27/12/2022, 20:02 If We Want Humanity to Survive, We Must Cooperate With China

If We Want Humanity to Survive, We Must Cooperate With China

Nathan J. Robinson & Noam Chomsky

August 15, 2022. Current Affairs.

“China is our enemy,” Donald Trump declared repeatedly. “These are our enemies. These are not
people who understand niceness.” Accordingly, when Trump was in office, his administration
“took a sledgehammer” to U.S.-China relations, which “reached their lowest point in decades.”
Trump officials spoke of China using the most hysterical imaginable McCarthyite language.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the “threat from the CCP” was “inside the gates” and could
be found in “Des Moines and Phoenix and Tallahassee… [The CCP] will stop at nothing to
undermine the very way of life we have here in America and in the West.” Steve Bannon wrote,
“China has emerged as the greatest economic and national security threat the United States has
ever faced.” FBI director Christopher Wray  warned in July 2020  that “the Chinese threat”
endangered “our health, our livelihoods, and our security.”

What, precisely, is China attempting to do that endangers the “way of life we have here”? Wray
explained that “the scope of the Chinese government’s ambition” is nothing less than “to surpass
our country in economic and technological leadership.” William Barr warned China was engaged
in an “economic blitzkrieg,” which would see it ascend to the “commanding heights of the global
economy and to surpass the United States as the world’s preeminent technological superpower.”
Here we have a hint as to the true nature of the “China threat”: it is the threat that the United
States will no longer rule the world. A basic premise of our foreign policy is that we are fully
entitled to do so indefinitely.

This becomes explicit in the Trump administration’s strategy documents. The  2017 National
Security Strategy (NSS) warns that “China seeks to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific
region, expand the reaches of its state-driven economic model, and reorder the region in its
favor.” One might ask how the United States—which is not located in the Indo-Pacific region—
could be “displaced” there, but the NSS does not touch on the question of why the United
States, rather than the much more populous country of China, is entitled to dominance in Asia.
China and Russia, says the NSS, are “contesting our geopolitical advantages” and we are locked
into a “great power competition.” This also means we must “restore the readiness of our forces
for major war” by drastically increasing the capacity of our military to annihilate large numbers
of human beings quickly. The NSS recommends we “overmatch” the “lethality” of all the world’s
other armed forces in order to “ensure that America’s sons and daughters will never be in a fair
fight.”

The Trump administration’s “Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific” explains that one of the
U.S.’s top interests in the Indo-Pacific is to “maintain U.S. primacy” and sustain “diplomatic,
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economic, and military preeminence in the fastest-growing region of the world,” so that China
does not develop a new “sphere of influence.” In other words, we have to make sure that the
largest Asian country does not have more power and influence in Asia than the much smaller
United States.

It should be obvious that as China grows, efforts to maintain “primacy” over it in its own region
will require increasingly aggressive confrontation, meaning the Trump stance put the United
States on a direct course toward conflict. One might therefore hope the liberal internationalists
of the Democratic Party would have an approach less likely to lead to dangerous tension with
another nuclear-armed power. But even as he campaigned, Joe Biden was engaged in “attempts
to out-hawk Mr. Trump” on China, to the point of releasing anti-China campaign material that
was  criticized by some as racist. Biden called Xi Jinping a “thug” and  wrote  in  Foreign
Affairs that “the United States does need to get tough on China.”

As the  New York Times  observed, once in office Biden essentially maintained Trump’s foreign
policy, including on China. Secretary of State Antony Blinken  has said  that “the most serious
long-term challenge to the international order” is “the one posed by the People’s Republic of
China.” The 2022 National Defense Strategy, like Trump’s, pledges to combat “the growing multi-
domain threat posed by the PRC” and pledges to “prioritiz[e] the PRC challenge in the Indo-
Pacific.” To that end, the Biden administration  has continued  “surging troops and military
hardware into the region and encouraging its allies to enlarge their arsenals.” “The policies are
converging,” according to Stephen E. Biegun, who served as deputy secretary of state in the
Trump administration. In fact, the present course was initiated by Barack Obama’s “pivot to
Asia,” which promised among other things to “prioritize[] Asia for our most advanced military
capabilities.” Obama declared “the United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay.”

