Walter Russell Mead cheerleads for the new Cold War:
Today, the Chinese Communist Party has become an expansionist, tyrannical power whose inordinate ambition endangers freedom world-wide. America’s interests and values both lead us to oppose that ambition, even as we seek to avoid the catastrophe of another great-power war.
China hawks talk a lot about Beijing’s vast ambitions, but they don’t have many things that they can point to as proof that these ambitions are real. It’s as if they just dusted off talking points from fifty years ago about the Soviet Union and replaced every reference to the USSR with the CCP and PRC instead. The story is simply too good for them to check. After all, if China is an “expansionist power” that “endangers freedom worldwide,” a containment policy makes a kind of sense. It might still be the wrong thing for the U.S. to do, but you could at least see why someone would want to do it. If China isn’t really expansionist and doesn’t endanger freedom everywhere, however, a containment policy seems both unnecessary and dangerous.
The Chinese government is tyrannical, but for more than forty years it has not waged a war outside its borders. There have been skirmishes and there have been territorial disputes, but the last war of any consequence that the PLA fought was in 1979. A huge percentage of Americans alive today can’t remember the last time that the Chinese military attacked anyone. That never seems to come up when talking about supposed Chinese “expansionism.” Mead refers to China as “expansionist” and talks about Chinese “expansion,” but he would struggle to identify where that expansion has taken place.
Mead’s misleading choice of words is more than just sloppy writing. He wants his audience to believe that there is expansion that needs to be “countered,” and that is where the US comes in. The thrust of his column is that the US doesn’t have the luxury of having any standards in which partners it supporters because it needs every two-bit dictatorship it can get to “counter” China. He applauds the Biden administration’s, er, flexibility with the new leadership in the Philippines, and he bemoans their half-hearted criticism of the Saudis. We need that “multilateral coalition” to oppose China, he tells us, and who cares about the compromises that it takes to get it?
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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
