China Didn’t Start Cold War 2, The US Did
Since 2018 I’ve become more and more alarmed by the evolving US position on China. This could be over-compensation on my part. At the age of 23 I was a glorified receptionist in a Washington, DC law office. I spent my ample free time angrily advocating for the 2003 war on Iraq in every online venue I could find. In the years since I’ve come to see that war as a horrific mistake, and my advocacy of it as deeply shameful. My YouTube channel is, in part, an attempt to atone for my youthful belligerence, and take a more sophisticated and accurate approach to world politics, with a very heavy dose of skepticism towards the claims of the US government.
When I look at the bipartisan rush to war with China, I see a rerun of the US political environment in 2003, with the most significant difference being that the stakes for the US and the world are infinitely higher. It’s no longer just defense contractors and their pet congresspeople who are lobbying for a fight against China. Our whole media apparatus seems to be getting involved, even pundits not typically known for their foreign policy opinions. This is another strong echo of 2003.
Noah Smith, a Bloomberg columnist and one of my favorite twitter pundits, is an example of the strange spread of China hawkery. Around 2017 or so, I became a fan because of his delightfully nerdy mix of economics talk, immigration advocacy and heavily science fiction influenced tech optimism. If you’re familiar with his work, you can probably find Smith’s influence all over my YouTube Channel. But shortly after the Pentagon gave US media its marching orders in early 2018, the content of Smith’s twitter feed began to change. More intermittently at first, but by mid-2021 almost daily, Smith became a reliable spreader of the most aggressive and alarmist policy ideas around China. I made a habit of politely but firmly responding to the tweets I disagreed with. Smith tended to reply with good natured abuse, but a couple weeks back one of my tweets rubbed him the wrong way and he blocked me.
Yesterday Smith published an article entitled “The US Didn’t Start Cold War 2” blaming China for the current decay in US Chinese relations. It is artfully written and seems pretty compelling. But it only succeeds by leaving A LOT of important stuff out. Like everything about US policy toward China post- Bill Clinton. Smith is absolutely right that the US-led Asian order since 1945 has been phenomenal for most Asians (give or take a few million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Indonesians) and it’s been great for China most of all. But Smith couldn’t be more wrong about the reasons why that US-led order is declining. China is acting out in brutal, disgusting ways. But it is doing so because it has been terrified by twenty years of balls-out aggression on the part of the US government. This aggression has continued in different forms under four different presidents. China is finally reacting, in fairly pitiful ways, that make it clear the country was never ready for prime time. China is the weaker party, and if we fall into a new Cold War, or god forbid, World War III, it will be the US’s fault. The US definitely started Cold War 2.
I’ve attempted to tell this story in probably a dozen videos at this point. As much as I enjoy those vids, I think they’re somewhat limiting. Washington DC’s case against China relies on leaving information out, and video is not a good venue for conveying all the information that is necessary to fully confront hawkish arguments. So to respond to Smith’s piece, and make it clear why I believe the “New Cold War” is almost exclusively the fault of Washington, DC, I’m going to just go all out, and throw everything into one too long medium post. I hope you enjoy it.
The “Failure” of Engagement
As Smith points out, in the Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao era (~1993–2013), Washington DC’s approach to China seemed to be working. For decades, China was trending in a more democratic direction. Clintonite dreams of a country of 1.4 billion people democratizing on a shorter timeline than Hong Kong or Singapore were always idiotic, but the progress circa 2015 had been immense. It was and is worth celebrating.
China had not developed representative institutions, but it was committed to regular transitions of power, and it was becoming a lot more scared of its public than it used to be. In a weird way, China’s new, more assertive nationalism is a sign of a ruling party catering to public opinion. There is no way that Xi Jinping would be able to compromise on nationalist priorities in the way Mao did with Taiwan in the 1970s, or Deng did by conceding “One Country, Two Systems” for Hong Kong in the 1980s.
As of 2015, a richer, more networked Chinese public was becoming more and more intertwined with the world economy, and it was forcing the Chinese government to change on issues ranging from the environment to quality of life. Those with a superficial understanding of China get pissy that the post-WTO country hasn’t morphed into Switzerland on a shorter timeline than it took relatively tiny South Korea (42 years) and Taiwan (~40 years). But I think any honest commentator has to be in awe of how far the country has come, not just in wealth, but also in the power of the public and the government’s responsiveness to it. I think it’s clear that the open trade status quo no longer works for the US, and that’s why the status quo is ending. US commentators are eager to denigrate the very real progress China made prior to Xi Jinping, because we’re no longer interested in subsidizing that progress, not because it wasn’t real.
