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1: And these countries often leverage major power competition to their own advantage, which is something that is too often ignored because of the presumption that they have no agency.
2: The thing is, it's important to consider the circumstances — developmental and political — that face them, not us.
3: My experience, especially around China’s periphery, is that almost no policymakers find all aspects of “our” model or the “Chinese” model, such as it is, 100% appealing, 100% the right “fit” to their circumstances, or 100% applicable to the actual challenges they face.
4: So they cherry pick. Some things from the West. Some things from China. Some things from their own experience.
5: When we make every policy question, including developmental ones, ideological in the sense of discouraging them from emulating aspects of China’s experience, seeking Chinese involvement, and insist they reject that, we force *their* policy challenges into a box of our making.
6: And because it's a box of our making not theirs, I fear this will end badly for us in terms of US relationships in too many countries and cases because we will find, more often than not, that they are attracted to elements of what China is selling even when they see the risks.
7: It has been a long time since the United States was a developing country or faced the policy challenges that many such countries face. It has been a lot less long, however, since China had to deal with some of those challenges.
8: So even when China has little to offer because its circumstances are different, (it’s not a “model"), a lot of leaders/bureaucrats that I have met over the years in various countries think we are too removed from their set of problems to offer a comprehensive set of solutions.
9: So again, they will cherry pick. Which means that framing things as a zero sum choice between “our” model and “their" model isn’t, I fear, going to be a winner in many places. It's not effective framing even for what we are trying to achieve or the warnings we aim to send.
10: And as I've said earlier, it also reflects a rather over-determined view of what China is and isn't. The "Chinese model," whatever that means, actually involved borrowing a huge amount and quite eclectically from foreign examples and experiences. The Chinese forget that too.
