Washington’s Dangerous China Consensus | The Nation

The United States is so polarized that it often seems on the verge of civic rupture, if not civil war. But a problem still has the power to unite the political elite: the desire shared between the Democrats and the Republicans to participate in high power competition against China.

The internal division and the external heat frequently go hand in hand. Indeed, the alleged threat to China offers political decision -makers a very practical enemy – that which must be rejected not only for geopolitical reasons, but because the only way to prevent America from collapsing is to mobilize for war. In 2019, Steve Bannon frankly reflected that “in such a divided country … The thing that brings him together is China”. In 2023, Joe Biden echoes this feeling by saying that “winning competition with China should unite us all”. Or as Randolph Bourne pointed out over a century ago, “war is the health of the state”.

Although Donald Trump has collected the greatest advantages of being a basher in China, the current change in policy began in the decreasing days of the administration of Barack Obama. In 2016, the Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced the “return to high -power competition” between the United States and China – a reversal of the rapprochement between the two nations which began under Richard Nixon in 1972. However, many things differ on other questions, Donald Trump and Joe Biden maintained and intensified this framework of world rivalry.

For Trump, being anti-China is a way to raise the salience of its signature problems: economic protectionism, xenophobia and a foreign policy unilateralism. Also repugnant this political cocktail may be, it turned out to be more political success than the Biden administration’s attempt to revive military Keynesianism using anti-china rhetoric to strengthen bipartite support for a new era of spending in domestic reconstruction.

In 2022, Stephanie Murphy (D-FL), at the time, reflected the problems of this new consensus, noting that “no politician, republican or democrat, can be considered gentle on China, so that this pushes us in the direction of not [discussing] intelligent, but political political. If you want to free yourself from this intellectually suffocated consensus, you must turn to voices without reflection or a traditional policy. The danger of rivalry: how competition for great power threatens peace and weakens democracy, by specialists in international relations van Jackson and Michael Brenes.

The United States and China are the two most powerful countries in the world and, without surprise, have many areas of dispute. From the point of view of the United States, China is militarily aggressive for its neighbors, an attacker of human rights at the national level and a sparkled economic rival. For China, the United States is a world class hypocrite that speaks of the liberal international order while repeatedly ignoring the principle of free trade and putting or supporting the wars of choice several times. The two parties have one point, but these are all problems that can be resolved by diplomacy.

Transforming these political disputes into a great power competition has the same effect as the Cold War, which increases the challenges of each disagreement via the risk of rapid climbing.

Jackson and Brenes convincingly demonstrate that the push to make rivalry with China the foundation of a unified national and foreign policy is based on a badly informed nostalgia for the Cold War. For many in the political elite, the Cold War was a blessed period of national cohesion and goal during which a common enemy allowed the United States to unite behind robust social spending, technological progress and civil rights. It was the era of the interstate highway and the Moshot, expanding universities and consensual policy – all led under the auspices of a Cold War which was indeed a long peace.