Haley's Neo-Imperialism and 'Chinese Influence'

Neighboring countries in the Americas are not our property.

Nikki Haley asks silly questions:

4. Why is China infiltrating the Western Hemisphere?

It’s not just the spy base in Cuba. Beijing is trying to turn almost every country in the Western Hemisphere against us, often using economic bribery. We need to get Chinese influence out of our backyard.

Haley is a politician and would never be confused for a good foreign policy analyst, but even for a presidential candidate trying to whip up the crowd this is ridiculous stuff. Is the United States “infiltrating” the Eastern Hemisphere when it sends its ships into the western Pacific? Are we “infiltrating” a different hemisphere when our government reaches agreements with China’s neighbors? No, that’s an absurd way of thinking about international affairs.

Neighboring countries in the Americas are not our property, hard as that may be for some people in this country to believe. China isn’t “infiltrating” anything when it does business and makes agreements with them. As for turning them against us, I can’t think of anything more likely to turn our neighbors against us than trying to lord it over them and demand that they cut off ties with one of their major trading partners because Washington says so. Haley’s would-be neo-imperialism is so crude here that it would probably embarrass Max Boot.

I don’t know how the U.S. would go about “getting” Chinese influence out of the entire hemisphere, and I suspect Haley doesn’t, either, because it isn’t possible and it isn’t a reasonable goal. It is the sort of mindless demagoguery that we can expect as the U.S.-China rivalry intensifies, and if left unchecked it will sooner or later lead to some very nasty policies directed against our neighbors in the name of combating “Chinese influence.”

The surest way to drive Latin American countries closer to China is to insist on getting rid of Chinese influence in their countries when they are the ones welcoming that influence. A few weeks ago, James Bosworth warned that the U.S. was getting things wrong in how it was handling the “competition” with China in Latin America, and he suggested an alternative:

To put it bluntly, Latin America deserves better from China in the 21st century than it received from Europe and the U.S. in centuries past. The region is very open to that message, and some self-reflection on the part of the U.S. would probably boost its impact.

The only hitch here is that the U.S. typically doesn’t do self-reflection, especially when it comes to regions of the world where it has been responsible for enabling and causing a lot of misery.

Unfortunately, judging from the hawkish groupthink on China in Washington, the U.S. is probably going to treat countries that have strong ties to China as members of the enemy camp in the years to come. That will have the effect of further alienating other non-aligned countries and leaving the U.S. with a neighborhood that is even more suspicious about its intentions than it already is. If the U.S. wants to make more headway in cultivating ties with our neighbors, our government should focus on working with them on improving trade and mitigating climate change rather than hectoring them about China and threatening sanctions against any country that steps out of Washington’s line.

The U.S. could try the radical option of genuinely respecting the sovereignty and independence of other states and acting accordingly. That would not guarantee that the U.S. gains influence everywhere that it wants to have it, but it would prevent the U.S. from repeating many of the errors and crimes of the Cold War.