South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
A ColdWar approach won’t work with China
It’s easy to miss, given howpolarized our politics are, but there is a growing consensus around a very big issue: China.
Foreign policy experts, military leaders and politicians across the ideological spectrum all tend to agree that a newera of confrontation with China has begun. Many on the right have been calling for a ColdWar approach to China for a while now. But the idea, if not always the term “ColdWar,” is widely held amongDemocrats too. President-elect JoeBiden, once dismissive about the Chinese threat, now concedes that the country poses a “special challenge” to theU.S.
It’sworth dispelling acommonmisunderstanding. Just because there’s a broad consensus around an issue doesn’t mean peoplewon’t fight about it.
Indeed, some of the greatest political fights are driven by broad agreement on a problem. The best illustration of this point was the ColdWar itself.
Contrary to rhetoric fromrabid anti-communists from1945 to 1989, most Democratswere not pro-Soviet. Some, such as presidentsTruman, Kennedy and Johnson, were downright hawkish on theUSSR. SomeDemocratswere “soft” on communism. HenryWallace, FDR’s second vice president, was so soft you could say hewas supine. But for the most part, therewas broad agreement that the SovietUnion posed a serious threat to the United States and theWest.
The arguments among policymakers were over what to do about it, and they were intense. Looking back at the tumult over theVietnamWar, a decidedly Cold War conflict, or the debates overMcCarthyism— not to mentionU.S. nuclear policy or aid to theNicaraguanContras underRonaldReagan— you could be forgiven for thinking therewas no consensus at all.
Another complicating factor: Conceptually, communism, Marxism and socialism, aswell as related arguments about anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism, had significant purchase amongmany American andWestern intellectuals, actors, academics and writers. Somewere pro-Soviet— somewere even spies!— but most of them justworked froma set of assumptions based on the childish notion that anyonewho saidAmericawaswrong had to be at least a little right. This intellectual divide made the political consensus seem more fragile than itwas.
That’s one reason I’m skeptical of the idea that our confrontation with China will or should resemble the ColdWar. The SovietUnionwas a romantic fixation for many American leftists, most intensely in the 1920s and 1930s, but its half-life endured until the fall of the SovietUnion. In 1919, writer Lincoln Steffens visited the SovietUnion and declared, “I have seen the future; and itworks.” Almost seven decades later, a fringe socialistmayor from Vermont named Bernie Sanders visited Moscowon his honeymoon and returned to say something similar.
While China held considerable appeals to some intellectuals in the 1990s— The NewYork Times’ Thomas Friedman wrote fawningly about the benefits of Chinese authoritarianism— that’s pretty muchover now. The Soviets could convert Americans into spies because those Americanswere true believers. China has spies in America. (See the recent controversy over a female operativewhoreportedly tried to compromise various American politicians, includingRep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif.) But the currency of Chinese espionage appears to be, well, currency, as in money— with a little sex and blackmail thrown in.
In otherwords, China is definitely an adversary, but it isn’t really an ideological competitor theway the SovietUnionwas.
But that doesn’t mean confronting Chinawill necessarily be easier, just different.
For starters, the Chinese commitment to Marxism-Leninism is nonexistent save in one regard: the supremacy of theCommunist Party. I shouldn’t have to note that a party chock-a-block with millionaires and billionaires isn’t actually communist. Also, China’s system of ethnic apartheid and persecution doesn’t fit the identity politics prism that sees bigotry as a uniquely white problem.
China’s ruling ideology ismuchbetter understood as nationalistic, with bits of oligarchy, aristocracy, racism and imperialism thrown in. It is more comparable to early 20th centurywould-be hegemons such as Germany and Japan. This creates a whole set of challenges not easily fitted to our 20th century ColdWar struggle with an evil empire that did us the favor of embracing economic doctrines that kept it immiserated and crippled technological adaptation and innovation. TheCommunist Party’s strength is that it can actually claim to have delivered prosperity (albeit at an inhuman cost).
America needs to containChina’s ambition to be a superpower, but that will be more difficult ifwe act like generals fighting the last ColdWar.