Great Power Rivalry Isn't Unifying

The brain-dead red-baiting habits of the past die hard, and they are being revived thanks to rivalry with China.

Janan Ganesh is troubled that Americans aren’t falling in line in the name of rivalry with China as much as he hoped we would:

The Beijing-Moscow bond is tighter now than it was for much of the cold war, to say nothing of the linkages with Iran and North Korea. If an external challenge on this scale can’t induce Americans to rally around the flag, whatever would?

One of the reasons why Ganesh’s theory is “ageing like milk” is that he oversimplifies how nations respond to foreign threats. He assumed that some of the “old bipartisan ethos should return” when a new challenger appeared on the scene, but it doesn’t really work that way. Yes, nations tend to rally around the flag in wartime after they have been attacked, but they don’t automatically do this just because there is a potential threat on the far horizon. Long-running rivalries may not have the same unifying effects as short, intense conflicts.

Rivalry with another major power may sometimes cause partisans to set aside their political disagreements for the sake of uniting against a common foreign adversary, but we know that any foreign threat can also become a bludgeon that partisans use to bash their opponents and accuse them of all manner of treachery.