It’s easy for folks to dismiss China’s progress towards democratization, because, as Smith ably documents, China has begun to turn away from that progress, and that turn seems to be accelerating. The 2018 “coronation” of Xi Jinping as de facto president for life, a guy who consciously models himself after the horrors of Mao, is both really stupid on China’s part, and rightly terrifying to China’s neighbors. The 2016 move to radically step up the already existing repression of the Uighurs, seems like a prelude to genocide and has handed a PR victory to every China opponent in the world. The 2019–2021 crushing of Hong Kong’s separate system is another tremendous Chinese own goal, that’s also a blow to worldwide freedom. These are all horrible things, but they are all reactions. China’s Communist Party isn’t making Machiavellian moves towards primacy. They’ve essentially given up on impressing anybody outside their borders, and are putting on a show of toughness for domestic audiences that is beginning to look pretty desperate. China is weak. But it’s still got nukes, and it still has the power to turn Asia, “the region of the future”, into a region of shit.
Smith is absolutely right that the whole world needs China to calm down. What’s off is his prescription. Smith is selling the standard Pentagon line that the US was all sweetness and light when it came to China prior to the Trump administration. That’s simply not true. The important thing to look at here is the timeline. It’s true that the US-led Asian order is falling apart, but it’s the United States that has been undermining this order. And, despite the Trump heaviness of the next section, it’s not a process that started with Trump. It’s one that started with Bush, and has accelerated through each president since. To get China to calm down, the US needs to calm down.
Next up I’ll do what most articles on China neglect to do, and define what a few of the pillars of the US-led Asian order actually are. China hawk articles don’t like to do this, because when you dive into the details it’s impossible to claim that anybody is more at fault for that order’s disintegration than Washington, DC. We’ll start with the most dangerous, and most embattled of the pillars. The US treatment of Taiwan.
“One China Policy” — Taiwan
The most important detail, left out of almost all mainstream discussions of Taiwan, is that all three actors in the drama have been in agreement that China and Taiwan are the same country for half a century. That includes Taiwan by the way! In recent decades Taiwanese sentiment for independence has been growing, but it’s still just one stream in the Taiwanese political conversation, one that currently happens to hold power. As recently as 2015, Xi Jinping and then Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou could meet for an amicable photo op.
The idea that China and Taiwan are one country isn’t just fundamental to the founding of Taiwan’s political system, it’s also been immensely profitable for Taiwan. Most know that Apple’s iPhones are largely constructed by FoxConn, a tremendously successful Taiwanese company. What I was surprised to learn, in discussions with some savvy people, is that not many are aware that most of FoxConn’s production is carried out in Communist China.
As recently as 2014 it was possible to portray Taiwan as a laggard among the Asian tigers, far behind countries like Japan and South Korea. In his recent critique of Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works, Noah Smith points out how silly that critique looks in 2021. From its healthcare system to its economic dynamism, Taiwan now looks like a leader, not just in Asia but worldwide. What Taiwan’s belligerent defenders, from Smith to the Pentagon neglect to mention is that Washington DC’s “strategic ambiguity” is at the heart of that success.
“Strategic ambiguity” was the delicate deal struck by Nixon and Kissinger in the 1970s. When the Chinese Communist Party won the civil war in 1949, the losers fled to Taiwan. For 22 years The US stuck to the ridiculous fiction that the government of Taiwan was China’s true representative on the world stage. In a switch that may have won the Cold War, Nixon welcomed China into the anti-Soviet coalition, recognizing the Communist government, and giving it the UN security Council seat that had previously been Taiwan’s. But in doing so we refused to fully abandon our old allies in Taiwan.
The Chinese Communist party’s legitimacy is based on its ability to take back the territories it lost to 19th century imperialism, and Taiwan is the last piece left. But over the past 72 years Taiwan has developed its own vibrant society, even going democratic in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These two interests, Chinese Unification and Taiwanese Freedom, are currently irreconcilable. So the policy of “strategic ambiguity” wisely refuses to answer either question. The US stuck to its claim that Taiwan and China were the same country, but it also continued to arm Taiwan, and left it up in the air whether we would fight for Taiwan’s independence. This status quo has held for 50 years now, and it’s been tremendously profitable for everyone involved, especially Taiwan.
