A Cold War Against China is a Bad Idea

Should progressives support the United States in its policy of aggressively encircling Russia and China?

After all, neither Russia nor China is a role model for a future post-capitalist progressive society, or a supporter of progressive movements outside their borders. Russia is a crony capitalist economy, with a Putin-led (Orthodox) Christian nationalist government, that promotes right-wing populist movements in other countries. It is often on the opposite side to the West in many international political-military conflicts, and not necessarily in a good way. China’s state is still controlled by the Communist party, but has a state capitalist economy that includes a considerable proportion of foreign capital investment. It is in technological and economic competition with the USA, and seeks to weaken and overtake the US empire on all fronts.

In Western countries, especially in the USA, both Russia and China are treated as enemies, or at least as ‘adversaries’, just as if nothing had changed in their nature since they were Marxist-Leninist states, with state socialist economies, that were ideologically committed to replacing capitalism with socialism.

There is strong pressure on progressives to fall into line with this approach. It is certainly tempting to do so, since many of Russia’s and China’s policies, domestically and externally, are not just non-progressive but reactionary.

Encircling Russia and China Feeds Negative Nationalism — and Hurts Progressive Movements — in Those Countries and Ours.

To take the easy route, and align with elite and mass opinion in our countries in maintaining the Cold War narrative, would be a mistake. A better stance would be to oppose actions by any country seeking to gain or retain global or local hegemony in relation to other countries or regions through the classic methods of empire, i.e. military, economic and political imposition. But we should also strongly oppose supposedly ‘softer’ strategies of merely encircling and isolating the adversaries of the Western alliance economically and politically – e.g. by banning Huawei (and other new China-made technology that threatens to become a world-wide standard in place of a Western country produced one), or by excluding adversaries from a Western led trade bloc.

Why? Because technology and trade wars are very likely to lead to political and military ones (and the rise of unquestioning patriotic nationalism within all countries involved). That does not serve the cause of progressives seeking to reform their societies in China and Russia, or the cause of progressives within countries allied with the (White Christian Europeans, otherwise known as the) West.

The US is an Empire. China Wants to Be One. Supporting One Empire Against Another is a Bad Idea.

Here are two extensive quotes from recent articles in Foreign Policy that challenge the conventional wisdom about Russia and China respectively. Both authors are appealing to the Biden administration to hold back from continuing the policy pursued by both Democratic and Republican presidents since the 1989-91 ‘fall of communism’ – policies of aggressive expansion by the US and its allies, under the cover of Cold War type claims that Russia and China are threats to ‘export revolution’, to aggressively expand themselves.

The article on Russia, ‘What Biden and Putin Can Agree On’ by Bruce Allyn, appeared on February 19 2021. Allyn is the director of the Russia Negotiation Initiative at the Harvard Negotiation Project. The article implies that the post-1989 US and Western policy actively helped to produce (as opposed to react to) the highly corrupt crony capitalist economy, and the Putin-style authoritarian nationalist political regime, when it expanded NATO and the EU into almost all of Eastern Europe. To begin to reverse this, the US and EU need to begin to walk back the aggressive encirclement measures of the 1990s and since. Or at least they should find ways to make Russia stop (quite correctly) feeling threatened by encirclement and isolation. They should multiply measures to include and integrate Russia instead.

Putin Did Not Appear Out of Nowhere. Expanding NATO Helped Create the Need for Him.

“Putin did not appear out of nowhere. His strategies have a starting point in the betrayal that many Russians felt when NATO expanded eastward after assurances that it would not. And then there was the further alienation engendered by the U.S. bombing of Russian ally Serbia in 1999, decisions to build Aegis Ashore missile defense systems in Romania and Poland, support for an anti-Russian leader in Georgia after 2003, and support for the pro-Western opposition in Ukraine in 2004 and then in 2013-2014. Then there was the U.S. decision to go beyond the United Nations mandate and topple Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime in Libya in 2011, and of course U.S. support for opposition figures in Russia.

It is helpful to understand that it is not only Putin, but also his predecessors, Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, who felt aggrieved by U.S. actions. In former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott’s memoir, he recalls a conversation when then-President Bill Clinton put himself in Yeltsin’s shoes: “We keep telling Ol’ Boris, ‘Okay, now here’s what you’ve got to do next—here’s some more shit for your face.’ And that makes it real hard for him, given what he’s up against and who he’s dealing with.” And by the middle of his presidency, even initially pro-Western Yeltsin would express his brewing resentment, “I don’t like it when the U.S. flaunts its superiority … Russia will rise again!” he said, “I repeat: Russia will rise again!”

