My Comment: I think there is an increasing awareness, at least I hope there is, that the future of China and of the United States are inexorably tied together. Ever since the end of the Cold War, there has been a lack of balance among nations on the global scale. We are the undisputed super power militarily and that drives a nervous undercurrent across every other nation state on the planet. Just like on the playground, the big guy sounds and acts like he’s a friend and a good guy, but what if he’s not.

I suspect we are going to remain the major power militarily for the next several generations, if not longer. But if we are to remain a great country economically, we need the Chinese. And if China is to become a great country, they need us. The question becomes how do we move that outcome forward and not shoot ourselves in the foot.

By Thomas P.M. Barnett | 20 Feb 2012

While America has begun an economic recovery of uncertain strength and staying power, we Americans nonetheless face a far longer-term and more substantial national rebuilding project. This daunting task has placed us in a contemplative space, in which we nervously toggle between bouts of renewed self-confidence and crippling self-doubt. But the same thread runs through both cycles of this national bipolar disorder: the assumption that we must bear this burden alone.

That assumption is our greatest weakness right now, for it blinds us to the economic opportunities at hand, while encouraging us to adopt an unwise defensiveness in our national security posture.

Frankly, Americans should know their own history better and trust in themselves more.

We did not build this country on our own. We had plenty of help in terms of enabling trade partners and their magnificent flows of direct financial investment. For the bulk of our history, those partners have been primarily European, and those bonds defined the enduring trans-Atlantic relationship more so than our subsequent military alliances. How so? We got rich together and, by doing so, defined a shared future. The military cooperation arose as a matter of protecting that bond — not the other way around.

We can easily romanticize the democracy angle, because in our collective military efforts over time we have indeed stood down several great authoritarian challenges. But to suggest that democratic affinities were the primary factors driving these relationships is false. Indeed, recent Western history illustrates how fragile democracy and political tolerance is whenever income growth is threatened. Simply put, reasonably consistent — and equitable — wealth creation is necessary for democracy’s survival.

This underlying truth has animated America’s grand strategy for many decades now: We may defend freedom, but we extend free trade — the “open door” instinct that extends all the way back to our approach to late-imperial China at the end of the 19th century. It is that core American grand strategy that remade the world in our economic image these past seven decades, thus we “win” whenever we convert the disconnected into the connected, or the ideologically isolated into the trade-enabled.

Take Myanmar’s long overdue re-emergence right now. It is proof positive that there is no such thing as a post-American world — only a pre-American one.

But don’t kid yourself that American military might, requiring great enemies to justify its even greater expenditures, secures this much-fabled second century of “global dominance.” That neoconservative siren song, now so ably peddled by Robert Kagan in his latest book-length essay, “The World America Made,” sets a poor course for our nation’s ship of state, for it forces us into conflict with the very force that will determine our national resurgence: China.

If the next century is going to be a Pacific Century — and there is ample evidence of this macro trend — then America will have to be able to tap into Asia’s great savings pool to finance its long-term economic growth. That savings pool, decades in the making, has seen China cleverly insert itself at the top of an Asian assembly chain that achieved a massive transfer of wealth as part of an enduring trade surplus with America. That transaction, along with the undergirding collective security we provided Asia as external military Leviathan, constituted America’s greatest foreign policy success — and foreign aid success — ever, helping to lift hundreds of millions of impoverished Asians into the ranks of an emerging, and even ascendant, global middle class.

That Asia-centric global middle class binds America’s economic future to Asia’s economic present. Our business community understands this intrinsically; our political elite does not.

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, is known for insisting that you can’t succeed as a business in the global economy unless you succeed in China. I would add that you cannot succeed in China unless you’re Chinese. That’s the reality of a rising world power intent on raising its own national corporate champions — Deng Xiaoping echoing, and updating, Alexander Hamilton.

So how do you square that circle? You get yourself some Chinese partners, as General Motors recently did with Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation to take on Volkswagen and Tata and Honda in global markets. General Electric is doing the same with China’s AVIC aviation corporation to take on Airbus and Boeing in global markets. And now just this week we receive word of DreamWorks Animation tying up with a Chinese media firm.

By partnering with Chinese firms, these companies are positioning themselves for success as globally integrated enterprises, former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano’s term for the next-generation successor to traditional multinational corporations that still cling to their home nations.

But when it comes to America’s own markets, although we are seeing a great uptick in Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) into distressed U.S. companies, the baseline is still tiny relative to the money China is investing globally. On an annual basis, we still haven’t cracked the $10 billion mark in terms of Chinese FDI. In contrast, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, in concert with leading CEOs of U.S. companies, suggested that America needs something more on the order of $250 billion of Chinese FDI annually for several years to jumpstart our economy.

Meanwhile, our politicians prefer to squabble over China’s industrial espionage, which is real enough; its currency manipulation, which is a structural imperative for China that will fade with time and the country’s economic rise; and its growing military prowess, which is driving President Barack Obama’s strategic “pivot.” In all of these realms, our political elite purposefully choose an “us versus them” mindset, sensing “leadership” in that path. Sadly enough, there are enough Chinese leaders who themselves regularly dip into this self-defeating toolset to achieve mirror imaging.

This confrontational stance keeps us in Clint Eastwood’s proverbial “halftime” locker room, rather than getting us out on the field for the much-desired “second half.” The military pivot to Asia, in particular, is emblematic of the trust deficit so often cited by the Chinese: A truly visionary national security strategy would see the U.S. seeking to ease the growing East Asia military arms race and rivalry in order to build the trust needed to get Beijing to help out militarily in developing regions.

Such a U.S. national security strategy would be the strategic equivalent of following Jack Welch’s business advice, for to succeed globally in security, we must succeed with the Chinese — not in opposition to them.

Unfortunately, there is currently no U.S. political leader emerging with this kind of vision. Mitt Romney’s policy promises to date on China parrot the worse instincts being peddled by Kagan, himself a Romney foreign policy adviser. In fact, Romney’s China policy is an even more self-defeating and unimaginative version of Obama’s misguided strategic pivot, made spectacularly irrelevant by the still-unfolding Arab Spring.

All of this is a shame, because America and Americans truly are eager to start the “second half.” If only our political leadership could get out of the locker room — and out of the way.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is chief analyst at Wikistrat and a contributing editor for Esquire magazine. His eBook serial is “The Emily Updates: One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived” (September-December 2011). His weekly WPR column, The New Rules, appears every Monday. Reach him and his blog at thomaspmbarnett.com.