The New York Times tells us that both “the Trump and Biden administrations have had to grapple
with the question of how to maintain America’s global dominance at a time when it appears in
decline.” The United States is thus quite open, under presidents of both parties, about seeking
to limit China’s role in global affairs and impede its development. A desire to “maintain global
dominance” is treated as a perfectly legitimate and benign aspiration. Indeed, liberal
commentator Matthew Yglesias,  explaining  why it is worrisome that China “threatens [our]
position as the world’s number one state,” says that the notion that the U.S. ought to have more
power than any other country “is one of the least controversial things you could say in American
politics.” (Because the premise is uncontroversial in the United States, Yglesias treats it
as true, and reaches the bizarre conclusion that we should aim to populate the world with “one
billion Americans” so that we do not become the “little dog” to China.)

It has long been the presumption of U.S. planners that we are entitled to have our way in Asia.
After the Chinese Revolution in 1949, American politicians began debating the “loss of China,”
with accusations flying back and forth as to who “lost” it. The terminology contains a tacit

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assumption that the U.S. owned China and it was ours to lose. The idea of China being out of our
control was horrifying. Today, the United States is attempting to prove that China has no hopes
of becoming a regional hegemon in its own backyard, using a “military-first” approach. The U.S.,
U.K., and Australia  have announced  they “will co-operate on the development of hypersonic
weapons, expanding a trilateral security pact designed to help Washington and its allies counter
China’s rapid military expansion.” And as Michael Klare  observes,  the 2022 National Defense
Authorization Act “provides a detailed blueprint for surrounding China with a potentially
suffocating network of US bases, military forces, and increasingly militarized partner states… to
enable Washington to barricade that country’s military inside its own territory and potentially
cripple its economy in any future crisis.” The Department of Defense tells us that “Beijing views
the United States as increasingly determined to contain the PRC.” Since our Indo-Pacific policy is
built explicitly around containing the PRC, it should not be surprising that Beijing feels that way.

Those who characterize China as a threat can immediately produce a substantial list of its
misdeeds to justify the charge. There are of course  serious human rights abuses in China,
including its suppression of dissent and the  repression of the Uyghur population. It has
unquestionably violated international law in the South China Sea. Trump’s National Intelligence
Director (NID) John Ratcliffe  said  China “robs U.S. companies of their intellectual property,
replicates the technology and then replaces the U.S. firms in the global marketplace.” A July
2022 NID report warns of sinister Chinese influence efforts “to expand support for PRC interests
among state and local leaders [in the United States] and to use these relationships to pressure
Washington for policies friendlier to Beijing.” The Trump administration, at the urging of Chuck
Schumer, formally labeled China a “currency manipulator.” William Barr  said  China practices
“modern-day colonialism” in its “foreign aid” infrastructure initiatives by “loading poor
countries up with debt, refusing to renegotiate terms, and then taking control of the
infrastructure itself.”

The problem with the list of charges, however, is that they either plainly pose no threat to the
United States or are actions we ourselves claim the right to engage in.

For instance, the evidence of China’s hideous mistreatment of the Uyghurs is compelling. But it
is difficult to see how the Uyghur repression makes China a threat. By the same reasoning, Saudi
Arabia’s  war crimes in Yemen  make it a threat to the U.S.. Furthermore, the United States
plainly has no problem with the violation of human rights. It all depends on the perpetrator.
While Biden has signed a bill punishing China for its repression of Uyghurs, he is happy to fist-
bump a dictator and sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons to Israel to continue
penning Gazans in an open-air prison and murdering Palestinian children. The U.S. could easily
put a stop to the cruelty against Palestinians, but Biden saves his criticism for those who would
point out the existence of apartheid (such as, for instance, leading Israeli human rights
group B’Tselem).

