On China, the Asia-Pacific, and Cyberspace: A Conversation with Dan Blumenthal

Dan Blumenthal has visited Duke to speak with undergraduates on several accounts over the past year, most recently during the 2015 Duke-UNC China Leadership Summit.
DEAN members Emily Feng and Archer Wang speak with Dan Blumenthal, the director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

EF: I’m curious about how you got into China. I know that you went to Duke Law School, so you probably had that bent, but as a China watcher, as an Asia watcher, everyone has their own story about they got interested in the continent. What’s yours?

DB: I always knew that I wanted some kind of career in US foreign policy. My father was born in Jakarta, Indonesia – he’s Dutch -- and lived there for 27 years.  So in the back of my mind I always had an interest in Asia. As an undergraduate I studied political science, economics and Middle Eastern issues, but I wanted to open my horizons to other issues. Before I went to law school and graduate school I took a backpack with my belongings and traveled through Southeast Asia, convinced that that was the area of foreign policy I wanted to focus on. I came to law school here, at Duke, and I was asking people what language I should take because I had a language requirement for my Master’s at Johns Hopkins’ SAIS. If I wanted to be an Asia specialist they said, Chinese or Japanese. This was 1996. I said Chinese, and at the time not a lot of law students were applying for foreign language areas. I got a scholarship and studied at Middlebury College’s Chinese Language School and after that just started getting immersed in Chinese studies as part of my foreign relations/international law studies. 


EF: So what was it like back then studying China and East Asia? Were you considered an exception?

DB:  Yes, particularly as a professional student. Certainly in the 1990s people were beginning to notice that China was becoming more prominent -- there was particularly much more optimism about commercial and business affairs -- so people going into International Relations schools or Political Science might have taken a look at China. But I would say that Arabic language studies and Middle Eastern Studies were much more dominant. I was one of the few law students that I know who took on Chinese language. 


EF: I read some of your previous op-eds, things in the National Review, the Weekly Standard – you’ve written about protecting US allies in the Pacific region, specifically Japan. Do you think, as China’s gotten more aggressive in its own foreign policy and regional presence, that there’s a counterbalance needed in the region?

DB: Yes, I think that the first order of business should be to make sure that, from a pure US national interest perspective, no country, in this case China, dominates that critical region. So a favorable balance of power is the first order of business. 


EF: The elections last year have seen pretty strong national leaders emerge like Joko Widodo in Indonesia, Shinzo Abe in Japan, Modi in India, and now Xi Jinping in China. Do you think that these strong personalities in the area will also shift relationships?

DB: I think certainly Prime Minister Abe has a strategic vision for his country. He’s implementing it and that is partly in response to concern about Chinese national security policies. And he’s certainly taking Japan back as far as he can go in terms of more robust national security policies. I think India with Modi can be very interesting as he does not come from a traditional caste -- he’s an ordinary guy. I think he can be very business and market oriented which would really transform India if that does happen. Indonesia, they still have a long way to go in terms of market reform and development. All these countries, as you mentioned, are very nationalistic and have strong feelings about their nation. And Xi Jinping looks to be a strong man set on centralizing power, backing away a little bit from reforms.


EF: Do you see those personalities clashing or do you think that they’ll possibly knit together to make a stronger regional bloc?

DB: I think on a very basic and general level, Modi and Abe in particular have a joint interest in making sure China doesn’t dominate the region and I think that that’ll bring them together. That doesn’t mean that they’re going to have bad relations with Xi. Particularly in the case of Modi there’s lots of business to do and a lot of potential cooperation on South Asian issues. But Modi and Abe are I think foraging a close relationship. In terms of Indonesia, it’s still very non-aligned so the US is getting a little closer to it. And on top of which it’s facing, as is China actually, a resurgence of Islamist -- kind of jihadist -- problems. 


AW: I want to ask a follow-up question about that. I focus on Japan, so in terms of Japan as a country, Abe Shinzo has proposed a couple times to change Japanese Constitution Article 9, and remilitarize Japan. Do you think that’s going to happen? What does that mean for Japan as a regional power?

