![]() That strategy has been implemented in three stages: “blunting,” or the curbing of American power in China’s neighborhood “building,” or the cultivation of Chinese power in its own neighborhood and “expansion,” or the growth of Chinese power abroad and and eventual replacement of American hegemony with its own. Doshi argues that over the past thirty years, following the Tiananmen Square massacre and the fall of the Soviet Union, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party developed a “grand strategy”-meaning, as Doshi defines it, “a state’s theory of how it can achieve its strategic objectives that is intentional, coordinated, and implemented across multiple means of statecraft”-to displace the United States as the world’s preponderant economic and military power. It makes sense to begin that line of inquiry by tracing the argument of The Long Game. Even as Rush Doshi’s name may be obscure to many, if he is the architect of a grand strategy to counter China’s rise, a project that would surely reach into every corner of American life, then we should probably pay more attention to what he says.īut if today’s policy intellectual doesn’t exercise the kind of influence that, for example, Kennan did, then it’s crucial to ask: why? What has changed in the structure of the state? If the answer to that is yes, then that’s all that needs to be asked. As he walks the halls of power, do the cogs in the national security machine respond to his recommendations? The first is whether or not today’s policy intellectual exercises the same influence as yesteryear’s. There are two questions that emerge from such an examination. ![]() Like Kennan, he spent time in the United States’ arch-rival country, closely examined the thought of its leaders, and now bears a message for his own leadership class (which is listening) about what must be done.Īn examination of the modern policy intellectual, particularly in light of past giants like Kennan, can be quite revealing of the current state of domestic politics and national security. The Long Game is a document in the vein of “The Long Telegram” and Doshi a policy intellectual, at least aspirationally, in the vein of Kennan. Doshi, who based the book on his recent PhD dissertation, now serves as the Director for China on Joe Biden’s National Security Council. This history matters quite a lot today, in light of the United States’ growing rivalry with China, and a book titled The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi, offers a guide for American strategy. The burgeoning national security state mobilized itself, as well as the diplomatic and economic power of the United States, to implement the strategy Kennan had outlined in the Long Telegram. There’s no doubt that Kennan and his “containment” theory were influential (even if historians might quibble over the extent). Implicit in the notion that such figures actually exist and matter is the notion that if their arguments take hold, the state apparatus can coordinate its many constituent parts to both assemble and implement a strategy that corresponds to what they say. The archetype of the policy intellectual-unelected but deserving some share in rule on the basis of extraordinary merit, academic but capable of seeing the “big picture”-is worth interrogating. ![]() Kennan’s thought took elite foreign policy makers in Washington by storm, and he was appointed to establish and head the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, where he was instrumental in developing policies like the Marshall Plan. To prevent that, the United States would need to “contain” the spread of Communism by marshaling its own resources to counter Soviet influence. The USSR, Kennan argued, sought to export Marxism-Leninism around the world, and to muster its economic, political, and military strength to reshape world order in its favor. Coming in at over 5,000 words, the document addressed two very simple questions: What did the Soviet Union want, and what should the United States do about it? In February of 1946, less than a year after the end of World War II in Europe, George Kennan, a senior-level staffer at the American embassy in Moscow, dictated what would later become known as “The Long Telegram” to his secretary.
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