Can Kevin Rudd's Managed Strategic Competition plan work for Sino-Western relations?

Kevin Rudd has recently proposed a strategic road map and general plan for preventing war in the SCS.

Rudd proposes a set of 'road rules' for his strategic competition road map that includes calls for Beijing to go no further in the SCS. This is reasonable, as is a rule prohibiting grey zone conflict in the form of cyberwarfare, which soft-warfare is deeply bi-laterally trust-eroding. However, two areas present serious difficulties for Rudd's road rules.

Rudd's "some rules are better than no rules" approach is laudable. However, there will need to be an overarching rule set for making the rules. It will have to involve enforcement of unprecedented respect and trust in rulemaking regarding such issues as human rights, cultural, and doctrinaire political differences.

Rudd notes that former US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo's demands for the abolishing the CPC were unreasonable, ill advised, and ill motivated. However, based upon long established patterns of behaviour, it is likely that when laying down any rules, the US and allies will tend to play the same kind deeply troubling, and offensive, 'surround and control' game as has been deployed by them against China for decades. They are likely to want to use Rudd's 'road-rule' making endeavour to make highly politicised and ideologically loaded demands of China regarding China's management of domestic religious terror in Xinjiang, for example. There's also the associated, longstanding spectre of CIA espionage and spying in the mainland of The Middle Kingdom. This is probably more important - and detrimental - than the grey-zone cyberwarfare waged by all sides. Rules limiting cold war style rhetoric will need to be accompanied by tangible action in limiting cold war type behaviour. The rules for this rule-making will need to be very robust, and yet flexible in the face of error and accident.

The second problematic area is more difficult, and involves ideological differences that come to the fore in the West's responses to China's endeavours in the global village. It is the value-based and ideological problem set that exists at one level of abstraction up from the concrete geopolitical and soft power transactions, but influences the shape and dynamics of those transactions.

The anti-communist, anti-atheist rhetoric and perceptual lens of the religionised and capitalist West tends to paint any former and all diplomatic, mercantile, and political efforts at foreign engagement by China as tantamount to spying and espionage (and IP theft). It may be impossible for the West to get over this mental block of red-perilism. Without serious effort applied to ideological and cultural sensitivity and flexibility, such value-centric problems, and cultural slurs, are likely to derail all but the most careful of rule-making regimens for implementing Rudd's strategy.

Ironically, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that, for a socialist nation, China is doing an historically unprecedented, and stellar, job of engaging in capitalistic economics. Setting the rules for Rudd's managed strategic competition will require levels of subtlety that Beijing will probably prove more capable at than Washington would in its current state. It is certainly not a job for the likes of delusional, megacult rhetoricians like Michael Pompeo or Scott Morrison.

Rulemaking procedures and constraints for Rudd's strategically managed competition will be the whole problem. Additionally, there probably needs to be something like a three-strikes policy in different rule sets, rather than a 'sudden death' or pass-fail approach. The latter approach is unlikely to be flexible enough to accommodate the birth pangs and rough takeoffs that Rudd's strategy would likely undergo.

Perhaps a Biden-Harris administration can pull off the requisite diplomatic gymnastics, but deep and non-trivial adjustments to entire large diplomatic, ideological, and geopolitical narratives would be required as part of the process. It's not clear that the religionised American heartland, nor the religonised West in general, are ready, willing, or even in-principle capable of the required adjustments. This applies to both Xinjiang and Taiwan. Overall, it must currently certainly be obvious to Xi Jinping that there is little to no interest in the West in satisfying China's grievences over Taiwan to China's satisfaction. It's not clear that any understandable resulting discontent can be solved or assuaged by any amount of diplomatically ingenious rule making for strategic engagement.

Perhaps Joe Biden should ask China if there is something that would allow compromise on Taiwan? Has anyone seriously asked, with genuine intent to try and understand China's perspective on Taiwan's secession, what else might satisfy China? Not to my knowledge. If the US lost Hawaii to secession, would they not do what Margaret Thatcher did in the Falkland Islands? If China backed Hawaii in such a setting, would the US continue to pursue global aspirations directed at engaging with China? It doesn't seem so based on the evidence of the trade war launched by Donald Trump.