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Some charges against China are exaggerated, like the idea of its neo-colonial “debt trap.” (Some
international debt traps are  quite real, however.) Others might as well be lists of events in
American history. As the AP notes, to charge China with intellectual property theft is to condemn
“the very sort of illicit practices that helped America leapfrog European rivals two centuries ago
and emerge as an industrial giant.” Alexander Hamilton, whose life is celebrated in a
popular patriotic musical, advocated “a federal program to engage in industrial theft from other
countries on a grand scale.” Peter Andreas, author of Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made
America, notes that “only after becoming the leading industrial power did [the U.S.] become a
champion of intellectual-property protections.” Similarly, our condemnations of economic
warfare and influence campaigns ring hollow, given that the United States exercises its economic
power through possession of the  global reserve currency  and the CIA is  quite open  about
conducting influence operations abroad. Kyle Haynes of  The Diplomat  asks us to imagine  a
situation in which:

An emerging great power is rapidly expanding its military capabilities. It

unilaterally abrogates decades-old norms and agreements by militarizing a
strategically vital waterway, and is seeking to coercively expel the reigning global
hegemon from the region.

This could be a description of China today, or of the period in which the United States came to
rule the Western hemisphere. China is simply rejecting the principle that we are allowed to
“kick away the ladder,” by which countries climb the ladder of development through whatever
unscrupulous means they please—including violence, deceit, and the theft of higher technology—
and then impose a “rules-based order” to prohibit others from doing the same.

It is worth asking: If China is a threat to us because it is establishing military installations in the

South China Sea, then what are we to China? When China established its first overseas military
base—in Djibouti—it  was treated  as part of a plan to “shift global power dynamics, eroding US
dominance, and relegating Europe to the sidelines of international affairs.” What, then, should
China make of our own 750 overseas bases across 80 nations? Are they innocuous and defensive,
or an insidious effort to shape the world to serve our interests? When China reached a security
agreement with the tiny Solomon Islands, raising the possibility of its opening a second overseas
base, the United States immediately began to “turn the screws” on the Solomon Islands, in what
Chinese officials (accurately) called an “attempt to revive the Monroe Doctrine in the South
Pacific.” China scholar Lyle Goldstein, having reviewed a series of official articles called China’s
Atlantic Strategy, says that “one of the things they said very clearly was ‘The Atlantic is
absolutely critical to the United States, and the United States is coming to our backyard and
poking around in the South China Sea, so we have to go to their backyard.’” Is turnabout fair
play, or do the rules only apply to our competitors? For instance, China has indeed violated the
UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. But the United States hasn’t even signed the convention.
China’s actions toward Taiwan are menacing. But the United States  has claimed the right to
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depose governments around the world.  To talk of our deep concern for human rights as
we starve the people of Afghanistan is perverse.

Such points as these are often labeled “whataboutism”—distracting attention from one set of
crimes by pointing to another (in this case, examining our own crimes and not just those of
official enemies). In fact, they are evidence that we do not seriously care about the ideals we
profess. Once we see that the ideals are applied selectively, we can ask what governs the choice
to apply or not apply them in particular cases. As a general rule, the U.S. opposes the criminality
and violence of those powers we wish to contain and supports the criminality and violence of our
valued partners and allies. There is a single standard, then: whatever serves our perceived
interests is good, whatever undermines them is wrong.

China, of course, sees this plainly. “The attacks on China mirror exactly what the United States
has been doing,” said Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the country’s foreign ministry. Zhao argued
that the U.S. “has no respect for the international order underpinned by the UN Charter and
international law” and is a “saboteur of the international order” because it “wantonly withdraws
from treaties and organizations,” placing “its domestic law above international law and
international rules.” In pointing out that the U.S., with its long history of illegal violence,
is almost always at war, Zhao concluded:

“In the eyes of the United States, international rules must be subordinate to and
serve its interests. When international rules happen to be consistent with U.S.
interests, they are cited as authority. Otherwise they are simply ignored.”

