纽约时报中文网 - 中英对照版-中英为什么美国应该更担忧中国而不是中东的战争

On Thursday, Joe Biden gave a speech linking the Israel-Hamas conflict and the Russian invasion of Ukraine and framing American involvement as part of a grand strategy to contain our enemies and rivals. “When terrorists don’t pay a price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their aggression,” he declared, “they keep going. And the cost and the threats to America and the world keep rising.”

周四，拜登发表演讲，将以色列与哈马斯的冲突与俄罗斯入侵乌克兰联系起来，并将美国的参与定性为遏制敌人和对手的大战略的一部分。“当恐怖分子不为恐怖行为付出代价时，当独裁者不为侵略行为付出代价时，”他宣称，“他们就会继续下去。美国和世界付出的代价和面对的威胁不断增加。”

Broadly speaking, Biden is correct; the United States has a strong interest in preventing rival powers from redrawing maps or undermining America’s democratic allies. But the difference between the president’s strategic analysis and the kind I’ve tried to offer recently is twofold: the general absence, in Biden’s words, of any acknowledgment of difficult trade-offs and the specific absence of any reference to China as a potentially more significant threat than Russia or Iran.

总的来说，拜登是对的；防止敌对势力重新绘制地图或破坏美国的民主盟友极为符合美国的利益。但是，总统的战略分析与我最近试图提供的分析之间存在两个区别：拜登的话总体上没有承认任何艰难的权衡，也没有具体提到，中国是比俄罗斯或伊朗更严重的潜在威胁。

These absences are not particularly surprising. It’s normal for American presidents to say chest-pounding things like “There is nothing, nothing beyond our capacity” rather than to talk about possible limits on our strength. And since we don’t actually want to be at war with China, it makes a certain sense to avoid lumping Beijing in with Moscow and Tehran.

这些缺失并不特别令人惊讶。美国总统常常会说些“没有任何东西，任何，超出我们的能力范围”之类振振有词的话，而不是谈论我们的力量可能受到的限制。既然我们实际上不想与中国开战，那么避免将北京与莫斯科和德黑兰混为一谈也是有一定道理的。

But presidential rhetoric and policy are inevitably linked, and the China threat that doesn’t exist in Biden’s speech barely exists in his funding request: The administration is asking Congress for over $60 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel and just $2 billion for the Indo-Pacific. Likewise, a president’s rhetoric lacunas inform political priorities, at least within his own coalition. If you can’t talk about why we need to worry about Chinese power alongside Russian or Iranian aggression, the people who listen to you may assume there’s nothing to worry about.

但总统的言论和政策不可避免地联系在一起，拜登的演讲中没有提到的中国威胁在他的资金申请中也几乎不存在：政府要求国会为乌克兰拨款600多亿美元，为以色列拨款140亿美元，为印度太平洋地区拨款20亿美元。同样，总统的言论缺漏也会影响政治优先事项，至少在他自己的联盟内部是这样。如果在谈论俄罗斯或伊朗的侵略的同时，你不说说我们为什么需要担心中国的力量，听你说话的人可能会认为没什么可担心的。

So let me explain why I worry about China and why I keep insisting that a strategy of containment in the Pacific should be a priority, even when other threats seem more immediate.

因此，让我解释一下为什么我对中国感到担忧，以及为什么我一直坚持认为，在太平洋地区实施遏制战略应该是当务之急，即使其他威胁看起来更为紧迫。

Start with the geopolitical background. It makes sense to talk about China, Iran and Russia as a loose alliance trying to undermine American power, but it is not a trio of equals. Only China is an arguable peer of the United States, only China’s technological and industrial might can hope to match our own, and only China has the capacity to project power globally as well as regionally.

先从地缘政治背景说起。把中国、伊朗和俄罗斯说成是一个试图削弱美国实力的松散联盟是有道理的，但三方的实力存在差异。只有中国可以与美国平起平坐，只有中国的技术和工业实力有望与我们匹敌，只有中国有能力在全球和地区范围内投射力量。

Moreover, China offers a somewhat coherent ideological alternative to the liberal-democratic order. The Putin regime is a parody of Western democracy, and Iran’s mixture of theocracy and pseudodemocracy holds little broad appeal. But China’s one-party meritocracy can advertise itself — maybe less effectively since Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power but still with some degree of plausibility — as a successor to democratic capitalism, an alternative model for the developing world.

