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Can the United States afford to push Pakistan over the edge? If not,
we must find a way to balance our clear interest in defeating al-Qaeda
and the Taliban against Pakistan’s continued stability—including our
relationship with Pakistan’s government, military and citizens.
Dennis Blair, forced to resign last year as director of national
intelligence, has suggested coordinating drone strikes much more
closely with Islamabad.
In the longer run, China’s rise will clearly be a historic challenge to
the United States. Yet, while administration officials talk frequently
about China in domestic contexts, the president’s policy toward
Beijing is fundamentally incoherent.
Two recent books, Henry Kissinger’s On China and Aaron
Friedberg’s A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the
Struggle for Mastery in Asia, suggest two very different
interpretations of Chinese conduct and propose alternative American
responses. Kissinger views China as a rising but thus far moderate
power and warns against creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that could
lead to zero-sum competition between Beijing and Washington. He
argues that such rivalry could lead to a pre–World War I situation
with potentially devastating consequences for both nations and for
the rest of the world. Friedberg ridicules this approach, arguing that
the United States should seek to democratize China and, if this does
not succeed, should practice assertive containment. In his view, if the
World War I analogy has any value, it is in demonstrating that the
British were too timid in responding to Germany’s rise.
Kissinger and Friedberg offer coherent proposals that are mutually
exclusive. Kissinger’s is much more persuasive to me, but there is a
choice—and America must make a decision. Accordingly, it is quite
troubling to see the Obama administration trying to have it both
ways: building a cooperative relationship with Beijing while visibly
siding with China’s neighbors in every dispute. At the same time,

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