The top line figures are impressive. China takes the largest share of Taiwan’s exports at 28%. But if we dive into the details further, and consider the amount of Taiwanese exports to the rest of the world that are reliant on cheap mainland labor elsewhere in the value chain, I think it’s pretty clear that the Taiwanese miracle would have been impossible without mainland China. And Taiwan is just as valuable to mainland China. Even more valuable now that the Chinese government has idiotically acted to crush its other window on the world in Hong Kong. I think it’s 50/50 whether making an explicit US commitment to Taiwanese independence would lead directly to World War III, but it would almost certainly lead to China cutting off Taiwan economically, and the end of the Taiwanese economic miracle. Sure, Vietnam and Bangladesh are eager to pick up the low income labor slack, but folks who propose that solution are dramatically underestimating the importance of a shared language and proximity in the joint Mainland-Taiwanese miracle. Those who want to abandon the status quo are not friends of Taiwan.
The US’s policy of “strategic ambiguity” has been a tremendous success. I’m a bit mystified by the suggestion, not made explicitly by Smith, but made by many of his fellow travelers, that maintaining the status quo is somehow a Chamberlain-esque Munich 1948 abandonment of Taiwan. Under “strategic ambiguity” we’ve been heavily arming Taiwan for decades. I’ve argued that we’re probably not selling them the right stuff, but it’s not like we’re leaving them defenseless. What’s so frustrating about this whole current argument is that it was started by Donald Trump, a guy that Smith and the rest of the US national security establishment claim to deplore.
Remember, in 2015, the “strategic ambiguity” thing was going so well that Xi Jinping and Taiwan’s President we’re having photo ops and a substantive meeting in Singapore. Strategic ambiguity wasn’t on its last legs, it was flourishing. Even though the Obama Administration had been engaged in a blistering program of aggression against China, known as the “pivot to Asia” (more on that later), and China had already been dumping concrete in the middle of the South China Sea, “strategic ambiguity” over Taiwan was healthy. The diplomatic niceties were carefully observed, and everybody was making too much money to upset the diplomatic apple cart.
Enter Donald Trump. Before he was even in office, in December 2016, he was eagerly celebrating a phone call with Taiwan’s president, the first open diplomatic contact between US and Taiwanese leaders since the 1970s. It’s crucial to get the timeline right here. This was before concentration camp construction in Xinjiang really spooled up in 2017. This was before Xi Jinping’s “Coronation” as President for life in 2018. This was before the crushing of Hong Kong in 2019–2021. I have zero interest in defending any of those actions, but its important to understand why and when they happened. Trump came to office trampling all over the greatest red line in US-Chinese relations. As we’ll cover below, Bush, Clinton and Obama had previously taken much more substantive steps to undermine the US-led order in Asia, but Trump’s gleeful blowing up of this norm set the tone for his presidency, and the terrified and brutal Chinese state we’ve got today. Smith and his defense industry funded sources at the American Enterprise Institute are absolutely right that China is now talking more seriously about invading Taiwan than they have since the 1990s. But It’s Trump that reopened the conversation in December 2016, not the Chinese government.
One of the more disturbing aspects of Noah Smith’s article, one that he’s defending vigorously in the comments, is the assertion that China might begin an attempt to take Taiwan with a pre-emptive assault on US bases in Asia. I agree that that is a real risk. Such an assault by China would lead directly to World War III, and the possible extinction of human life on earth. I would hope that the willingness to undertake this suicidal action would indicate just how important it is to China that they not lose Taiwan. So… maybe we should take this threat to humanity’s continued existence off the table by simply maintaining strategic ambiguity? Again, before Trump, Chinese and Taiwanese leaders could meet peaceably, everybody was getting rich, and nobody was seriously talking invasion. Now, without strategic ambiguity, we’re talking about World War III. How about we stop doing that?
As Trump realized how much money he could make by placating China’s feelings on this subject, both in trade negotiations and possibly personally, he backed off Taiwan. In the final months of his administration however, in one of Mike Pompeo’s many parting “Fuck yous” to the incoming Biden administration, the US lifted all restrictions on official diplomatic interactions between the US and Taiwan. In the current US political environment, which Noah Smith has done more than you’d think to help construct, it’s very hard for Biden to back off of this. Strategic ambiguity is fraying quickly, as Biden has continued to toy with diplomatic contacts that would have been unthinkable pre-2016. Relations with Taiwan are more up and the air and fraught than they have ever been. One of the central pillars of Asian stability is deeply in Jeopardy. And it is entirely the US government that has put Taiwan in this Jeopardy.
