Crouching Tiger by Peter Navarro
Title: Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World
Author: Peter Navarro
Published: 2015
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 282
We have learned that economic engagement, economic interdependence, and nuclear weapons are unlikely either alone or together to keep the peace. We have also determined that a neo-isolationist US-military withdrawal may well lead to more, rather than less, conflict and instability while fruitful negotiations with an opaque and truculent China are likely to be very, very difficult. It follows from these sobering conclusions that if a grand bargain is also unfeasible… the only option seemingly to consider is “peace through strength.”
In Brief:
Crouching Tiger is an informative book and an important subject, but it’s so one-sided that the assertions within ultimately fall flat.
Rating: 3.1
Synopsis:
This is another book I wasn’t super fond of, so to keep it short/save time/catch up like last time I’m going to use the Goodreads summary. Sorry.
Will there be war with China? This book provides the most complete and accurate assessment of the probability of conflict between the United States and the rising Asian superpower. Equally important, it lays out an in-depth analysis of the possible pathways to peace. Written like a geopolitical detective story, the narrative encourages reader interaction by starting each chapter with an intriguing question that often challenges conventional wisdom.
Based on interviews with more than thirty top experts, the author highlights a number of disturbing facts about China's recent military buildup and the shifting balance of power in Asia: the Chinese are deploying game-changing "carrier killer" ballistic missiles; some of America's supposed allies in Europe and Asia are selling highly lethal weapons systems to China in a perverse twist on globalization; and, on the U.S. side, debilitating cutbacks in the military budget send a message to the world that America is not serious about its "pivot to Asia."
In the face of these threatening developments, the book stresses the importance of maintaining US military strength and preparedness and strengthening alliances, while warning against a complacent optimism that relies on economic engagement, negotiations, and nuclear deterrence to ensure peace.
Accessible to readers from all walks of life, this multidisciplinary work blends geopolitics, economics, history, international relations, military doctrine, and political science to provide a better understanding of one of the most vexing problems facing the world.
Where I’m At:
To be perfectly clear: I don’t know all that much about China. Though I’m interested in foreign policy and international relations, my formal schooling and personal interests focus pretty intensively on the Middle East and North Africa region. I follow the news about China probably more than the average American (but not all that much more), I listen to friends who are smarter than I am, but I don’t feel particularly suited to level critiques against Navarro’s claims. So I’m not really bringing all that much to this book.
I also probably wouldn’t have read this book on my own, but it was given to me by a very close friend from high school, Cooper. Like I’ve said before, I treasure recommendations and take them pretty seriously, bumping them to the top of my extensive to-read list (though I later found out this book was recommended to him, he hadn’t actually read it yet). Cooper is one of the sweetest, most loyal men that I know. He’s also in the US military, so I don’t get to see or talk to him that often while he’s been bouncing around the country for the last few years. Reading the book, even if I wasn’t a huge fan, was enjoyable in part because it made me feel closer to Coop.
Oh just one last thing – I’ll admit that I knew of Navarro before reading the book as an advisor to President Trump, which probably biased me against him from the beginning, though I did my best to give it a fair chance.
Getting Into it:
I was excited to read this book because of my above-noted lack of knowledge on China, which is an important topic in geopolitics. I don’t think Americans pay enough attention to China as a whole – though that’s less true now under Trump’s presidency than when the book was published in 2015 – often focusing more on the Middle East (guilty) or Russia. My below issues aside, the book did a good job of informing me on some of China’s economic, political, and military strategies.
The premise of this book is that it’s a “detective” story, with Navarro asking key questions in the beginning of each chapter, and examining the evidence to determine the “correct” answer, all to discover whether or not it’s likely that the US will go to war with China. I’ll give credit to the attempt at creativity and acknowledge that it was somewhat effective in laying out each chapter’s topic. That said, overall this premise felt pretty shticky to me, and I couldn’t really get myself to buy into it. More specifically, it didn’t feel like Navarro bought into it himself – the book was not at all about laying out the clues and letting the reader or “detective” decide, but just about laying out the arguments to make Navarro’s case. The questions he asked in each chapter were leading, with a very obvious “correct” answer. He didn’t really give the space to engage in other options, but remained hyper-focused on his case.
And what was that case? It’s clear from the beginning that Navarro really does not like China, to almost an uncomfortable extent. He portrays the country rather like an evil, malicious empire that just wants to control everything, pollute the environment, and steal American jobs at all costs. He’s alarmist, defaulting to the worst-case scenario in nearly every option he gives. He’s also clearly hawkish, so his concluding position for a strong military response is presupposed pretty much from the beginning.
So I was probably never going to agree with Navarro’s thesis, given my proclivity towards pacifism and skepticism towards his extremist assertions. On its own, that’s fine – people have different opinions, I don’t expect to agree with every book I read. However, the real criticism is that Navarro is so singular in this book, giving no weight to any other arguments, that it ultimately detracts from his own.