DB: I think they want to normalize. They’ve been in this abnormal situation that the US imposed upon them, which they’ve done well and they’ve enjoyed, but it’s allowed them to have a more pacifist constitution and really just focus on very narrow defense of homeland issues. But they’ve had a great weight in global affairs because of their economic strength, so they want to bring into line their economic, military and diplomatic strength. I think that’s a process of normalization, of being a normal power. That’s certainly not how it’s viewed in China or South Korea. They have memories of imperial Japan. It’s still all very gradual. The changes in Japan’s national security policy in particular -- you have a lot of changes you have to make to the constitution. People don’t realize that while the US and Japan are allied, there’s not that much, because of Japanese law, that Japan can bring to that alliance. It has a lot of power and capacity, but they want to become a more equal player.


EF: In your last book, you called China a strategic rival. There’s a lot of talk right now about the relationship between China and the US as mutually exclusive, the growth of one is at the expense of the other. Is that a useful framework at all?

DB: I don’t think so. I think rivalry is just one part of the relationship. It’s very natural and normal in international history and international politics for two great powers to have rivaling competitive developments in their relationship. But the fact is that both the US and China have prospered from the relationship, from the economic relationship, and it’s not zero-sum. The Chinese have made a decision under Deng Xiaoping to join the international system and they’ve benefited greatly. It’s the biggest and fastest period of wealth accumulation ever in history. So they’ve done very well in the international system. And the US has benefited from the economic relationship with China. Rivalry’s one part of the relationship, but certainly in economics it’s not that one side gains and the other side loses. Maybe on some of the most intense disagreements on security issues there’s a little bit of a zero-sum game going on, but not in the broadest sense of the relationship.


EF: At the American Enterprise Institute, what are the top issues for you research-wise that you focus on?

DB: The US-China relationship without doubt. It all is multi-faceted. I’m writing a new book about the US-China relationship and what kind of power China has. I argue that yes, it’s absolutely a competitive modern classical nation-state but it also maintains its civilizational legacy and it has kind of a Sino-centric mind on certain issues. But it’s also very much part of this hyper-globalized, economically liberal global system. So China has three different kinds of identities, and the US is really dealing with all three of them.


EF: And how does cyber-security modify or find its way into that three-identity system you laid out?

DB: So as a classical competitive modern nation-state, cyber is a good tool of statecraft for China. Cyber has many components, so most threatening is its capacity to be used as a means of warfare. And in that sense China’s perfecting it as they find US weaknesses – US over-dependence on information systems, for instance. While the Chinese aren’t the only ones engaging in this, their use of cyber to take US commercial data and for espionage or intimidation purposes is the kind of thing that Americans really draw attention to because it hits them at home. It’s new, and people don’t understand it very well but it’s definitely a tool of the classical modern nation-state. It’s an instrument of power.


AW: You said that China is using it as a tool in this rivalry. Do you think the US is doing the same thing?

DB: Yes, the US and every other nation now have cyber as a tool of military and security policy to further its gains as a country. The US, however, does not engage in the theft of commercial trade. That’s the only difference.

As the director of Asia Studies at the American Enterprise Institute Dan Blumenthal focuses on East Asian security issues and Sino-American relations. He is also a founding board member of the Alexander Hamilton Society and serves on the board of the Project 2049 Institute and the US-Taiwan Business Council. Blumenthal recently became a research associate at the National Asia Research Program. Previously, he served in and advised the US government on China issues for more than a decade. From 2001 to 2004, Blumenthal served as senior director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the US Department of Defense. Additionally, he served as a commissioner on the congressionally mandated US-China Economic and Security Review Commission from 2006 to 2012. He has also served on the academic advisory board of the congressional US-China Working Group. Blumenthal coauthored the book “An Awkward Embrace: The United States and China in the 21st Century” (AEI Press, 2012) and has authored numerous articles in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and The Weekly Standard.

Emily Feng and Archer Wang are both graduates of Duke University.