As a final point, after the past four years of China’s brutal mishandling of its Trump opportunity, I am personally now much more committed to Taiwanese self-determination than I was in 2016. The way to guarantee it is to restore Strategic Ambiguity, return to the profitable business as usual, AND make damn sure that Taiwan has the missiles it needs to make the Taiwan strait just as dangerous for the Chinese Navy as it currently is for the US Navy. I laid out that strategy here. I’m pretty confident most of the great “friends of Taiwan” Noah Smith has allied himself with are more interested in selling useless tanks and F-35’s than the missiles that would make Taiwan inviolable.
“Free Trade”
Free, or even preferential trade for Asian countries has been the firm foundation of the US-Asian order since at least 1973. From Japan’s accession to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in that year, to the World Trade Organization that GATT morphed into, welcoming China in 2001, trade has been central to Asian order. It’s the bribe that the United States paid to win the Cold War, and it’s also built great fortunes in the United States, as it has lifted hundreds of millions of Asians out of poverty. I used to believe fervently that this was a great deal. For me it was. As a multiply degreed white guy, globalization has been great for me. I was able to slide along the wide bridges of money that connect every country of the world, to some (limited) professional success, and a great deal of personal fulfilment. Even after 7 years as a meagerly paid political commentator, buoyant globalization-enabled stock markets have allowed me to hold on to decent savings.
But globalization has not been a good deal for 80% of Americans (more or less). In fact it’s been such a bad deal that the US political system is beginning to fray over it. Everybody from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders agrees that this system of shipping jobs to China is no longer viable. The 2016 election season managed to convince me as well. What’s crucial to notice here though, is that I was pretty slow on the uptake. It’s common to assert that this switch in US trade policy didn’t come about until the beginning of Trump’s trade wars, but that’s simply not true. The Obama administration was working, since at least 2012, on significantly changing the terms of the trade environment in Asia.
Back in 2015, I opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, commonly known as the TPP. Now I’m not so sure. TPP was supposed to be the center-piece of Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”. What it was designed to do, along with the Atlantic focused TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), was to create new, smaller, more exclusive free trade blocs. The “big bang” moment for Chinese growth was WTO accession in 2001. That gave China access to the entire world’s free trade club. TPP and TTIP were meant to be smaller, more exclusive free trade clubs. They were intended to cut China out. They were aimed directly at China’s life’s blood: access to world markets. The TPP was finalized in 2016, but Trump took the US out of it in 2017. Negotiations on the TTIP were halted in 2017 by Trump’s trade war against Europe.
Trade agreements are extraordinarily complicated things. A lot goes into them, with different provisions serving different interests that sometimes conflict. It’s likely that the TPP/TTIP agreements were packed with the sorts of anti-worker provisions that leftists claimed they were. But at the same time, they were designed to funnel the fruits that had been enjoyed by Chinese workers, back to the workers of more developed countries. Again, timeline is important here. TPP was finalized in 2016, and the TTIP was getting close. These processes take years. The details of the negotiations were more secret than many liked, but the fact that these negotiations were proceeding, and their explicit anti-Chinese agenda was well known for years prior. They would have been much more effective agents against China than Trump’s indiscriminate and disorganized trade warring. Obama’s projects posed a much graver, more effective threat to China’s economic engine than Trump’s projects ever did.
On the trade front Trump offered China a useful sort of chaos. It’s always easier for a country to get its way if it is negotiating one to one rather than against a united front of countries, which China would have had to deal with had the US-led TPP survived. With bilateral negotiations, China could negotiate side deals, and pressure Trump on other issues in return for financial concessions, be they national or personal. But more than anything else Trump represented chaos. His relative ease to deal with on Trade was outweighed towards the negative by his eagerness to trample over red lines like the status of Taiwan. You really never did know what you would get with Trump. This offered much more limited benefits to the world and to the US than Trump’s supporters often claim.
“Strategic ambiguity” over Taiwan was a necessity for any sort of Asian order that roped in China. But it is open access to the US market that makes the US-led Asian order a good deal for China and most other countries in the region. In his article, Smith asserts that “The main cause of Cold War 2 is not economic.” He’s right, the main causes are political actions taken by Bush, Obama and Trump. But the economy is pretty damn important too. By acting to remove the economic benefits of US primacy in the region, especially in the chaotic manner that the Obama and Trump policies combined amounted to, the US government is threatening to remove the economic benefits of US primacy for China. I am in the process of being convinced that clawing back some of the economic benefits we have given to China is the right thing, or even a necessary thing to do. The world is not entitled to profit off of the suffering of US workers. But it’s the US that is undermining the free trade pillar of the US-led Asian Order, not China.
