There is no doubt that the United States is more prosperous and more secure in a globalized world, with close economic and political allies and strategic partners in Europe and Asia and elsewhere. But the coronavirus pandemic, produced by China’s dissembling and a credulous—if not incompetent—UN World Health Organization (WHO) underscores that while building foreign partnerships is more important than ever, these efforts should be guided by U.S. national interest. The upcoming U.S. presidential election will give the American people the opportunity to determine whether American interests are guided by a more calibrated approach to diplomacy informed by a healthy dose of skepticism of the costs and benefits of globalism, or to return whole-hog to the globalization of the past two decades.
In particular, the United States must decide whether the pandemic has tempered the liberal internationalist impulse to rely on the United Nations and continue to embrace China, despite the global calamity unfolding in slow motion before our very eyes. The New York Times, as the establishment voice of record, has reliably advocated more of the same. For the past three months, the paper of record has, without fail, published at least one propaganda piece from Chinese state media about the need for greater cooperation between China and the United States, amidst daily revelations that past cooperation has yielded few tangible results. On February 28, for example, the paper gave space to China’s foreign affairs commissioner in Hong Kong, who argued the United States and China must work together, to “protect global health.” This was printed around the same time China was denying that SARS-CoV-2 could become a global contagion. On March 13, the paper gave space to a token westerner in Beijing, who copy-pasted the Xinhua’s argument that China’s effort to deal with the virus bought the West precious time. Recently, on April 5, longtime Chinese ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai argued in an op-ed that the two countries must embrace in solidarity, collaboration and mutual support on coronavirus, just two weeks after Chinese officials launched a psychopathological campaign to blame the pandemic on American soldiers.
The pandemic from China places us at one of the most historic inflection points since World War II. As China has become wealthier it has become a menace to American prosperity and security, hollowing out American manufacturing through endemic trade mercantilism, leveraging decades of theft of U.S. technology and military secrets, and deputizing Russia as the junior delinquent in a bilateral condominium of instability designed to create a new authoritarian global order. Yet many of the most senior U.S. foreign policy elites from both parties persist in the view that Washington’s relationship with Beijing should be business as usual.
Consider this latest example of a numerous Bush-Obama era scholars and policymakers who erect the Straw Man of greater cooperation with China, as the Trump administration tries contends with washed data, shift through Chinese untruths, contend with threats to withhold pharmaceuticals and medical supplies in the face of a pandemic, and counter China’s comprehensive and global “blame” narrative and charm offensive. The luminaries, led by former National Security advisers, Susan Rice and Stephen Hadley, include Joseph Nye, Madeline Albright and Chuck Hagel. “No effort against the coronavirus—whether to save American lives at home or combat the disease abroad—will be successful without some degree of cooperation between the United States and China,” in response to an open letter from one hundred Chinese scholars calling for the same thing, apparently parroting Chinese Communist Party talking points. While the letter is bipartisan, that word is increasingly meaningless, as the current division in the United States is not between Republicans and Democrats, or even Left and Right, but between nationalists and internationalists. There are both nationalist left and right, and internationalist Left and Right. The Bush-Obama era folks fall in the latter camp. They are the experts who have insisted for two decades that if the United States helped make China stronger and wealthier, it would become more like us, and, given that they have invested their professional life in the project, they are in too deep to be struck by its colossal failure.
Hadley argues that “There are some areas where it’s still in the best interests of both countries and of the world as a whole to have the United States and China cooperating, and I think even the most hawkish Republicans would agree with that.” No one is disputing that, but that’s also irrelevant in treating China as an adversarial power and diversifying the supply chains to end Chinese monopoly. Curiously, these arguments all follow similar lines like the Chinese communist party orchestrated open-letter campaigns calling for international cooperation and shared global goals. Can one see a tinge of the old Soviet Union, which called for green energy and denuclearization, while funding agents in West Germany to protest against American nuclear power? Kori Schake, another Bush alum, wrote in the Atlantic, recently, that “We don’t appear to have concern that poor countries with weak public-health systems might eventually bear the brunt of the pandemic. We seem only to resent Chinese philanthropists for sending medical supplies to us, rather than thanking them for providing much-needed assistance.” Yet the United States, typically with little fanfare, provides more direct aid and greater funding to virtually every UN agency, and emergency assistance, than any country in the world—many times over. After having given so much for so long, the American taxpayer might be pardoned for not caring much about Chinese “philanthropists” doing public relations campaigns, for the Chinese communist party. Furthermore, the largesse has also proved often to have been ill-spent, or even counterproductive. As Rajan Menon and Will Ruger recently suggest, futile campaigns against rogue states and terrorism have squandered American blood and treasure, which would have been useful in an era of great power competition. “It now seems abundantly apparent that rather than building hospitals in Afghanistan, we should have focused on producing masks and ventilators here at home. Rather than building schools in Iraq, we should have invested in scientific breakthroughs to treat disease.” From misadventures in Mesopotamia under Bush and the Mediterranean under President Barack Obama, internationalist policies have resulted in enormous debts and deficits, with nothing but to show for it, just as both Republican and Democratic administrations presided over the decay of U.S. national infrastructure, ballooning debt, and turned a blind eye to the “China dream” to recast the global system.
That needs to change, and these open debates about China, at least highlight and point out those who understand what’s at stake, in the near future. Things are not going back to normal and should not go back to normal either. It would be an extremely anti-national act, to continue doing business as usual with China, and continue to waste blood and treasure in futile nation-building in the Middle East. For what it’s worth, the time for a narrow national interest is at hand.
And as the architect of the National Security Strategy Nadia Schadlow recently wrote, for all his faults, and despite his personality and oratorial challenges, President Donald Trump has been broadly correct about China, and the bipartisan group of internationalists was wrong. “That Trump might be introducing needed correctives to the hyper-globalization pursued by earlier administrations is generating serious cognitive dissonance in some quarters. And the reality is that only one organization in the entire world has as its sole responsibility the American people’s safety. That institution is the U.S. government. Whether led by Republicans or Democrats—or by Donald Trump or anyone else—it should always put the American people first.”
There’s a saying that in foreign policy, experts often fail upward, so there will be no comeuppance for some and their evident failure to force world reality into their flawed model, and they will continue to be rewarded with thinktank gigs as officials in waiting to inflict the same policies on an exhausted public once again. There is no better time to critique the failed foreign policy of the past twenty years and reject more of what the internationalists are selling, which continues to promise to do more of the same thing and achieve a different result.
James Kraska (@JamesKraska) is chair and Charles H. Stockton professor of international maritime law in the Stockton Center for International Law at the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed here are his own and do not represent those of the Stockton Center, the U.S. Naval War College, the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
Sumantra Maitra (@MrMaitra) is a doctoral scholar of neorealism and great power grand-strategy, at the University of Nottingham, UK, awaiting final submission of thesis after a successful thesis defense, and a senior contributor to The Federalist.
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