Brad DeLong hails our new Chinese overlords

In a post about trade issues, star economist and sage-of-the-blogosphere Brad DeLong segues once again onto one of his favorite topics: the need for the United States to subordinate itself to China. He writes:

Think of it this way: Consider a world that contains one country that is a true superpower. It is preeminent--economically, technologically, politically, culturally, and militarily. But it lies at the east edge of a vast ocean. And across the ocean is another country--a country with more resources in the long-run, a country that looks likely to in the end supplant the current superpower. What should the superpower's long-run national security strategy be?

I think the answer is clear: if possible, the current superpower should embrace its possible successor. It should bind it as closely as possible with ties of blood, commerce, and culture--so that should the emerging superpower come to its full strength, it will to as great an extent possible share the world view of and regard itself as part of the same civilization as its predecessor: Romans to their Greeks.

In 1877, the rising superpower to the west across the ocean was the United States. The preeminent superpower was Britain. Today the preeminent superpower is the United States. The rising superpower to the west across the ocean is China...

Throughout the twentieth century it has been greatly to Britain's economic benefit that America has regarded it as a trading partner--a source of opportunities--rather than a politico-military-industrial competitor to be isolated and squashed. And in 1917 and again in 1941 it was to Britain's immeasurable benefit--its veruy soul was on the line--that America regarded it as a friend and an ally rather than as a competitor and an enemy. A world run by those whom de Gaulle called les Anglo-Saxons is a much more comfortable world for Britain than the other possibility--the world in which Europe were run by Adolf Hitler's Saxon-Saxons.

There is a good chance that China is now on the same path to world preeminence that America walked 130 years ago. Come 2047 and again in 2071 and in the years after 2075, America is going to need China. There is nothing more dangerous for America's future national security, nothing more destructive to America's future prosperity, than for Chinese schoolchildren to be taught in 2047 and 2071 and in the years after 2075 that America tried to keep the Chinese as poor as possible for as long as possible.

So, let me get this straight...if we accept China as the world's leading nation (how is this done, exactly?), then China will remember what we did for it, and China thus will be our friend, and help us in 2071 when we're threatened by as-yet-unnamed Hitlerian adversaries...

This pet idea of DeLong's is just as ridiculous as it was all the other times he wrote it, but this time its ridiculousness is made a little more baldly apparent. First, there's the assumption that China will actually remember what we did for it. It's worth noting that a lot of China's current stellar economic performance is already due to U.S. actions - lobbying to get China into the WTO, investing in China, giving it Most Favored Nation trading status back in the 80s, etc. And anti-American sentiment still runs pretty high in China. Why should we think that, if our basically friendly trade and diplomatic policies toward China remain unchanged, their attitudes will radically shift? The assumption that China will like us for doing the very same things that it mildly dislikes us for doing now is an awfully shaky thing on which to base our next century of geostrategy.

The second problem with DeLong's Britain-U.S./U.S.-China analogy is: Britain and the U.S. shared basically the same values and governing system in 1900. China and the U.S. have utterly divergent beliefs about things like the source of government legitimacy, the rights of individuals, and the dignity of individuals. So if we indeed need China to defend us against a fascist enemy in 2071, that begs the question: Will they be more fascist than China?

I like economists in general, and Brad DeLong is a good one. But here he's falling for the economist's temptation to see per capita GDP as the only objective of a society. If that were true - if freedom and dignity were as obsolete as some have proclaimed - he'd be right about China. But he's not right.