“A Pacific American Pacific”
US primacy in Asia started off hideously violent. From the Korean war, to Vietnam, to horrific massacres in Indonesia, Cambodia and other countries, East Asia between 1950 and Nixon’s trip to China was a horror show that makes today’s Middle East look like a playground dust-up. But then, the US’s humiliation in Vietnam, combined with the de facto US alliance with China against the Soviets, basically gave Asia a 15 year early escape from the cold war. From 1975 through the 1980’s, while Latin America, Africa and the Middle East dealt with some of the Cold War’s hottest proxy wars, the business of Asia was economic development. In the 1990s, while even Europe was dealing with Cold War hangover conflicts, Asia got richer. Even the speed bump of the 1997 Asian financial crisis ended up consolidating democracy in some cases.
The beauty of all of this is that the US didn’t really have to do much other than get out of the way. Everything went better without US military involvement. The US military was only a vague threat, and US credibility in the region skyrocketed. There’s an important lesson there. Many of these positive benefits accrued to the region even before the US opened its economy entirely to China in 2001. What mattered was the US Public and elite’s desperate urge to avoid another Vietnam. Asia basically got benign neglect. Asia got US businessmen and the US state department, which was more interested in using soft power to push out strong men like Marcos and Suharto, always a much more effective strategy.
The US’s post- Cold War compulsion to continue to develop military technology and seek out military victory was unsettling to the Chinese, but at least we stayed out of Asia in the 1990s. Pentagon adventures in Iraq and the Balkans, especially the 1999 US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Serbia, certainly acted as a spur to Chinese military modernization, but on the surface everything was fine. Everybody was getting richer, and everybody was happy. US military forces were limited to the same Japanese and Korean bases they had had for decades, and the Pax Americana was working for everybody. Every president since 2001 has worked to steadily chip away at that success.
Bush — In his China article Smith speaks somewhat dismissively about the Iraq war and the disastrous effect it had on the US’s standing in the world, and our ability to act as a trusted hegemon anywhere. This is surprising, because he’s written very eloquently about the costs of Iraq elsewhere. I’ll just quote Smith at length on this…
The Iraq War did incalculable damage to the moral standing the U.S. had accumulated since its intercession in World War 2 and its construction of the postwar liberal order. We invaded a non-threatening country on the thinnest of false pretexts (don’t deny it), inflaming an entire region of the globe. Hundreds of thousands died. A few of our troops committed well-publicized atrocities… And the Bush Administration did all this while cynically claiming the cause of “democracy promotion”, sullying the name of democracy at home and abroad for years to come.
And the War on Terror wasn’t just about Iraq. It was a worldwide expansion of US militarization of everything. The days where the US successfully exerted its will through diplomacy and economic soft power were essentially over. Hyper-militarized, forever war absurdity became the US’s policy of choice, either involving direct military involvement, or world-dictatorial sanctions shutting down economic activity entirely from Iran to Venezuela (or at least attempting to). It’s easy to miss among all the catastrophic failure in the Middle East, but Bush also started chipping away at the US-led order in Asia as well. The Philippines has a long standing Muslim insurgency in the south. So US military bases returned to the Philippines in 2002.
Smith points out that China’s neighbors are (rightly) unsettled by China’s recent actions. He suggests that they are only now rallying to our banner in new diplomatic arrays like “The Quad”. In truth, the policy of encircling China goes back to Bush, long before China was undertaking any aggressive actions. Nuclear non-proliferation is supposedly a very important priority for the United States. For decades we have used it as a club to beat Iran with, as just one example. As part of this non-proliferation commitment in Asia, the US had long standing sanctions against India, for its refusal to sign the Non-proliferation treaty, and for its attainment and testing of the bomb in the 1970s. In 2008, the Bush administration did away with these sanctions, in a deal that promised to promote and enhance India’s nuclear programs. One of the public reasons for this deal was India’s usefulness as a strategic counterweight to China. US encirclement of China long pre-dated Chinese aggression.
