Horizons: Journal of International Relations and Sustainable Development, Winter 2019, No.13
American policy towards China is now up for grabs, with hardliners and soft-liners battling for the upper hand. The hardliners view China as an existential threat to American security and interests. The soft-liners regard China as a powerful counterpart, on occasion friend, competitor, or adversary, but not an existential threat. In my view, the official adoption of the hardline approach would prove disastrous, creating a self- fulfilling grave risk of future conflict.
American views of China are highly unstable. China was an American ally in World War II, but then quickly became an implacable American foe after the communist victory in China’s civil war. Mao’s China was a military adversary of the United States in the Korean War, and was viewed as a hostile nation by policy makers until 1972. China increasingly was seen as an American friend and an important counter-weight to the Soviet Union following Richard Nixon’s surprise visit to China.
During most of China’s rapid economic rise after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms began in 1978, China was viewed by American politicians, business, and the broad public as a new and important trading partner and as a mostly benign, if large, geopolitical counterpart. Yet now China is again rapidly being viewed as a dangerous enemy according to many American pundits and policymakers.
The American historian Richard Hofstadter famously wrote about a “paranoid style in American politics.” Americans invent or vastly exaggerate dangers that do not exist. This has led to episodes such as “the Red scare” against Bolsheviks just after World War I, the McCarthy era accusations against Communism after World War II, the Global War on Terror after 9/11, and now, in my view, the fear of China and threat of a new Cold War instigated by the United States…
Read the rests of the article from CIRSD here.