So Much for 'Creative Thinking'

Today Hal Brands praised a new piece of legislation co-sponsored by Mitt Romney and a few other Senate Republican hawks. The so-called Strategic Act is notable for being long on hawkish proposals for what the U.S. should do in opposition to China, but it is not at all clear what it is meant to accomplish besides worsening relations and heightening tensions. If strategy is matching ends to means, hawks have been remarkably vague about what their goals are. They are pursuing a hostile policy for its own sake. It is a given that they are in favor of “competition,” but competition over what and for what purpose?

Brands writes:

There is a lot of creative thinking going on about America’s China policy, and it’s becoming possible to discern the outlines of a winning strategy. The critical question is when the U.S. and the democratic world will have a leader to carry that strategy forward rather than hold it back.

This is the latest installment in Brands’ series of columns outlining how a new Cold War-style rivalry with China should be conducted. Nowhere in these columns does Brands explain why the U.S. needs to engage in this rivalry, and he never defines what “winning” would look like. The implicit goal seems to be regime change, which is both a dangerous and far-fetched goal. We have seen how much trouble comes from destabilizing countries with tens of millions of people, so we can only imagine what might result from destabilizing a nuclear weapons state with more than a billion inhabitants. There is no evidence of any “creative thinking” here. It is just bog-standard, aimless hawkishness that has no connection to U.S. security interests.