China-US 2039: The Endgame? Building Trust Over Future Decades

中美2039：最后階段？在未來的數(shù)十年里建立信任

2020年9月30日

原視頻地址：

視頻簡介：

The four-star U.S. navy veteran’s new book is based on years of military and business experience and informed by many prominent American and Chinese decision makers in both countries and looks critically at the present US policy toward China.?

China-US Focus Editor-at-Large James Chau connected with the author in August and discussed over Zoom the takeaways from the book, attempting to understand how the author’s views were informed by his military career during the Cold War between the Soviets and the Americans and what China and the U.S., in particular their militaries, can work to build trust to avoid costly confrontations and conflicts.

The book is available on Amazon and can be purchased in bookstores.?

以下為視頻對話內(nèi)容。

James Chau：I’m James Chau and I’m delighted to be joined today by Admiral Bill Owens, who is a?four star navy veteran. Of course, many people know him when he served as the vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and many more people now know him as an author of this book China-US 2039: The Endgame?? The Endgame, Admiral Owens, the question mark, whats your answer to that? And what’s the main takeaway from this book?

William?Owens: That book, James, was the result of a feeling I’ve had for a long time that China looks at long-term planning in a very profound and efficient way. And unite state does, essentially, none of it. And so I thought it would be interesting to get some real experts together, append real quality time for a year. And we did, for 52 weeks, we had an hour a week or so, talking about a whole variety of issues and then with a prognosis of what we believed it would be like in 2039. Of course, the future is hard to know. But I believe strongly that book comes to outline the way it could be and the way it might be. So the way it might be is that we find no solutions to being involved in a new cold war, because we allow the political systems of both countries to drive us and we both need, as?Graham Allison ?says,

An enemy and so we find it helpful to name each other as not good people, and therefore we go into some form other than a peaceful existence between China and the US. Will it be a Cold War? Or will it be something different? I don’t know, the world is changing fast. But I think unless we intercede, to say.” Let’s do some constructive things,” then that first outcome is going to be much certain. And Graham Allison is right, in that sense, Graham Allison also wants peace between both countries, so that’s one of the reasons he wrote the book and respect him for that. This book says, basically, that China will be significantly larger economically, that it could, if it chose, have a much larger military than the United States. The technology of China will be at least on a par with the United States, and that situation in 2039 will not be in terms of military power in the benefit of the United States. I don’t think that’s a given, but it’s not about military power. It is about trying to find, as the book says, a way for our children in China and the US to have a way forward. And so, the book searches for recommendations and in chapter four of the book, it provides over a dozen specific macro recommendations about things that we should do over next years.

It does not imply that we should do them right away, some of them we can do right away, but some of them will take time. But it’s a list of those items. And it talks about specifically how and what to do to implement those kinds of things to build trust. Trust is the big word, if I could say it 1000 times, I would say it 1000 times, between our two countries. So I won’t go through all of those items, unless you want me to.?

James Chau：But may I? Because I’m on that page, which is page 65, if everyone’s got their book open to that. You mentioned no first use of cyber-attack, a new approach to Taiwan and people-to-people program driven by the Chinese Premier and the US Vice president. You also speak about no first attack on space assets, the south China sea, Antarctica rules, underpinning that of course, bringing that all together is that spirit and that bond of trust. And because this book was written not for yourself or your peers but was written for the young people going to shape the next two decades to 2039, could you tell them how you build trust? How do you earn it???

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William?Owens: Yes I believe strongly it’s about people being together and genuine understanding about their about their intent. And trying to put ourselves into their shoes and what they’ve been through, to try understand what they are about and why they are the way they are.? My experience with that has been quite warming for me with Chinese generals, with Chinese businesspeople, I believe there is great commonality between us. It takes time. It’s like dating a girl. It takes time to get to know her, and to be sure that she is everything she appears to be. And when you find the right friendship between us and China, then it’s something you hold close to your heart because you realize that these are special people, the Chinese, and we can find a way with them, to build that trust. It takes time. It takes time.? It takes time. But to do devote it something that that is perhaps the most important single thing in our world today, trust between the US and China, it’s worth the time spent. So I think you can do that. it is for the young people. Whenever I get a chance to talk to a college group, I try to make that the case. And I think they all want to hear that. They want to hear that from somebody who’s been around a while. And I tell them stories about me and the Chinese generals and we have a lot of fun together. When we were in Hawaii together, we had a lot of fun, when we in Sanya together, we had a lot of fun and we talk seriously about real issues. And you can find accommodation. Always, on every issue, I’m sure, if you have trust, and so I believe so strongly in that, that it’s one of those things that I think those of us who have had the blessing of seeing it and feeling it, you know, we have a responsibility to say it as we see it. So I like to tell stories about my counterparts in the…? ?We’ve had 28, American four-star generals and admirals, together over a 10-year period, frequently, two or three times a year in the us or China, and we come to know each other, I know some of their grandchildren. They’re sweet kids, I hug them just like I hug American kids. I always remember one night after a reception, and we had had, you know, just a wonderful time, and we had serious discussions that day, we had had a bit of Maotai but one of the Chinese generals reached over and we were walking back to our living accommodations and he wanted to hold hands, and I’ve never held hands with a man. But I would tell you I like that a lot. And you can hold hands with them and say we are in this together, we’re not Chinese and Americans fighting each other. We are in this thing together. And probably the Chinese generals don’t have the same freedom to say it the way I am able to say it here. But I think if they did, they would say, many of them, just what I just said. So it’s really a special thing when you can find that kind of togetherness, and when you’re always thinking about this is about next generations, and by God, we can show them how great we can be. China an US together. So I’m proud of being able to have some small ability to bring people like this together, and to show others on both sides, in America, in Washington or other places, or in China, how close we can be together and to be all of us smiling and there as one group, not two groups, but one group.?