此外，中国提供了某种连贯的意识形态方案，可以取代自由民主秩序。普京政权是对西方民主的拙劣模仿，而伊朗的神权政治与伪民主的混合没有什么广泛的吸引力。但中国的一党精英领导制度却可以宣传自己是民主资本主义的继承者，是发展中世界的另一种模式——自习近平巩固权力以来，这种宣传也许不那么有效，但仍有一定的可信度。

These general strategic realities obviously aren’t as threatening as actual aggression. But the threat China poses to Taiwan, in particular, has different implications for American power from the threat Russia poses to Ukraine or Hamas poses to Israel. Whatever happens in the Ukrainian conflict, America was never formally committed to Ukraine’s defense, and Russia cannot realistically defeat NATO. Whatever misery Iran and its proxies may inflict upon the Middle East, they are not going to conquer Israel or drive American power out of the Levant.

这些总体战略现实显然没有实际侵略那么具有威胁性。但与俄罗斯对乌克兰或哈马斯对以色列构成的威胁相比，中国对台湾构成的威胁对美国实力的影响是不同的。无论乌克兰冲突发生什么，美国从未正式承诺为乌克兰提供防务，俄罗斯也不可能在现实中击败北约。无论伊朗及其代理人会给中东带来怎样的苦难，他们都不会征服以色列，也不会把美国势力赶出黎凡特。

But America is more committed (with whatever public ambiguity) to the defense of Taiwan, and that expectation has always been in the background of our larger alliance system in East Asia. And while six experts may give six different opinions, there are good reasons to think that China is open to invading Taiwan in the near future and that America could join such a war and lose outright.

但美国对保卫台湾的承诺更加坚定（无论在公开场合如何含糊其辞），而这一期望一直是我们在东亚的更大联盟体系的背景。虽然六位专家可能会有六种不同的观点，但有充分的理由认为，中国对于在不久的将来入侵台湾持开放态度，而美国可能会加入这样的战争，并且彻底失败。

China hawks tend to argue that losing a war over Taiwan would be much worse than our post-9/11 debacles, worse than letting Vladimir Putin hold the Donbas and Crimea permanently. You cannot definitively prove this, but I think they’re right: The establishment of Chinese military pre-eminence in East Asia would be a unique geopolitical shock, with dire effects on the viability of America’s alliance systems, on the likelihood of regional wars and arms races and on our ability to maintain the global trading system that undergirds our prosperity at home.

中国问题上的鹰派倾向于认为，在台湾问题上输掉一场战争将比我们在9·11后的惨败糟糕得多，比让普京永久控制顿巴斯和克里米亚还要糟糕。你无法确切证明这一点，但我认为他们是对的：中国在东亚建立军事优势将是一个独特的地缘政治冲击，对美国联盟体系的可行性、对地区战争和军备竞赛的可能性，以及对我们维持支撑国内繁荣的全球贸易体系的能力，都会产生可怕的影响。

And it’s at home where I fear the effects of such a defeat the most. America has experience losing wars of empire — in Vietnam and Afghanistan, for example, where we were extending ourselves without putting our full might into the fray. But we have no experience being defeated in straightforward combat, not guerrilla war, by a great-power rival and ideological competitor.

而在国内，我最担心的是这种失败的影响。美国经历过帝国战争的失败——例如，在越南和阿富汗，我们在没有投入全部力量的情况下进行扩张。但是我们没有经历过在直接战斗而不是游击战当中，被一个强大的对手和意识形态上的竞争者打败。

Whatever anxieties you have about our current political divisions, whether you fear left-wing disillusionment with America or right-wing disillusionment with democracy or both, such a defeat seems more likely than anything to accelerate us toward a real internal crisis. Which is why, even with other foreign crises burning hot, a debacle in East Asia remains the scenario that the United States should be working most intensely to avert.

无论你对我们目前的政治分歧有什么样的焦虑，无论你是担心左翼令美国幻灭，还是担心右翼令民主幻灭，或者两者兼而有之，这样的失败似乎更有可能加速我们走向真正的内部危机。正因如此，即使在其他外国危机如火如荼的情况下，在东亚的崩溃仍然是美国应该竭尽全力避免的情况。