What Max Boot gets wrong about China alarmism
Tom Rogan
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Is bipartisan cooperation on China policy a problem?
I’d say the opposite is true: Said cooperation offers a ray of light amid Washington’s partisan fetish show. Washington Post columnist Max Boot disagrees. He warns that bipartisanship in foreign policy can be a bad thing, noting the bipartisan 2002 authorization of force against Iraq set “the United States on the path to another disastrous conflict.”
It bears noting that this is the opposite of what Boot argued on Dec. 30, 2002. Then, Boot attacked a rare dissenting view from the bipartisan majority, Pat Buchanan, and supported the neoconservative argument for war. Namely, that “we need to liberalize the Middle East — a massive undertaking, to be sure, but better than the unspeakable alternative. And if this requires occupying Iraq for an extended period, so be it; we did it with Germany, Japan and Italy, and we can do it again. … This is, in case you haven’t guessed, my own view too. So I guess that makes me a neocon.”
Back to 2023, Boot contends that with China, “The problem today isn’t that Americans are insufficiently concerned about the rise of China. The problem is that they are prey to hysteria and alarmism that could lead the United States into a needless nuclear war.” He suggests that fears over a near-term Chinese attack upon Taiwan are exaggerated because “China has been much more cautious in the conduct of its foreign policy” over the past few decades. Boot quotes the scholar Jessica Chen Weiss, whose analysis I have previously contested, as telling him that “[Rep. Mike] Gallagher [‘s China select committee] has set the stage for anyone who raises questions about U.S. policy to be smeared as a friend of the Chinese Communist Party.”
To be fair, Boot rightly notes that a major economic decoupling from China would cause significant U.S. economic pain. While I would argue that a broad but not total decoupling is nevertheless necessary, it is fair for Boot to argue that Republicans are not sufficiently honest about the short-medium-term costs this would entail for Americans. Beyond this point, however, Boot’s analysis is misguided.
U.S. UNPREPARED AS CHINA BOOSTS PREPARATIONS FOR TAIWAN WAR
First, Gallagher’s China committee has only just begun its work. Perhaps Chen Weiss’s assessment will bear out as true. Perhaps not. But maybe we should wait and see before proscribing the committee as McCarthy-lite?
Second, just as Barack Obama was a very different president to Donald Trump, President Xi Jinping’s 2023 China is a very different China to Xi’s 2013 China. Where Xi was previously able to leverage massive trade to earn political space from the West, that influence is diminished even in much of Europe (albeit not all). And unlike in 2013, Taiwan’s status is a boiling controversy. Considering that Taiwan is a matter of personal and political destiny for Xi, this conflagration flows innately through broader U.S.-China tensions. Finally, the People’s Liberation Army is far better positioned today to fight a war with the U.S. over Taiwan than it was in 2013. Boot correctly observes that China has not fought a major war since its 1979 conflict with Vietnam. But he ignores Xi’s telling retention of 72-year-old Zhang Youxia at the top of the PLA. It’s because Zhang is one of the very few officers with combat experience from that 1979 war.
Boot also fails to explain how American public “alarmism” over China is unwarranted.
On the contrary, if most Americans truly understood the scale and ambition of China’s espionage activities, its nuclear and conventional force developments, and the Chinese Communist Party’s cold disregard for individual freedom, their alarm would surely be even greater than it is today. Indeed, Xi’s fixation on ensuring ideological conformity, whether by Chinese business interests or ethnic Uyghurs, is utterly anathema to defining American values. It’s unclear how this alarmism could, as Boot suggests, result in a nuclear war. Perhaps Boot believes that general public disdain for China will motivate unjustified U.S. government actions that further exacerbate Beijing’s frustration. If so, he needs to identify what these actions might be. Support for Taiwan? Further high-tech export restrictions? The proper debate is in the details.
Congressional bipartisanship on China is a good thing for the same reason it’s occurring in the first place. It underlines the increasingly stark nature of Beijing’s threat and America’s interest in confronting it. Portraying bipartisan cooperation against China as the product of short-sighted populism is too simplistic.