From that perspective, it is no mystery why pliant Yeltsin picked steely Putin to “lift Russia off its knees.” (And it wasn’t just Putin’s promise not to go after Yeltsin, his family, or cronies for corruption.) Looking pained, Gorbachev told me two years ago that, after he let the Berlin Wall come down and worked to put an end to the Cold War, the United States kept trying to “push Russia out of geopolitics.”

So the problems in U.S.-Russian relations are not just “Putinism” or the idea that Putin fears democracy and needs an external enemy to stay in power. Rather, the problems existed before and will continue long after.”

China’s Rise to Challenge the US as an Imperial Power May Be Stalling.

The March 3 Foreign Policy article on China, ‘China is Losing Influence – and That Makes It Dangerous’ by Salvatore Babones (FP columnist and adjunct scholar at the Center for Independent Studies in Sydney; @sbabones on Twitter) is more speculative. It suggests that the USA is overreacting when it fears that China is on pace to displace it as the single world superpower, and consequently pursues policies to encircle and isolate it. China is already showing signs of stalling in its attempts to become a potential rival hegemon.

This view is more debatable empirically than Allyn’s statements about Western policy towards Russia, but the general point about aggressive encirclement and isolation makes just as much sense when the object is China. Personally I would put greater stress on the internal contradictions in China’s economy, society and political system, including the fact that its one child policy and rapid urbanization has led to an aging population, which in turn might lead to slowing economic growth and require massive in-migration of non Han people into an historically ethnocentric culture. (To be fair, Babones might also stress internal contradictions, if he were not doing an article in a foreign policy magazine.)

Regardless, Babones’s point is that the US and its Western alliance allies should not pursue a policy of breaking the world into trade blocs and ramping up polarization in political and military areas based on the false premise that the USA’s global hegemony is under imminent threat from China. Or, at least, it should slow down on these efforts, and let other countries deal with China on their own.

Squeezing China Will Not Produce Liberal Democracy There. It Might Create Conditions for War.

“Over the last two decades, China has moved from the periphery to the very center of the world’s international relations. Given that China’s economy is now more than five time as large as it was at the turn of the millennium, that transition is hardly surprising. But many of China’s new international relationships, initially hopeful, have now turned hostile. China still has some down-at-the-heel allies, such as Pakistan and North Korea, but it is increasingly isolated from the developed countries that alone can facilitate its continued economic growth.

For China, that means trouble. Its promises are no longer taken seriously, and its propaganda falls on deaf ears. Many of its Belt and Road Initiative projects have ground to a halt. Virtually no one supports its nine-dash line in the South China Sea, and Western countries have been lining up to offer immigration pathways to professionals fleeing Hong Kong after Beijing’s takeover last year. Many countries have banned China’s Huawei and ZTE from their telecommunications networks. And India, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan are all modernizing their armed forces in response to potential Chinese threats.

Under these circumstances, the best thing that U.S. President Joe Biden can do to stem the rising tide of Chinese expansionism is … nothing. China’s red tide is already rolling out all on its own. Biden can afford to pursue a policy of “masterly inactivity”, relying on China’s own aggressive foreign policy to further isolate the country from the rest of the world. Instead of increasing the pressure on China, now is the time for him to lighten up a bit.

Why Are Western Countries So Afraid of ‘Unfair’ Technological and Economic Competition?

The worst thing Biden could do is put so much pressure on China that its leaders lash out because they feel they have nothing to lose. That was arguably what happened in 1941, when the United States successfully countered Japanese expansionism with military aid to China, a trade embargo, and the freezing of Japanese assets in the U.S. banking system. Japan wasn’t on the rise in 1941; it was on the wane. Bogged down in China, checked by the Soviet Union in a little-remembered conflict in Mongolia, and increasingly squeezed by U.S. economic sanctions, Japan’s leaders recklessly sought a kantai kessen (“decisive battle”) with a naval strike at Pearl Harbor. They saw no other way to forestall a long, smothering defeat.

Of course, what Japan’s leaders got instead was a decisive, blood-soaked defeat. But today, no one except the hardest of hard-liners wants to see China defeated. That kind of language makes no practical sense. Short of a world war, there is no way for anyone outside China to dislodge Chinese Communist Party leadership from its headquarters in central Beijing. A more sensible goal for the United States and its allies would be to see China return to the slow liberalization trajectory it was arguably following before President Xi Jinping took power as the party’s leader at the end of 2012. And that’s a goal that China must be convinced to choose for itself.”