The Perilous Path of Trying to Keep China Down

If our current containment policy somehow counts as appeasement, I would hate to see what these people think confrontation looks like.

Jacob Heilbrunn’s profile of China superhawk Elbridge Colby does a good job identifying where he fits in the contemporary foreign policy landscape, but we don’t hear very much about his specific policy views:

But is China truly the frighteningly powerful empire that Colby discerns? Or is it beginning to falter under the weight of its own internal problems? There are more than a few who dissent from Colby’s narrative throughout Republican ranks, even among Trump supporters and realists.

Different camps of hawks spend so much time fighting with each other over where to concentrate U.S. resources that their arguments about U.S. interests and policies receive relatively little scrutiny. A large part of the Colby profile covers his quarrels with other hawks over Ukraine, and this means that there is very little time spent on China policy itself. It is simply taken for granted by all hawkish groups that rivalry with and containment of China are the right things to do, and the only major difference between them is that they disagree about the trade-offs needed to make that happen. This creates the illusion of sharp divisions among China hawks when there is almost mindless unanimity when it comes to the shape and direction of China policy.

One of the main problems with Colby’s preferred China policy is not so much how he assesses Chinese power, but how he defines U.S. interests.