War with China

War with China John Tangney THUMBNAIL - warwithchina In former-National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster’s account of a 2019 Chinese embassy party in Washington DC, his colleague Matt Pottinger quotes Confucius to the Chinese ambassador to explain America’s shift from using the language of cooperation to that of competition in describing their relationship with the Middle Kingdom: “If names cannot be correct, then language is not in accordance with the truth of things. And if language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.” By shifting to the language of competition, the Trump administration had begun to acknowledge the de facto situation between the US and China and had moved beyond the post-1989 ‘end of history’ era when it was still thought that opening the Chinese economy would bring a more open Chinese society. In this account, previous administrations had been guilty of “strategic narcissism” in relation to the Chinese Communist Party. ‘Strategic narcissism' is a term coined by Charles Morgenthau, the progenitor of the international relations field, to describe an approach that only attributes agency to one’s own tactics and motivations and fails to understand the motivations of the other side. The necessary corrective is “strategic empathy.” Matt Pottinger, who is fluent in Mandarin, and in Chinese history and culture, was a strategic asset in this context, and was understood as such by the Chinese, who had prevented him from accompanying the Trump delegation’s visit to the Forbidden City in Beijing in 2017. They feared his ability to critique the jingoistic display of ‘Middle Kingdom’ ideology being staged there for the president. Both McMaster and Henry Kissinger - who directed American diplomacy with China before the age of American strategic narcissism - make the point in recent books that the emotional drivers of China’s current militancy derive from the so-called ‘Century of Humiliation’ when China suffered defeats at the hands of British and Japanese imperialists. Prior to this, China had been a vast inward-looking country that had survived numerous internal conflicts as well as external incursions, always reconstituting itself following a period of division, or absorbing invaders into its cultural sphere. Unlike Kissinger in his 2011 book On China, McMaster, writing a decade later, concludes that cooperation with China has failed, a view that has bipartisan support in Washington, and has been bolstered in the past few days by Chinese military incursions into Taiwanese airspace in the wake of the Afghanistan debacle. China’s provocation of the Taiwanese has been preceded in recent years by incursions into Philippine waters in the South China Sea as well as into Japanese territorial waters around the Senkaku islands. Such military probings, combined with Xi Jinping’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ that uses financial indebtedness to turn smaller countries into vassal states, are perhaps ambiguous with regard to the question of whether China’s ambitions are imperialist in the sense that Britain’s or Germany’s were before World War One. In any case, some in the American military think China will invade Taiwan in the next six years, which would pose a stern challenge to America’s resolve in standing by its allies. The novel 2034, visible on McMaster’s home bookshelves in recent podcast appearances, is an imaginative projection of what a conflict between China and America might look like, drawing on the idea that high tech military establishments may have systemic vulnerabilities that can be exploited by less advanced opponents. Related to this is what McMaster calls ‘Russian New Generation Warfare’, which involves provocative behaviour just below the threshold at which a hot military response might be expected from NATO forces. This can include cyber-attacks, incursions into foreign airspace, creating economic dependencies with the Nordstream 2 pipeline, using malware to shut off the power grid in Ukraine, and sabre-rattling announcements about pre-emptive nuclear strikes on Europe designed to cause fear and uncertainty. Warlike actions by Russia and China just below the level of hot warfare seem to converge with the language used in Western countries to describe ideological conflicts about reproductive rights or race relations as the ‘war on women’ or the ‘war on blacks’. They serve to blur the distinction between politics and warfare, creating a climate of hysteria. Indeed, in light of the increasingly popular view that uncivil language is a form of violence, Western liberal society looks to be engaged in a war of each against all, awaiting a new Hobbesian social contract with a powerful sovereign. This helps explain the glamour that Putin has for some on the dissident right, and their idealization of life in Chinese cities where you can walk around without fear of being mugged because the force of the state on individual behaviour is that much greater than in Paris or New York. However, in Western countries, the blurring of lines between politics and war remains the stuff of clever-clever academic papers and alarmist news stories for now. It’s usually little more than a nuisance to the common sense by which ordinary people navigate the world, despite not being able to say where precisely the lines between politics and violence, or high and low culture, or black, latino, and white races, are located. In the East, on the other hand, the blurring of the war/politics distinction is deadly serious and needs to be met with a serious response. The language of empathy is not usually associated with the Right in the era of campus crybullies and Hollywood bleeding-hearts, but in McMaster’s use of the term, strategic