A new Cold War with China would be harder to wage
Under fire for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump, his campaign and his party are moving to lay blame for the 80,000 U.S. dead at the feet of the Communist Party of China and, by extension, its longtime General Secretary, President Xi Jinping.
The Trump campaign has begun to target the Democratic nominee as “Beijing Biden” for his past collusion with China and his attack on Trump for “hysterical xenophobia” when Trump ended flights from China.
What is the historical truth?
On China, Trump is the first realist we have had in the Oval Office in decades. But both parties colluded in the buildup of China as she vaulted over Britain, Germany and Japan to become the world’s second power in the 21st century.
Both parties also dismissed Chinese trade surpluses with the U.S., which
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Michelle Malkin Star Parker
Jonah Goldberg Walter E. Williams Pat Buchanan Marc E. Thiessen George Will began at a few billion dollars a year in the early 1990s and have grown to almost $500 billion a year. Neither party took notice until lately of our growing dependency on Beijing for products critical to our defense and for drugs and medicines crucial to our health and survival.
The mighty malevolent China we face today was made in the USA.
But what do we do now? Can we coexist with this rising and expansionist power? Or must we conduct a new decades-long Cold War like the one we waged to defeat the Soviet Empire and Soviet Union?
The U.S. prevailed in that Cold War because of advantages we don’t have over China in 2020.
From 1949-1989, a
NATO alliance backed by 300,000 U.S. troops in Europe “contained” the Soviet Union. No Soviet ruler attempted to cross the dividing line set at Yalta in 1945. Nor did we.
East of the Elbe, the Soviet bloc failed to offer the freedoms and prosperity the U.S., Western Europe and Japan had to offer. America won the battle for hearts and minds.
Plus ethnic nationalism, the idea that separate and unique peoples have a right to determine their own political and cultural identity and destiny, never died in captive nations of Europe and the USSR.
China today does not suffer from these deficiencies to the same degree. Unlike the USSR, China has four times our population. Where the USSR could not compete economically and technologically, China is a capable and dynamic rival.
Moreover, if we begin a Cold War II with China, we would not start with the advantages Truman’s America, undamaged at home, had over Stalin’s plundered land in 1945. China’s weaknesses?
She is feared and distrusted by her neighbors. She sits on India’s lands from the war of the early 1960s. She claims the whole South China
Sea, whose waters and resources are also claimed by Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan.
The peoples of Hong Kong and Taiwan fear that Beijing intends to overrun and rule them.
Even Vladimir Putin has reason to be suspicious as Beijing looks at the barren but resource-rich lands of Siberia and the Russian Far East, some of which once belonged to China.
China is thus a greater rival than the USSR, but the U.S. is not today the nation of Ronald Reagan, with its surging economy and ideological conviction we would one day see the ideology of Marx and Lenin buried.
Three decades of postCold War foolish and failed democracy-crusading have left this generation not with the conviction of Cold War America, but with ashes in their mouths and no stomach to spend blood and treasure converting China to our way of life.