Is the Chinese position here incorrect? Is it unjust? In fact, it is difficult to see how anyone could
argue with it. George W. Bush, when warned that some of his planned retaliation for the 9/11
attacks could be illegal, replied “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to
kick some ass.” The United States  freely violates treaties when it pleases, and when the
International Court of Justice ruled that the United States had acted unlawfully in supporting the
Nicaraguan contras, the U.S. simply refused to recognize the Court’s jurisdiction and blocked
enforcement of the judgment. The United States has indicated that if the International Criminal
Court should ever try to put an American on trial for the kinds of crimes that we now demand
Vladimir Putin be indicted for, we would be willing to invade the Hague if necessary to halt the
prosecution. Anything to ensure that we are not subject to the same rules as everybody else.

One reason China is disinclined to listen to the United States’ pious pronouncements on military
aggression, human rights, and international law, then, is that the entire history of the U.S. is a
history of military aggression, human rights abuse, and brazen violations of international law. If
we wish to be taken seriously when we speak of our ideals, we need to show that these ideals
are not just invoked in bad faith as ways of keeping others from engaging in the behavior that
sustains our country’s global power. The humble and devout Christians who run the United States
might wish to glance again at Matthew 7:2-4, which contains a valuable caution:
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“For with the same judgment you pronounce, you will be judged; and with the
measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck in your
brother’s eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye? How can you say to your
brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while there is still a beam in your
own eye?” 

But what about Taiwan? Surely here is an instance in which China is posing a serious threat—not
to us directly, but to the principle of self-determination. In recent years, China’s rhetoric about
reunifying Taiwan with China has become increasingly bellicose, and there are ominous signs that
as China’s military capacity grows, so does the risk that it will go to war to subsume Taiwan. Lyle
Goldstein  notes  the increasing prevalence of rhetoric out of China that “The PLA [People’s
Liberation Army, the Chinese military] has the will and capability to ensure national unification.”
A PLA video quotes a Chinese navy captain  saying: “We have the determination and ability to
mount a painful direct attack against any invaders who would wreck unification of the
motherland, and would show no mercy.” (Goldstein says that not taking these threats seriously is
“reckless beyond belief.”)

The situation is a serious one. But to understand it and try to respond sensibly, we have first to
refresh ourselves on some basic history. Taiwan was part of China for hundreds of years, before
being ceded to Japan in 1911. Before and during World War II, Japan used Taiwan as a military
base, its “unsinkable aircraft carrier.” In 1945, Japan surrendered Taiwan to the Republic of
China (ROC), although there was controversy over its sovereignty for some years afterwards.
When the People’s Republic of China (PRC) defeated the ROC in the Chinese civil war in 1949,
Chiang Kai-shek’s ROC forces retreated to Taiwan and set up a government in exile. For the next
decades, both the PRC and the ROC claimed to be the legitimate government of  all  of China,
both the mainland and Taiwan, and during the ‘60s and ‘70s, Chiang’s government in Taiwan was
still planning to reinvade the mainland. The United States long endorsed the position that Taiwan
was part of China, and only ceased to recognize Taiwan as the legitimate government of all
China when it became clear that the PRC was not going away. In recent decades, Taiwan itself
has seen a diminution in residents who identify as Chinese rather than Taiwanese, and an
increased sense of the island as its own nation rather than the Republic of China. (In fact,
Taiwanese officials used to dislike the country being referred to as Taiwan, because it implied it
was a separate nation rather than the legitimate Chinese government. Taiwan has long competed
in the Olympics under the name “Chinese Taipei,” in part because the Republic of China
government argued that its sovereignty was not confined to Taiwan.)

It is easy to portray the conflict over Taiwan today simply as the story of a large aggressor
wanting to dominate a small neighbor. But the history makes the story more complicated. In the
aftermath of a civil war, if the defeated party retreats to a small part of the country, it is
predictable that a complicated sovereignty dispute will arise. There is no obvious U.S. analogy to

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help us understand. We would have to imagine that the losing side in our own civil war had
retreated to Galveston or Key West and claimed to be the legitimate government for the whole
country, before eventually shifting to a more realistic position of desiring autonomy. It is not
only easy to see how a generations-long conflict over sovereignty could arise in such a situation,
but also easy to see how, if a large foreign power armed and supported the government-in-exile,
and threatened to go to war to preserve independence of the smaller state, the prospects for an
amicable resolution of the sovereignty dispute could be diminished.

