My Take | How hyping ‘the China threat’ poisons US domestic politics

In his five-hour Senate confirmation hearing, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said China was America’s “biggest threat”. No surprise there. These days, everyone who is anyone has to say that or risks being labelled “soft on China”, or worse, a “China stooge”. The choice, it seems, is either calling China a “pacing challenge” (if you fancy yourself as a moderate) or an “existential threat” (if you are a hardliner).

But here’s the thing. When all these powerful people keep repeating the same warning, day in and day out, how do you think China might react? Wouldn’t it also consider, in turn, that the United States is its “biggest threat” and “existential challenge”? The technical term for that is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There is another obvious point, which is hardly worth mentioning except American politicians seem oblivious to it. In fact, many harbour the fantasy that somehow, ordinary Chinese would understand America is not against them, only their “autocratic” rulers. Sorry, but they all know if American bombs are ever dropped, they would land on their heads.

Seriously, the more you threaten China, the more its leadership is able to rouse up ethnonationalism to justify its rule. Now, if you want a primer on how we get to this spiralling insanity, you can do worse than reading a new book, The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy, by international relations specialists Van Jackson and Michael Brenes.

Their key argument is that rivalry with China is bad for the political health of Americans, who are already not well. This is because to prosecute Cold War 2.0, the political elites hype up the China threat and amp up the military and the national security apparatus. That will end up compromising America’s own democratic values as well as its civil and political institutions.

“China rivalry … favours demagogues and jingoists in domestic politics even as it perverts US grand strategic thinking,” the authors wrote.

“[It] cannot ameliorate what ails the United States … Far from birthing a new political consensus, a new unity, what instead follows is the suspension of civil liberties for targeted groups, the empowerment of extreme reactionary and anti-democratic voices, a climate of racialised fear that tips into societal violence, deflection of political accountability and the diversion of public resources away from public welfare.”