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China Rivalry Is Used to Justify Everything

China Rivalry Is Used to Justify Everything

The argument is always the same: “countering” the rival is so important that the U.S. “has to” tolerate the abuses of its partners, and that’s just the way it’s going to be.

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Daniel Larison
Sep 28, 2023
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Hal Brands offers up the standard Cold War rationalization for giving India a pass1:

A deteriorating global situation makes the US increasingly dependent on imperfect partners that are wont to do unpleasant, even brutal things. There is no answer to Chinese power without a more assertive India — and no avoiding the fact that Washington won’t always like what such an India does.

As far as China hawks are concerned, pursuing rivalry with China justifies almost anything. Today that means looking the other way when the Indian government appears to have carried out a targeted assassination on the soil of one of our allies and neighbors, and tomorrow it will mean pledging to defend the Saudis, and next week it will probably involve enabling some other dictatorship as it commits atrocities. Before you know it, China containment will be used to justify the most ridiculous and unnecessary policies in regions far removed from China, because that is how containment policies tend to expand and mutate.

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