The cocktail of fear and paranoia consuming the would-be policymakers in Washington seems exceedingly unlikely to produce a coherent national strategy, much less a competent one. Ironically, and despite the sensationalized rhetoric, it's not really about China at all.
Rather, it's about themselves, and what to make of the brave new world they live in.
But often in the arguments emanating from the other three camps, China seems less like an enemy than a rhetorical device. Some will hail Chinese statecraft as an example to emulate. Others will summon a Chinese boogeyman that must be defeated. But in many of these cases, the real problem identified is not China per se, but the economic order that enabled its rise. The real target is a free-market consensus that prioritizes free trade and capital mobility over national resilience. Were the Chinese Communist Party to collapse tomorrow, the essential policies each group advocates would not change.
That China is such a powerful rhetorical weapon is revealing in its own way. Much like the geopolitical debate’s preoccupation with realpolitik, the economic debate’s insistence on foregrounding competition with China says something important about the anxieties of those in Trump’s orbit, as well as the arguments deemed most convincing to Trump himself.
Rather, it's about themselves, and what to make of the brave new world they live in.
At the heart of these disputes lies a fundamental question: What is America capable of? Can it still do great things? For the last four years, Trumpists have answered “no.” They have cast the federal government as a bloated machine run by inept bureaucrats whose culture has been hijacked by “wokeism” and whose institutions have been weaponized against them. Trump has vowed to change all of that.
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