Lyle Goldstein: scholar takes sober view of China's ambitions

Maritime studies

The Princeton PhD graduate got his job at the US Naval War College shortly after the EP-3 incident on April 1, 2001, in which a US spy plane collided in mid-air with a Chinese fighter jet off Hainan Island, resulting in the death of a Chinese pilot. The incidence sparked widespread protests in China and caused a setback for China-US relations.

Goldstein, who started work on Sept 10, 2001, a day before the Sept 11 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center in New York, said the EP-3 crisis helped him land the job because the school needed more China experts. Though the school wanted him to work on the Middle East and Russia after the Sept 11 attack, Goldstein found his way back to China studies after a while.

He became the founding director of the China Maritime Studies Institute in 2006, gathering all the Chinese writings on international relations, defense and maritime diplomacy and studying Chinese thinking. He said he is quite proud of the institute.

While the school has close ties with the US Navy, Goldstein said the Navy seems to be inclined to allow these China scholars to study China in the manner they themselves deem most appropriate.

Goldstein's book Meeting China Halfway calls for mutual compromise between China and the US through cooperation rather than confrontation. It has won praise by many leading scholars as novel, bold and insightful, but he was also criticized for buying into the Chinese narrative.

"It's true that my view is unconventional. That's probably why I wrote the book," Goldstein said. "I see the world differently than most people. I don't fear sort of being lonely."

Goldstein, who was once a student of military strategy at SAIS, believes it's important for someone with a military or military strategy background to step forward and say, "Actually I don't think China is a threat. I don't think this is a threat to US national security, and I think most of what China is doing is reasonable.

"So I can try to play a special role in the relationship by calming down tensions," he said.

While many Americans have described Chinese behavior in the South China Sea as aggressive, Goldstein said China has been fairly reasonable if people look at Russia and its behavior in Ukraine.

China the next US?

He believes scholars like Friedberg are actually worried that China will become the US, whose history Goldstein described as going through a period of aggressive imperialism and throwing its weight around.

"I always tell American audiences: Should we really lecture China how it should behave in its backyard? Over a small border dispute, we took over half of Mexico. We just took it," said Goldstein, referring clearly to the American-Mexican War in the late 1840s.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed in 1848 gave the US undisputed control of Texas and ceded to the US the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming.

Compared to the American experience, China is not really aggressive, according to Goldstein. But he said Friedberg knows the American experience well and is worried that China is going to be just like the US, meaning any country given the power and strength will expand.