The China Threat: Who Do You think the Enemy is?
The upcoming 2024 U.S. elections have once again placed the foreign policy spotlight on US-China great power rivalry. While Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance called China “the biggest threat” to the U.S, Kamala Harris has stated at the Democratic National Convention to ensure “America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century”. With growing tensions in the South China Sea, a continuing trade and tech war, concerns over US-China relations have far reaching consequences for the global value-chains and international security.
The grand narrative that is being fed is certainly pessimistic and feels as though all roads are leading to an almost pre-destined conflict. Trump would like people to think, “We have a modern day Axis of Evil. The biggest threat is NOT global warming. The biggest threat is nuclear warming.” However, this is not a Hollywood movie about good and evil; we live in a multifaceted world.
The callback to Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address and consequent War on Terror should serve as a stark reminder of the ramifications of throwing the ‘black paint’ onto other countries. To put it mildly, the United States’ incursions into the Middle East were illegal, a violation of the rights of sovereign countries and an affront to the international order.
Driven by a desire for retribution rather than pursuing measures that would actually break the wheel of violence and revenge, Washington imposed systems that would continue to destabilise and threaten the stability of its designated ‘enemies’. As Middle East fellow for the Woodrow Wilson Center Marina Ottaway highlights, the US invasion “created a system dependent on divergent sectarian interests … too bogged down in the politics of balancing the factions to address policies that would improve the lives of Iraqis”. In effect, there was a conscious effort from Washington to design a product for Iraq that would sow division into its internal politics to hinder its ‘hostile’ activities at the expense of the progress of the entire country and its people.
The implied key point is that once enemies are identified and threat perception is high, the response from the West will be evolved beyond traditional and proxy warfare. Modern strategies aim to destabilise the development and security of the ‘enemy’ in creative, yet devastating ways. Moreover, once foreign policy is directed at the ‘enemy’, it is incredibly difficult to change course towards generative or productive forms of engagement to mitigate threat.
While Harris seems like the more ‘rational’, and steady-handed candidate, we should not let optics throw away the need for healthy skepticism. It may seem trivial to state the obvious, but gender does not reduce a human’s capacity for force. As a Stanford research survey revealed “women support nuclear weapons use and violations of noncombatant immunity no less (and in some cases, more) than male respondents”. In fact, Harris’ hawkish sentiments might outpace Trump’s in a pitiful race to the bottom as she declared “As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” Hence, a Harris War Room holds the same potential for global insecurity if it continues to see the ‘number two’ as an ‘enemy’. Although military conflict is very unlikely, which certainly makes the Asia region more blessed than the Middle East, examining ‘China Threat’ theory showcases new concerns for peace and security due to the US-China rivalry.
The ‘China Threat’ at its core views China’s rise as a challenge to the international order, the global systems, and ‘Western’ interests. American elite’s definition of ‘rise’ has evolved from the Cold War, to shift from ideological differences and military capabilities towards economic power and political system. Ideologically, the promotion of communism beyond China’s borders is vague and subjective. Militarily, direct engagement spells mutually assured destruction, and both countries have far too many internal and external challenges to fight a ‘slow’ war of military friction. This leaves two other main criticisms to showcase why it is problematic to equate rise with economic and political threats.
Firstly, we must ask - is China’s aggressive growth and modern need to sustain its material conditions not a result of its compliance with the global system and its practices? Moreover, did the US not secure its political position as the hegemon through its economic imperialism and if so, why are other countries barred from pursing development in similar ways? Therefore, the China Threat poses a question of double standards between Western democracies and the Global South as well as the ‘rights’ to development.
This by no means justifies the coercive tactics that Beijing employs to remain economically competitive but is rather a critique of the international system that was largely designed by Western powers. The onus is on Western democracies and other developed countries to devise a fair, ethical, and expeditious avenue for Global South countries to ‘catch up’ to them. If not, then they lose the moral high ground to complain when lesser-developed countries eventually follow the example of prosperity set for them. China will not be the first nor the last country to become an economic challenger using coercive methods, especially when the alternative is a ‘middle-income’ trap at best.
Secondly, a closer examination will showcase that this Cold War mentality remains engrained in the China Threat, which is self-validating narrative. Since the Cold War, American elites have built on the China threat in Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” and Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man”. While Huntington’s position is that conflict will break out on cultural borders i.e., East/West, Fukuyama’s position is that Western-style democracies are the ideal political type and the ‘final’ project for all countries to achieve peace. Clearly, both ideas perpetuate the binary between peace/conflict and West/East. If the East cannot be assimilated by the West, then there can only be conflict.
However, in a world of multiplicity this will never be the case. All the people of the world desire cultural recognition, political autonomy, and the right to feel prestige. Treating non-Western countries as adversarial will only provoke the hostility they fear and harden the stance that peaceful coexistence is impossible. Therefore, the ‘China Threat’ needs to be reassessed if we are sincere about avoiding a race towards a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Image Courtesy of Frank Schulenburg via Wikimedia, ©2013. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