Over time, Taiwan has clearly gone from being a disputed part of China to a nation of its own
that deserves the right of self-determination. But when we look at the situation from the PRC’s
perspective, we can see why certain U.S. actions in support of Taiwan may actually be
counterproductive. First, we can understand why the PRC views Taiwan as part of China, and
might consider reunification important—Taiwan has been a part of China before, and Taiwan has
been used by both Japan and the ROC to wage or plot war against the mainland. The United
States, then, should tread lightly, because the more the PRC associates the cause of Taiwanese
independence with the U.S. strategy to encircle China with hostile countries to maintain U.S.
power in the region, the more determined the PRC may be to crush any prospect of Taiwanese
independence. To give another analogy: if Puerto Rico sought independence, we can ponder
whether a favorable U.S. response to the cause of independence would be
made  more  or  less  likely if China declared its intention to defend Puerto Rico militarily and
indicated its intention to use Puerto Rico as a core ally in combating U.S. hegemony in the
Caribbean.

If our end goal is to ensure the self-determination of Taiwan, and prevent it from being
obliterated in a war, what is the correct approach? First, we should obviously avoid taking steps
that would make it more likely that Beijing would decide to try to pursue unification through
force. We should do our best to preserve the peaceful status quo, because if China were  to
seize Taiwan, it is not clear the United States could successfully defend the island, and any U.S.-
China war would be a humanitarian and economic catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude,
especially for the people of Taiwan.

In fact, there is good reason to believe a war over Taiwan can be avoided. The Taiwanese
themselves, when polled, are far more likely to say that they do not think the situation will end
in war,  and  “some Taiwan politicians think that the US’s increasingly bitter competition with
China is adding to the risk.” The  Financial Times  quoted  a Taiwanese expert who said that
“Washington needed to better explain its growing alarm over the perceived risk of a Chinese
attack.” And a researcher at the Taiwanese Institute for National Defense and Security Research
assessed the risk of a Chinese attack as “very low.” The Taiwanese and Chinese governments
have actually met on cordial terms in fairly recent memory and millions of Chinese tourists visit
Taiwan each year. There is even a conceivable peaceful path to eventual independence by which
the status quo is maintained until Taiwanese autonomy is essentially a fact rather than an
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aspiration, and in which, in future generations to come, the Chinese desire for reunification
becomes an anachronistic piece of rhetoric no longer taken seriously. (Outright independence is
controversial even in Taiwan and the shape of the ideal long-term outcome is unclear. Whatever
it is, it should certainly not be determined by the United States’ aspirations for Taiwan.)

Following the path to a lasting peaceful and just settlement will require the United States to
refrain from actions that make China feel it needs to assert its might, or that make it see a
failure to pursue reunification through force as a humiliating capitulation to the United States.
We must avoid creating the impression that we consider China an enemy and Taiwan a crucial
ally against that enemy. We should certainly avoid entering into an arms race with China that
turns the region into a “powder keg.”

Unfortunately, there is good reason to believe that U.S. support for Taiwanese self-determination
has little to do with a principled belief in democracy and everything to do with preserving our
power in Asia. (After all, if we believed on principle in self-determination for all the peoples of
faraway lands, we would not be pouring weapons into Israel to keep Palestinian self-
determination from breaking out.) Instead, Chris Horton of The Atlantic explains why the United
States is so invested in the cause of Taiwan:

“[It] is difficult to overstate Taiwan’s strategic importance to both the United

States and an increasingly assertive China. The island’s location, economy, and
security are all essential to American interests, and if Taiwan were to become part
of China, as Beijing has insisted it must, China would instantly become a Pacific
power, control some of the world’s most cutting-edge technologies, and have the
ability to choke off oil shipments to Japan and South Korea—leverage it could use to
demand the closure of U.S. military bases in both countries. In effect, Beijing would
likely be able to achieve its goal of forcing the U.S. out of Asia. It is no surprise,
then, that Taiwan is one of the rare issues on Capitol Hill today with bipartisan
agreement—Congress has been regularly passing pro-Taiwan legislation with
unanimous support throughout the Donald Trump era.”

