Beware the Hawkish Consensus on China

Whenever the U.S. sets out on some new global struggle, it empowers ideological zealots and causes previously sensible people to adopt that zealotry as a way of remaining “relevant.”

Judah Grunstein warns against the entrenchment of the hawkish consensus on China:

The result is that competition and even potential conflict are now considered the default position for relations with China; those who suggest that cooperation—even on existential challenges like the climate crisis—is still valuable and at times necessary are seen as either naïve or, worse still, useful idiots.

What’s striking is that this approach has now become so entrenched that its premises are no longer scrutinized or debated. Moreover, maximalist objectives that only recently were considered farfetched and unfeasible are now granted serious consideration or else taken for granted.

Grunstein is right to sound the alarm here, and I fear that he is also correct when he says that “the momentum behind the hard-line consensus on China will only grow.” Once there is a bipartisan consensus about an adversary, the debate sharply narrows to fights over tactics. In this case, it is no longer a question of whether the U.S. should continue pursuing a militarized rivalry with China, but rather how and where it should do so. There is remarkably little debate over the scope of Chinese ambitions or the necessity of “countering” them, and it is simply assumed that U.S. “leadership” requires the latter.

To the extent that there are differences between the major parties, it is a difference in rhetoric and emphasis and not a fundamental disagreement over the substance of the policy itself. Unfortunately, this gives the advantage to more hawkish elements as they constantly push for more military spending, more deployments, and more coercive measures. Less aggressive adherents of the consensus feel compelled to go along with most or all of it in order to be taken “seriously,” and even critics often feel the need to frame their arguments using the language of the hardliners. Even those that believe that the U.S. and China must cooperate on some major issues are now described as “competitive coexisters” for fear that identifying too much as advocates of engagement is politically toxic.

Hardliners set the agenda, “centrists” quibble over details at the margins, and only a small minority challenges the wisdom of the strategy itself. That was the pattern in the Cold War and the “war on terror,” and we can see that the same thing is happening again now. One of the reasons why those “considered cranks and extremists before the new consensus emerged” are so easily accepted as part of a new hardline consensus is that mainstream policymakers have chosen to embrace the extremism that they previously shunned.

Whenever the U.S. sets out on some new global struggle, it empowers ideological zealots and causes previously sensible people to adopt that zealotry as a way of remaining “relevant.” Zealotry is a poor guide for statecraft, and before you know it the U.S. is on the road to another reckless war in a country that has little or nothing to do with our security. Each time this happens, it is a predictable consequence of following the flawed consensus to its “logical” conclusion, but then no one seems to learn much of anything from that failure and the U.S. proceeds to do it all over again a generation later.

There are strong incentives for analysts and policymakers to fall in line with the prevailing consensus, and the risks of going against the tide are great enough to discourage all but the most convinced dissenters. There is also safety to be found in numbers. When “everyone” in Washington buys into more or less the same position, there are no consequences for any particular analyst or policymaker when that position is later discredited by events. This is the “everyone thought Iraq had WMDs” defense, and the defense works in Washington because there is absolutely no accountability for policy failure at any level. If there is never any penalty for being aggressive and wrong, and the penalties for being prudent and cautious are significant, our policy debates will predictably be filled with cheerleaders for aggressive options.

Even when some analysts may recognize that the consensus is seriously flawed, it is safer and easier to keep their objections to themselves. This is the self-censoring that Jessica Chen Weis criticized in her Foreign Affairs article last year:

The desire to avoid appearing “soft” on China permeates private and public policy discussions. The result is an echo chamber that encourages analysts, bureaucrats, and officials to be politically rather than analytically correct. When individuals feel the need to out-hawk one another to protect themselves and advance professionally, the result is groupthink. A policy environment that incentivizes self-censorship and reflexive positioning forecloses pluralistic debate and a vibrant marketplace for ideas, ingredients critical to the United States’ national competitiveness.

It should not require political courage to point out that putting the U.S. on a collision course with a nuclear-armed major power is a foolish and destructive thing to do, but in Washington today it requires a great deal of it. When all the incentives encourage endorsing hardline and confrontational policies and skepticism and criticism are penalized, it should come as no surprise that policymakers fail to anticipate how those policies might fail or backfire. All the people that would and could have warned them about those pitfalls were pushed to the margins and ignored. When the policy debate becomes an echo chamber filled with different groups of hawks, it is inevitable that U.S. policies will suffer from huge blind spots and unexamined faulty assumptions that end up driving the U.S. into the ditch.