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…