Are we really committed to Taiwan out of a belief in self-determination, then? One might answer
that it does not matter: Taiwanese self-determination is a right worth defending even if the
United States has ulterior motives. But if the interest of the United States is in a  U.S.-
aligned  Taiwan rather than a free Taiwan—indeed, we supported Taiwan even when it was an
authoritarian state—this may lead the U.S. to forgo actions that would be in the interest of
Taiwanese self-determination but bring Taiwan and China closer together. For instance: Lyle
Goldstein says that, as was the case with Ukraine, there are opportunities for diplomacy, but
they involve fostering warmer relations between China and Taiwan:

So many opportunities were missed to avert the war in Ukraine. To state the
obvious, if they had simply declared that Ukraine would be a neutral state, how
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hard would that have been? … That was a completely feasible option, but it just
didn’t fit with our ideology. The idea that we might climb down, that we might
compromise—that’s showing weakness, so we can never do that. Taiwan has all kinds
of diplomatic positions. We should be encouraging those. … There are all kinds of
compromises to be made, people-to-people exchanges, military confidence-building
measures. All of that should’ve happened with Ukraine and Russia, but no, we
insisted on a confrontational approach, and now we have a ghastly war.

Instead of trying to facilitate amicable cross-strait relations, we have instead opted for the
course of encouraging Taiwan to become a missile-covered “porcupine” that can resist a Chinese
invasion. U.S. officials have been deliberately taking steps that they know will anger China—such
as Biden  promising  he would go to war with China over the island, and  Nancy Pelosi’s self-
aggrandizing visit. In doing so, we may flatter ourselves that we are supporting Taiwanese self-
determination, but what we are actually doing is increasing the likelihood that the country will
be destroyed. (The situation was similar in Ukraine: the (empty) promise to admit Ukraine to
NATO was justified in the name of Ukraine’s security. But it did nothing to dissuade Vladimir
Putin from his belief that without his deployment of force, Ukraine would end up as part of a
hostile Western military alliance.) For 50 years, the U.S. has accepted the “One China” policy,
with neither side making moves to undermine it. It could continue, in the absence of reckless
and provocative moves by the U.S.

In fact, China’s sensible long-term strategy regarding Taiwan is not to invade, which would
severely harm itself and its prospects, and perhaps spark a suicidal war. (It also hasn’t shown
signs of planning to invade.) Without invading, China can make clear that if it chose to, it could
strangle the island, which survives on trade. China can continue to pursue its long-term strategy
of becoming the center of Eurasia, with vast development and investment projects (now
incorporating parts of Africa and even U.S. domains in Latin America) expanding to the Middle
East. Europe will look on and try to figure out how to get into this enormous China-based
economic system, and over time, Taiwan will increasingly want to join as well, improving
commercial relations. China is certainly a threat to U.S. economic power: this is what’s likely to
produce violent conflict with the United States, not the threat of invading Taiwan.

Alarmingly, there are those in the United States who think war with China over Taiwan is all but
inevitable. “To us, it’s only a matter of time, not a matter of if,” said the director of
intelligence of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Rather than war being unthinkable, a diplomatic
solution is unthinkable. But those who truly want to see a free Taiwan—rather than a Taiwan
used as a geopolitical pawn by major powers, with horrific consequences for the Taiwanese—
have a duty to ask how the U.S.’s stated desire to keep China down though increasing our
military power in Asia may affect China’s resolve and behavior on the issue of Taiwan.

