A prominent American economist has cautioned that the United States and China risk developing a “fixation” with national security, a tendency he said was distracting from the domestic challenges facing both countries.
“We’ve taken the concept of national security too far,” said Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Centre, at the US-China Hong Kong Forum on Monday.
He called on Washington and Beijing to draw a clear distinction between economic and national security, noting both countries had conflated the two to an extent that masked their own domestic issues.
“I think that’s a cop-out. It means that we have problems at home, [and] we can put them under the umbrella of blaming them on others,” said Roach, who was previously chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia.
Roach cited Washington’s labelling of its trade deficit with China as a security threat as an example. In reality, the gap reflected America’s own structural problems, such as its low domestic savings rate driven by massive budget deficits, which could “get even worse” due to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, he argued.
“It’s expedient for us to blame China, because we have not resolved our own budget and savings problem,” he said, adding that China had likewise blamed its own economic challenges on Washington’s containment efforts.
“It’s perfectly legitimate to worry about national security for defence purposes, but to then equate that with economic security … you’ve gone much too far, in my opinion,” he said.
