You’ll find it on the news so often that it becomes a cliché. A deceased person begins a crusade against any epidemic, crime, or public safety hazard that has claimed their loved one. A campaign is set up. Donations are coming. What drives their efforts is a sincere desire to help others out of the same pain. But a profound psychic also needs to take control. Once made and acted upon by a capricious world, the feeling of self-control, however brief, will soothe them.
Countries also have losses to deal with. Whether or not China ever gets over it, America still remembers the unipolarity of the 1990s. It copes with trauma by thinking about what could have been done about it. If only China didn’t suffer waving hand World Trade Organization December 20th. If only the successive White Houses hadn’t been so confident in their dealings with Beijing. The conclusions go back to 1949, when, as some Republicans still imagine, the United States had “lost” China to communism.
On the surface, this self-blame seems courageous and honest. In fact, it is an easy way out. The alternative is to acknowledge that the much larger and older country was tied for prominence in the world (again) when it first opened up. Deng in the 1970s. The West may have postponed appearing at the top, by some costs. Stopping it completely was never within its power.
Helplessness is more painful possession than guilt. The rest of the democratic world doesn’t find it easier than America. “The Western Way Invites China to Lunch,” has a Fox News headline that is dull and contrived. In fact, it is a BBC one, From last week. Consider its two implications. First, the WTO may, in 2001, justifiably blacken a fifth of humanity that has just undergone a generation of market-friendly reforms. Second, doing so would somehow only deter China but not the West, although American and other companies have tried to low-wage labor there is forever after.
If this is just academic fallacy, it need not hold us captive. But there are political consequences to this fantasy. One topic that Donald Trump brought to the White House was that the US elites are derelict and even complicit in the rise of China. President Bill Clinton, Mr. George W. Bush and Barack Obama are still said to have sold out industrial America (but not recorded because cheap consumer goods flowed into many of the same households from a trading China). The premise that a powerful China is some form of aberration, and not just a setback from historical significance, generates a lot of American populism.
Progressives have their own version of this solipsism. ONE fierce civil war in the Arabian peninsula? Blame it on Western arms sales. Poverty in Africa? Washington Consensus. Melting in Afghanistan? How dare we give it up. Even liberals or neutrals convince themselves that Russia is autocratic because Kremlin-friendly tycoons are allowed to buy out Mayfair. According to this view of the world, nothing bad happens anywhere that is not of Western origin. It was a stab in the global consciousness that could never be the same again. It is the pretense of humility that is truly the greatest statement of omnipotence.
The West is forever confronted with a harsh “truth” (how sinful we are) in order to overcome a harsher truth (how disadvantaged we are). It was strange enough to deny that the rest of the world had the mind and will in 1949, when the United States held a large enough share of global output that there was at least a desire to shape distant events. great. To keep it in this century is to live in an egotistical delirium.
It also gave rise to bitter intellectual contradictions in Washington. China hawks berate a generation or two of US leaders for facilitating their rise. Mike Pompeo, as secretary of state, seems to wonder if even Richard Nixon’s recognition of the “red” status in 1972 was naive. The trouble with this surface durability is that it shows China doesn’t have the conditions to prosper under its own steam. If so, why the hawk? Why perpetual vigilance and vast army? China can’t be a great rival that spans centuries and inadvertently creates soft free-trade libertarians at the same time.
The truth is that no one values China more than those who realize that China is so vast and its ambitions have long been stifled, with or without WTO membership. The hawks are actually fatalists.