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U.S. tension with China is sometimes characterized as the classic “security dilemma” of
international relations, “whereby military programs and national strategies deemed defensive by
their planners are viewed as threatening by the other side,” in the words of Paul Godwin of the
Foreign Policy Research Institute. Stephen M. Walt  warns  “remarkably, plenty of smart, well-
educated Westerners—including some prominent former diplomats—cannot seem to grasp that
their benevolent intentions are not transparently obvious to others.” In other words, China does
not see that we are (supposedly) only trying to deter Chinese aggression when we take such
steps as: building a hostile regional military alliance, flooding the surrounding territory with
high-precision weaponry aimed at China, labeling China an “enemy,” sending increasing numbers
of warships to patrol its coast (ostensibly to enforce the Law of the Sea Convention—which we
have not signed—and given the euphemism “freedom of navigation operations”),  sending
Australia a fleet of nuclear submarines to counter China, and conducting military exercises near
China’s shores. China is not supposed to act the way we would act if Chinese warships were
steadily accumulating in the Gulf of Mexico and conducting military exercises. Chinese military
drills are interpreted by us as hostile, but the U.S. organizing  the largest maritime warfare
exercise in the world as a warning to China should not be interpreted by China as hostile. The
Chinese are supposed to accept that we only ever engage in “defense,” while it is other
countries that engage in “aggression.”

But let us consider the possibility that our actions are not, in fact, best characterized as
“defensive” at all. Americans might not pay close attention to American actions, but the Chinese
do, and perhaps China is not tragically misinterpreting our policy, but has simply read our
publicly available strategy documents. They see that U.S. planners wish to maintain control of
the Indo-Pacific and deny China the right to do in the Eastern Hemisphere what we have done in
the Western Hemisphere. They might open the Wall Street Journal and read the “Henry Kissinger
Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs” arguing that to protect the “world America built,” we
must undertake a new “urgent, enduring effort to contain an advancing rival,” even if this
means new “Cold War-style tensions and crises” (i.e., the constant threat of human civilization
coming to an abrupt and violent end). The Chinese government may also read  in our new
National Defense Authorization Act that the secretary of defense is tasked with “strengthen[ing]
United States defense alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region so as to further the
comparative advantage of the United States in strategic competition with the People’s Republic
of China.” They might hear our talk of the “rules-based order” and then remember that Barack
Obama, speaking of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, said “the rule book is up for grabs. And if we
don’t pass this agreement—if America doesn’t write those rules—then countries like China will.”
In 2012, they saw leading “moderate” Republican Mitt Romney pledge to “ensure that this is an
American, not a Chinese century,” arguing that “security in the Pacific means a world in which
our economic and military power is second to none,” i.e., we have an inherent right to be more
powerful than China and point city-destroying weapons at it that we could deploy at a moment’s
notice.

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The United States may be incapable of seeing its own actions as anything other than idealistic
and benevolent, but our own government has clearly stated our intention to prevent a “fair
fight” and maintain the ability to annihilate anyone who challenges our power. As John
Mearsheimer  explained  in 2005, the increasing tension as China grows more powerful comes
about because:

The US does not tolerate peer competitors. As it demonstrated in the 20th century,
it is determined to remain the world’s only regional hegemon. Therefore, the U.S.
can be expected to go to great lengths to contain China and ultimately weaken it to
the point where it is no longer capable of ruling the roost in Asia. In essence, the
U.S. is likely to behave towards China much the way it behaved towards the Soviet
Union during the Cold War.

The United States intends to rule the world, even if that requires escalating the threat of a war
that will be possibly terminal to human civilization, and of course eschewing diplomacy, (which
would be appeasement).

