The American foreign policy establishment has no interest in peaceful coexistence with China. That’s the conclusion reached by American foreign policy and diplomatic historian Paul Heer in his recent essay published in TheNational Interest. He wrote this assessment two weeks before the American presidential election.
Heer attended a private conference that discussed how the United States and its allies should pursue a strategy in the so-called Indo-Pacific region to “deal with the challenge from China.” He concluded that “the prevailing sense was that engagement with China had become highly problematic, if not futile, largely because Beijing’s strategic ambitions leave little room for either accommodation or peaceful coexistence.” China was being blamed. Heer goes on to observe that “even China’s minimalist goals were deemed by many conference participants to be both immutable and irreconcilable with U.S. and allied interests.”
This basic posture should not be surprising to observers who have paid any attention to American policies toward China over the last decade or so. In fact, it could be argued that the fundamental presuppositions that inform this general posture have been a constant feature of American policy dating to the early 1950s and continuing into the 1960s. It could be described as an institutional-cultural milieu.
In the 1950s, the American political scene — insofar as China was concerned — was reeling from what was called “the loss of China.” Senator Joseph McCarthy famously excoriated John H. Service’s capitulation to the communists, in a speech in 1950 that addressed the scourge of communist influence in the U.S. State Department. McCarthy was clear that as Service capitulated, the Kuomintang’s Chiang Kai-shek was “fighting our war.” He meant by this “a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.
The modern champions of communism selected this as the time: “And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down — they are truly down.”
At the same time, General Douglas MacArthur, in a classified memo, described Formosa (the former name of Taiwan) as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender.” He went on to say that should the island fall into the hands of the Soviets, “Russia will have acquired an additional ‘fleet,' which will have been obtained and can be maintained at an incomparably lower cost to the Soviets than could its equivalent of 10 or 20 aircraft carriers with their supporting forces.”
Fifteen years after McCarthy’s speech and MacArthur’s memo, another memo — this one from Secretary of State Robert McNamara to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, dated Nov. 3, 1965 — described the American posture toward the war in Vietnam in the context of a wider strategic frame aimed at the containment of China. This frame was premised on a fear that China would become a direct threat to America’s security.
McNamara argued: “The long-run U.S. policy is based upon an instinctive understanding in our country that the peoples and resources of Asia could be effectively mobilized against us by China or by a Chinese coalition and that the potential weight of such a coalition could throw us on the defensive and threaten our security.”
He argued that China “looms as a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organize all of Asia against us.”
From the end of World War II to the end of the 20th century, the American posture toward the People’s Republic of China was also shaped by ideological concerns coupled with periodic contingencies. In those decades, America’s China policy was framed by a deep sense of grief — “Who lost China?” was the acerbic question posed in the early 1950s — accompanied by fear of communism as a Godless scourge. The realpolitik of the Cold War was to halt the fear of China’s expansion across Asia, coupled with ambitions to spiritually claim the nation. Instead, the U.S. moved to recognize the People’s Republic of China after Kissinger’s and then Nixon’s storied visits to Beijing in 1972 to outflank the Soviets.
A policy characterized as engagement ensued thereafter. Engagement reached its apotheosis during the Bill Clinton administration, when the U.S. president prevailed in domestic arguments for China’s accession to the World Trade Organization. Against critics at the time, such as Robert Kagan, Clinton argued that entangling China and bringing it into the post-Cold War American order would lead to its political transformation. If direct confrontation did not result in transforming China into an image to America’s liking, then — Clinton reasoned — the power of the market would work its magic.
China came into the WTO in 2000. Less than two decades later (at the latest around 2017-18), came the view among Washington’s policy elites that engagement had failed. In a special issue of Foreign Policy in March 2018, evaluating the effectiveness of multiple decades of so-called engagement, Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner concluded that “Neither U.S. military power nor regional balancing has stopped Beijing from seeking to displace core components of the U.S.-led system. And the liberal international order has failed to lure or bind China as powerfully as expected. China has instead pursued its own course, belying a range of American expectations in the process.” For them, China had defied American expectations.
This view was confirmed by Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in an address in February 2024 in which he lamented the failure of decades of American efforts to “shape or change China.” Engagement was one set of tactical approaches to a wider set of strategic ambitions to do that. Engagement should not be understood in any other way — certainly not as a path toward the peaceful coexistence of equals.
America’s ambitions to shape China in ways that suited American interests and aspirations go back decades, clearly. Engagement has been the most recent manifestation of how such aspirations were pursued, in the hope that entanglement with the American global order — the putatively named “rules-based order” underpinned by the economics of the Washington Consensus — would ultimately catalyze political and cultural change in China.
China was to be regained, if not by force, then through the efforts of missionary work. Whether it was Christianity or, failing that, the confessional of neoliberal economics, the aim was to liberate Chinese souls from the illiberal and godless shackles of Marxism-Leninism. These transformation efforts to shape or change China have foundered in the face of what Campbell and Ratner describe as Chinese defiance.
The American political establishment’s reaction has been to abandon the tactics of engagement. In their place, a once dormant visceral animus toward China has now been unleashed, amplified by the $160 billion congressional appropriation for anti-Chinese propaganda, drawing from this deep well of thwarted ambition coupled with the impulses of millenarian exceptionalism. McCarthy’s spiritual-cum-ideolgoical concerns, MacArthur’s military considerations about the "unsinkable carrier” Taiwan and McNamara’s assessment of the Chinese geopolitical threat to American security have again found voice.
Disengagement via economic sanctions and assorted prohibitions, the pursuit of alleged Chinese spies in American education and research institutions and the growing ambivalence toward trying to understand China — as recently observed by Li Cheng (Financial Times, Oct. 25, 2024) — all evince a political culture convinced of its own exceptionalism and incensed at China’s refusal to yield.
Others are pushing even harder. In May/June 2024, Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher argued in a piece in Foreign Policy that the Biden administration was excessively focused on short-term tactical questions revolving around the notion of “managed competition” when, in fact, the necessity was complete victory over China.
That China refused to yield should have been an object lesson about the need for what Heer described as “reciprocal compromise.” But Washington was never about compromise. Its millenarian zealotry and reanimated spiritual war forbid that.
The question that now animates us is whether Trump can rise above the historical institutional-cultural milieu, or will the new administration be just another episode of America’s ambitions to contain, change or conquer China.
