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Can a trade pact with Europe help America tame China?
Problematically, then, while Rosecrance spends most of his time on the economic dimensions of a union with Europe, he goes much further in his thinking than anything coming out of official Washington. At several points he mentions economic “and political” (emphasis mine) integration. How feasible is this? What are the political consequences of, as Rosecrance puts it, an “intermixture of sovereignty”? An idea of this scope deserves to be accompanied by a realistic and politically astute plan for making it happen, which is absent from this book.
For Rosecrance, such integration is a matter of when, not if: it “will happen,” and, once it does, the U.S. and Europe should approach China about joining in a formal capacity. At that point, China will have no choice but to cooperate. Rosecrance seems optimistic that China can be brought into this union. After all, China is highly economically interdependent with the rest of the world. It is, for example, “totally dependent on the U.S. Navy to secure the sea lanes to the Middle East and provide access to desperately needed oil.”
Only on the penultimate page, however, does Rosecrance slip in that the rule of law and protection of political liberties might be preconditions for China to join in a tariff bloc. Since Greece, Spain, and Portugal all moved from military rule to democracy and EU membership, it should be easy, right?
In the last two years, China has reacted angrily to Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” especially his administration’s efforts to finalize another large trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), with several Asian and South American countries, which China perceived as an attempt at encirclement and exclusion from a large trading bloc. China eventually said it was looking into whether it might be interested in the TPP, but its initial response must at least raise the question that it could react similarly to the TTIP. The great-power realist in Rosecrance recognizes this. Global production chains are, in theory, a barrier to war, but “history suggests that rising nations partly disregard their interdependence.”
Can a transatlantic economic and political union achieve all that Rosecrance says? Can it stimulate the European and American economies, attract Japan, deter Chinese aggression, eliminate “warfare among great powers,” and overcome political dysfunction in the United States? That’s a lot to hang on a trade deal, even the biggest in history.
To its great credit, even if it doesn’t speak in such grand terms, the Obama administration has taken the first step by launching negotiations over the TTIP. With the Doha round of global trade talks failing and Chinese investment creating a “string of pearls” around the south Pacific and Indian Ocean, tighter economic links with Europe may be the best—Rosecrance would say only—way to build a new set of rules that enhance American power and constrain Chinese influence. Getting there, however, will be far from easy.
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