James Chau: I know you’re a grandfather yourself. So this isn’t an academic discussion, but one, of course, that you live every day, and at the front of your book you make a very moving dedication. Usually books are dedicated to a wife, a husband or a child, you dedicate it, I suppose, to many children in the larger sense. You say “this book is dedicated to the young adults of united states and China, who in the next two decades will shape future of our countries and of the world.” And what about the cold war, admiral Owens? Because I think unless you’re an avid student of history you may not understand fully what cold war was,?What it involved, and therefore what the alternative is. If the US and China don’t meet the endgame, so to speak. And of course you were a key figure in that period, the berlin wall came down, I think when you commander of US sixth Fleet when you were at the pinnacle of your career in the Navy, what was the cold war like and why shouldn’t we go back to those times？

William?Owens: Well, it’s a period of lacking production. You’re trying to produce a military. Your mindset is how bad they are, whoever they are. In our case, it was the Soviets and they were bad people. They were 10 feet tall, they were very strong, they had a big military, and there was no middle ground. Our goal was to be ready for that war in whatever it came in. And so, my life was spent in the cold war. I was in the submarines most of my life. And so I spent a lot of my time up under the Arctic with my submarine, because that’s where we were, the submarines of the Russians and the united states and a few British submarines as well, but that’s where we were a lot for hundreds of days and without any ability to communicate with our families without the complete knowledge that we would come home. and sometimes, you know, we had a submarine that didn’t come home. USS Scorpion didn’t come home.? And so things happened and you were very much on your own. It was very much a “mano a mano”, man-on-man, kind of existence, and it was s strange but very serious time and so Mutual Assured Deterrents, the growth of the trial, the profoundly high tech machines that we built, the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower described as the defense contractors the congressmen and women who wanted hobs in their districts, and so they would love the bases, and the admirals and generals who were fighting for more money. All of that caused our defense budget to be larger than it should have been. And in the end, as I think president bush, George Herbert Bush, said, there was not a winner. We did not win the cold war. It was over, the wall came down and there no winners. But I can tell you, James, it was certainly true for many of us who spent our lives out there that it was not without risk. It was not a good thing, to go into a cold war, and this would be a different of sorts, if, God forbid, we ever go into such a thing with the Chinese, but it will certainly drain resources that could be used to solve world problems. It will deter us from the great joy of what we could do together, and I think it’s a huge waste of resources and lives probably, and it’s something I pray doesn’t happen. We could talk about it a lot,? ?but I’ll just leave it at that.

James Chau: Before we leave our conversation though, I would like to go to some of your words in the book, I highlighted these, in particular, “As we listen to media, locked in the drone of daily events, I fear,” you say, “I feel we have spent far too little time addressing the future.” Admiral Owens, I think that is a very, very important point to make, that we as humanity at a time of social media, and not only Facebook and Twitter, WeChat, but also WhatsApp where you could forward opinions without thinking too much, this drone of events and this constant echo chamber, and you’ve always said that words are very important, has? somehow distracted us from just moving ahead. You’re a military person, you’re a military leader. How do you think we as two countries and we as a world, the world it impacts, can just cut through the noise and just get to the point?

William?Owens: Yep. We do have to understand each other’s most significant issues. And then we have to through a genuine spirit of trust between us, find ways that, number one, we realize that we are the future. Our two countries, China and US, represent the future of all of these issues. The future of how we address pollution; the future of how of address ridding the world as much as possible of nuclear weapons, the future of cooperation and trust the future of doing business, the future of exchanging education; the future of good business, for the good of all of our people, and for eliminating poverty, and it just goes on. But I’m certain that without our two countries being together, this world is going to be a far less better off, a far worse off world than if we’re struggling hard to find ways to increase trust and solve these problems together. It’s enormously important. And it grieves me that no one talks about this, at least that I hear in the US, except people who come to be viewed as crazy lovers or whatever. I hope I’m not that way, because I’ve seen a lot in the world and I just know it in my soul that this is the only path forward for the better interests of Chinese and the Americans and the rest of the world will benefit handsomely from that. Japan, South Korea, everybody says, are great allies. They’ll benefit. And so will Asia in every way, if we are seeing together. We will have different, but through trust, we can shelve some of those, but we’ll find many, many areas of cooperation where we will fix it. But we won’t fix it if we’re not doing it together, in my view. The hardest problem in the world will not get fixed and so we leave a world that’s broken to our children, and what a tragedy that is to leave as a legacy. If I did that, in my will to my children, left them nothing except bills, you’d have to feel really badly. I feel really badly that I leave my children and my grandchildren with a broken world. We should all feel that way, and we should try to contribute to fixing it, in whatever way we can. And increasing the level of joy in the world, by being together as true friends, because I believe we have it in us to do that.

James Chau: This is an incredible book, “China-US 2039: the endgame, building trust over Future Decades’ by Admiral bill Owens available, as you always hear people say, on Amazon and at your favorite bookstore. But Admiral Owens you know what’s so great about this book is that you lay it out and you unpack these issues very, very clearly and succinctly over four chapters and the conclusion. And I have to smile because it’s not written like some great novel with fluff narrative. It’s a very, very pragmatic playbook. It has charts, diagrams, it goes point by point, and I suppose that speaks very much to your background and your life in military, yet through all that are the great human stories that you share at schools and colleges, and that you share in the narrative of this important book, which so many great leaders in politics and in business and in the military have spoken about and endorsed. It’s such a pleasure to be able to speak to you here. Thank you very much.

William?Owens: Thank you, James. It’s really a pleasure to see you as well and I appreciate the evening with you.

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