empathy is an aid to robust competition on the world stage. Campus and congressional crybullies, by contrast, use what we might call ‘performative empathy’ to exert power. They don’t own up to the strategic element of their behaviour, and not owning up to your lies is one of the chief methods of totalitarians, who, as they gather power, become increasingly brazen in their defiance of the truth. For example, Chinese cyberattacks on Western infrastructure have always been accompanied by denial, but, when discovered in the past, there followed a temporary reduction in their intensity. Now the denials continue, but without any falling off in the frequency of the attacks. McMaster thinks the open societies of the West have a strategic advantage in possessing a free press and a rule of law for exposing lies, even by those in high places such as American presidents, or Meng Wanzhou the Huawei CFO imprisoned in Canada at America’s request. Xi Jinping on the other hand regards his ability to create the truth by fiat as his country’s strategic advantage. Assuming, as many do, that this is a zero-sum conflict, it would seem to be a matter of grave import for humankind which of them turns out to be correct. Totalitarian states like the Soviet Union have shown themselves to be brittle, and held together by collective lies that don’t stand up very well to determined truth-tellers. Democracies, by contrast, are more antifragile, but they contain multiple competing claims on the truth by would-be totalitarians that threaten to tear them apart. The Chinese, like the Russians, have harnessed such divisions within Western countries to bring us to a situation where people are in danger of giving up on the facts because there’s always someone with “alternative facts.” Education is often put forward by policy-influencers like McMaster as a way to heal social divisions, but this has become one of the most contested spaces in the culture war. In McMaster’s account of his diplomacy with Russia, he describes how he listened non-reactively to their accounts of American failures in the Middle East or of NATO encroachments on Russian zones of influence in Eastern Europe. He then raised the level of the discussion to that of their common interests by pointing out that reflexively opposing America in the UN had almost led to Iran getting nuclear weapons. One way to unite the opposing forces in the Western culture wars might be to identify a common interest in countering Chinese and Russian new generation warfare, and indeed the Biden administration has followed the Trump initiative in dealing with China as a competitor rather than a partner in the rules-based international order. However, it’s not obvious that bipartisan support for this shift in policy is going to unite the West’s political tribes, or create a concerted response among Western nations. Bernie Sanders has called on Biden to avoid making an enemy of China for fear of inciting anti-Chinese racism in America, and empowering ultra-nationalist forces in both countries. McMaster too seems conscious of this danger, or perhaps just conscious of how racist incidents will be used by the left to undermine Western unity. Meanwhile, the AUKUS alliance has created new divisions between France and the AUKUS countries, no doubt partly justified in Washington by the memory of France’s weak response to their calls for concerted sanctions against Russia following the Skripal poisoning, and by France’s adoption of Huawei 5G technology despite knowing that Huawei is an arm of the Chinese state intent on stealing Western intellectual property. In the end, Australia’s recent decision to buy American rather than French submarines, like America’s decision to join AUKUS, is driven by pressing security considerations. In the 1990s, while China was still in the process of opening its economy, the CCP was biding its time, aided by misguided Western optimism that it could be reformed. Now the CCP openly admits that it sees America’s future role as a provider of raw materials and food products for China’s production of high-end consumer goods and cutting edge technologies while it overtakes the US as a global hegemon. McMaster is cagey about whether he approves of Trump’s presidency overall, but he can’t avoid casting Trump in a rather good light in his account of the former-President’s addressing Xi Jinping directly on the subject of Chinese cyberattacks and economic warfare, saying “I don’t blame you; I blame us.” Although Biden has continued Trump’s strategy, he is currently dealing with progressive elements in his own party who want to delay an infrastructure bill until their demands for social justice measures and a decrease in military spending are met. Bernie Sanders sees the battle between authoritarianism and democracy as internal to China and America rather than a battle between them, and the solution as a global minimum wage. Amazon Prime is currently airing a film by John Pilger called The Coming War on China that casts the Sino-US relationship in terms of American imperialist aggression. While anti-Asian racism is a real thing in America, it is anomalous in relation to the ‘systemic racism’ narrative because Asian Americans outperform their peers in most educational and professional environments to the point that they’re allegedly being discriminated against in college admissions. McMaster thinks they should be seen as an asset in US efforts to counter the threat from the CCP, but by amplifying the racism/imperialism narrative progressives are likely to vitiate the kind of unified response needed to deal with a cunning and powerful adversary whose totalitarian behaviour makes cancel culture look trivial by comparison. 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