An Unnecessary Containment Policy

If China isn’t really expansionist and doesn’t endanger freedom everywhere, a containment policy seems both unnecessary and dangerous.

Walter Russell Mead cheerleads for the new Cold War:

Today, the Chinese Communist Party has become an expansionist, tyrannical power whose inordinate ambition endangers freedom world-wide. America’s interests and values both lead us to oppose that ambition, even as we seek to avoid the catastrophe of another great-power war.

China hawks talk a lot about Beijing’s vast ambitions, but they don’t have many things that they can point to as proof that these ambitions are real. It’s as if they just dusted off talking points from fifty years ago about the Soviet Union and replaced every reference to the USSR with the CCP and PRC instead. The story is simply too good for them to check. After all, if China is an “expansionist power” that “endangers freedom world-wide,” a containment policy makes a kind of sense. It might still be the wrong thing for the U.S. to do, but you could at least see why someone would want to do it. If China isn’t really expansionist and doesn’t endanger freedom everywhere, however, a containment policy seems both unnecessary and dangerous.

The Chinese government is tyrannical, but for more than forty years it has not waged a war outside its borders. There have been skirmishes and there have been territorial disputes, but the last war of any consequence that the PLA fought was in 1979. A huge percentage of Americans alive today can’t remember the last time that the Chinese military attacked anyone. That never seems to come up when talking about supposed Chinese “expansionism.” Mead refers to China as “expansionist” and talks about Chinese “expansion,” but he would struggle to identify where that expansion has taken place.

Mead’s misleading choice of words is more than just sloppy writing. He wants his audience to believe that there is expansion that needs to be “countered,” and that is where the U.S. comes in. The thrust of his column is that the U.S. doesn’t have the luxury of having any standards in which partners it supporters because it needs every two-bit dictatorship it can get to “counter” China. He applauds the Biden administration’s, er, flexibility with the new leadership in the Philippines, and he bemoans their half-hearted criticism of the Saudis. We need that “multilateral coalition” to oppose China, he tells us, and who cares about the compromises that it takes to get it?

This is the same dreadful logic that informed many of the worst Cold War policy decisions, and it only works if people believe that the adversary is an expansionist power with global ambitions. Unless propagandists convince Americans that the fate of the world is on the line, the public might start to wonder why it is that the U.S. cooperates with so many horrid little despotisms in the name of freedom. So Mead talks about expansionism that isn’t actually happening and global ambitions that aren’t in evidence to stoke fear in order to stop Americans from thinking about their government’s pursuit of a rivalry that makes great power conflict more likely.

Joining forces with heinous governments to stop an even worse one that is bent on conquest might seem like an ugly necessity. Doing the same for the sake of maintaining your own dominance is an indefensible choice. There may be rare occasions when the U.S. has to make deals with earthly devils to avoid a worse outcome, but most of the time this is just an excuse to back brutal dictatorships out of convenience while pretending to be defending something good.

The “pragmatism” Mead is selling is just the old lie that the ends justify the means. They don’t, and they never will. That kind of pragmatism isn’t moral, and it doesn’t actually secure American interests, either. Instead, it encourages Americans to tolerate evil policies because they have been convinced that something good will come from them somewhere down the road. This is the sort of thinking that led to aiding and abetting mass murder in Indonesia, committing atrocities in Southeast Asia, and enabling massacres in Central America. We know exactly where this road will take us, and we should turn back now before it is too late.