The starting point for reducing tensions with China, then, is to take a look in the mirror and ask
whether each demand we make of it is fair, and whether we are willing to do unto others as we
ask them to do unto us. We might consider whether a good relationship is ever likely if we
continue trying to ring China with hostile sentinel states in an attempt to contain its power. We
might also consider whether China has certain legitimate grievances against the demands made
by the United States. On climate change, for instance, we are depending on China not to
behave nearly as destructively as we have. The average American is a far worse carbon polluter
than the average Chinese person, and the U.S. and Europe are responsible for the bulk of
historical emissions, meaning that China must be far less irresponsible as it develops if it hopes
to avoid accelerating the catastrophe. When we ask China not to expand the reach of its military
across the globe, or not to contemplate the overthrow of governments it feels threatens its
interests, or to treat U.S. intellectual property claims as universal, we are asking for it to show
more restraint than we have, and not to seek the kind of power we have sought. These requests
may make sense—if all countries acted like the U.S., the world would quickly be destroyed—but
they should be made from a position of humility.

The situation we face now is unbelievably dangerous. An insane arms race is underway. For many
years, China kept a relatively low level of nuclear weapons, and proudly so. Now it is
accelerating production of weapons that can only ever either be (1) a massive waste of resources
(if unused) or (2) a genocidal horror (if ever used). Even Henry Kissinger—hardly a man of peace
—has warned that the United States and China are stumbling toward a World War I-like calamity.
Of course, in the age of thermonuclear weapons, the potential for destruction is far, far greater
than it was in 1914.

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It does not have to be this way.

First, we should recognize that the idea that China poses a military threat to the United
States itself is so absurd that Lyle Goldstein says it is “almost a joke in national security circles,”
citing the example of “11 U.S. nuclear aircraft carriers versus a single Chinese conventional
‘test’ aircraft carrier.” China does, however, pose a threat to the United States’ ability to
maintain its desired level of economic dominance in Asia. If we are unwilling to share the Earth,
conflict is assured.

There are undoubtedly deep areas of contention between the United States and China that will
take long, laborious negotiations to resolve to the satisfaction of both parties. Perhaps there will
be compromises that please nobody. But we should begin from the position that war is simply not
a thinkable option in the 21st century. Martin Luther King, Jr., was correct when he said that the
choice we face is: “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” A
Third World War must not happen under any circumstances.

China, for its part, has implored the United States (and the U.K.) not to adopt a “Cold War
mentality,” arguing that it is “irresponsible” to hype up the threat and saying we must “cast
away imagined demons.” China has accused the U.S. of trying to “reignite a sense of national
purpose by establishing China as an imaginary enemy.” Indeed, the “igniting a sense of national
purpose by establishing an imaginary enemy” is precisely what we have a history of doing in this
country, and it wouldn’t be the first time that the Chinese have been blamed for America’s
domestic problems. (Those hyping the “China threat” will of course see China’s warnings about a
“Cold War mentality” as sneaky attempts to trick us into letting our guard down so the CCP can
infiltrate Des Moines.) The editors of  Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear  helpfully
review the history of U.S. politicians whipping up fear of Asiatic enemies to argue that “that
horrid, pestilent other is causing all our problems.” When “the political culture can’t quite
deliver its promises, it will appease the white working class by creating an external enemy and
blaming the victim.” The “they” threatening our way of life is ever-changing, but in every case
resolvable conflicts of interest become “epic civilizational contests between imagined
diametrically opposed foes.”

We should be cooperating with China. It is necessary for China and the United States, two major
economies, to sort out crucial issues together, like global warming, pandemics, and nuclear
weapons. Our fates are tied together. There is no choice but to get along. Yet relations have
been falling apart. After Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, in addition to launching  new military
exercises  that could lead to deadly errors and escalation, China  broke off talks  with the U.S.
about climate change, among other matters. The climate crisis is the perhaps most important
issue facing the world, a major emergency, and now the two leading powers in the world can’t
even discuss how to solve it. This is the road to disaster. The U.S. needs to stop needlessly
stoking conflict, think about how things look from the Chinese perspective, and work sincerely to

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understand and collaborate with a country of 1.4 billion people we have to share a planet with.
This does not mean one must be an apologist for China’s wrongdoing, or that its human rights
abuses should not be taken seriously. It means that the U.S. must cease to consider global
control a “vital interest” and must accommodate and respect the interests of others. It means
that the pursuit of long-term survival of the species means abandoning the desire to
permanently preserve our hegemony.

CHOMSKY.INFO

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