Obama- Obama sold himself as a break from the outsized aggression of Bush, but actually functioned as an acceleration of it. Especially in Asia. What Obama did manage to pull off was forever war on the cheap. He destroyed Libya, Syria and Yemen just as effectively as Bush destroyed Iraq, with the intelligence community and drones instead of large scale expenditure of US blood and treasure. Obama may have felt forced into some of this destruction by his subordinates, but as with Trump, the inability to control his own security forces is not an argument in favor of Obama’s presidency. With the Iran Nuclear Deal Obama did show that he was personally committed to extricating the US from the Middle East. But his purpose in doing so wasn’t to end the US’s militarized policy, it was to switch these resources to Asia. The official policy was a “Pivot to Asia”, announced in 2012.
Consider for a moment what that must have looked like from China’s perspective. After the United States had left the Middle East a smoking ruin, their charismatic international celebrity of a president started talking about bringing the same magic to Asia? I’m honestly surprised it took the Chinese government as long as it did to start panicking.
The standard Washington, DC line is that Obama’s Pivot “failed”. He certainly failed to stop doing stupid stuff in the Middle East, but he also substantially re-shaped Asia. He authorized weapons sales to Vietnam. He opened up Myanmar to US business. As we covered earlier, the TPP would have been a vastly more effective weapon against Chinese exports than anything Trump did. Most importantly, and with the most negative effects on the Chinese view of the world, he got Japan to abandon Pacifism. You know Japan, the country whose defeat was the basis of the US-led order in Asia? Japan, the country that spent decades carving bits off of China (including Taiwan) before finally attempting to conquer the whole damn place at the cost of at least 10 million Chinese lives? Japanese rearmament is a huge, underappreciated factor in the surge of Chinese nationalism over the past ten years, and what little attention it gets in the US is mostly celebratory.
The Obama administration saw the slow emergence of the “South China Sea Crisis”. Disputes over rocks in the middle of the sea are not a new aspect of geopolitics. And China is not the only one militarizing these rocks. Google “Diego Garcia” and the disputes over that US base sometime. And those rocks weren’t uninhabited before we got there. In the South China Sea specifically, the story isn’t quite as straightforwardly about Chinese perfidy either, but I think the general contours of the story we get in US media are correct. China disputes the ownership of a series of island chains with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. Some of China’s claims are ridiculous, some are not.
But the South China Sea story is always told without the context that I’m giving you here. When you consider the steady program of encirclement that Bush, Obama and Trump have been engaged in, is it any wonder that China is working with what little tools it has to try to defend itself? In the face of renewed US basing in the Philippines, and US weapons for Vietnam, is it surprising that China wants lines of defence? China’s dumping concrete into the sea and loudly celebrating it has always struck me as more of a pitiful attempt to save face than a sign of growing power.
Trump- The US-led order in Asia was about peace and boring bureaucrat-led development. Bush and Obama largely threw that overboard. Militarization was back, sparking all manner of horrific 1940s and 1960s memories, and a region-wide nationalist resurgence. But the US-led order in Asia was also all about trust. Even if the US had been driven a little crazy by 9–11, it was still the security guarantor that made all that trade possible. Even if the US was no longer interested in being as generous with trade as it once was, its business leaders could be trusted to come up with a new settlement. A settlement that would shift more of globalization’s benefits to the US would still allow Asia to enrich itself on the left-overs. If only out of its own self-interest, the US could be relied upon to keep things under control. Then in November 2016, the United States elected Donald Trump.
Trump was easier to handle than Bush or Obama in some ways. He was a clown, who clearly had no idea what he was doing. He was eager to throw away decades of goodwill and real US power in the interests of a few week’s of headlines that portrayed him as tough. If China had been anywhere near as savvy, forward-looking, strategic, and ready for future leadership as it has been portrayed in the US press for the past 20 years this should have been its time to shine. This should have been China’s biggest opportunity since Pearl Harbor (Japan, which was invading China at the time, brought the US into the war).
China could have proved to the world, or at least Asia, that it was a better guarantor of its interests than the now quite insane looking United States. Instead, China fell back into old “president for life” models and ugly brutality. China’s decline into savagery isn’t a threat to the United States, it’s weirdly a back-handed endorsement of the importance of the US-led order in Asia.
As Smith accurately puts it, “The Status Quo in Asia is Good And Worth Preserving”. The US should stop working so hard to undermine it. It’s well within our power to do exactly that. China has surprisingly little to do with it. Cold War 2 is very much a product of choices that the US government made, and it’s something we should be able to undo fairly easily. We probably won’t.
