UN Charter in 1945: that it is illegal to have wars of aggression, and that the UN Security Council should be the locus of peacemaking, and the sole locus of legitimate threats.
Jeffrey Sachs
Sachs’ erudite nature and proclivity for interdisciplinary research came through as he excitedly offered a preview into his new book, which would be seeking to rebase economic thinking more around Aristotle and neuroscience, and less on Hobbes. Sachs hopes to shift away from unrefined macro-models in economics, but also seeks a deeper vision of human nature as the basis for a better public economy – one that can deliver more wellbeing. The political theorist in me was secretly very excited.
Interviewing Sachs was a hugely insightful experience – Sachs came across as a scholar who was cautiously sanguine, carefully ardent, yet rarely impetuous. An intellectual giant in his own field, Sachs saw his forays into other disciplines as pursuing the natural conclusions and implications of his theoretical frameworks. His conception of US-China relations is particularly welcome in an era where selective, unabashed criticisms of non-Western states are once again in vogue. Defending his vision of internationalist liberalism against nationalists from China and the West alike, Sachs may well find himself short of company in these times of nationalistic navel-gazing – but perhaps his fortitude is what makes him such a charismatic public figure.