Max Boot
In these ultra-partisan times, pundits often bemoan the decline of bipartisanship. I’ve done so myself. But we should remember that when the two parties agree on an issue, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are right. It could mean they are falling prey to a collective delusion.
In 1964, for example, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing military action against North Vietnam. There were only two dissenting votes in the Senate and none in the House. Only later did it become clear that the factual basis of the resolution was fallacious (one of the two supposed North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. destroyers almost certainly did not occur) and that its impact was catastrophic: It would drag the United States into a losing war that left more than 58,000 Americans dead.
Nearly four decades later, in 2002, Congress authorized U.S. military action against Iraq by smaller (but still large) bipartisan majorities (296-133 in the House, 77-23 in the Senate) — setting the United States on the path to another disastrous conflict.
That history is worth keeping in mind lest we become too giddy in celebrating the current bipartisan agreement about the dangers posed by China. That consensus was on display last week in the first hearing of the newly formed House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which had been created by a vote of 365-65.
Chairman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) and ranking minority-party member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) were a model of bipartisan comity. In fact, Krishnamoorthi insisted that Congress must be united because “the CCP wants us to be fractious, partisan and prejudiced.” But while the hearing was bipartisan, it was also disturbingly one-sided.
All four of the witnesses — former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, Chinese dissident Tong Yi and business lobbyist Scott Paul — urged the hardest of hard lines against Beijing. Utterly missing were any of the numerous experts in the China-watchers community who would have warned of the risks of reckless confrontation, advocated dialogue with Beijing to reduce tensions and pointed out that there are issues (such as trade, global warming and the North Korean nuclear program) where cooperation with China is in our own interest.
In fact, Gallagher — a moderate by the standards of the House Republican caucus — implied that those who urge a less hawkish approach are Communist dupes: “The CCP has found friends on Wall Street, in Fortune 500 C-suites and on K Street who are ready and willing to oppose efforts to push back,” he said.
Jessica Chen Weiss, a political scientist at Cornell University who is a leading advocate of a more measured policy toward China, told me: “Gallagher has set the stage for anyone who raises questions about U.S. policy to be smeared as a friend of the Chinese Communist Party. … The initial selection of witnesses gives little reason to believe that the committee will invite differing viewpoints.”
The testimony about the threat from China wasn’t so much wrong as it was one-sided and misleading. For example, Krishnamoorthi displayed a chart juxtaposing U.S. manufacturing employment against the U.S. trade deficit with China from 1973 to 2015. “It starts out at roughly 18.8 or 19 million American jobs in manufacturing, and it goes all the way down to about 12.4 million jobs in 2015,” he said, implying that all of those jobs were lost to trade with China.
In fact, lots of other countries with robust manufacturing sectors, including Germany, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Mexico, have contributed to U.S. job losses. So has automation. Moreover, an analysis in the Harvard Business Review found that while “some U.S. regions lost manufacturing jobs as a result of trade with China in the early 2000s … that trend has ended.”
Completely unmentioned were all the benefits of trade with China. The U.S.-China Business Council notes: “American companies exported $192 billion in goods and services to China in 2021, constituting 7.5 percent of U.S. exports … Exports to China support over 1 million U.S. jobs.” Meanwhile, cheap Chinese exports have fueled U.S. prosperity — and, until recently, with low inflation.
Trying to decouple the U.S. and Chinese economies, as the committee advocates, is undoubtedly necessary for some strategically important commodities, but it will come at a considerable cost. The Tax Foundation estimates that President Donald Trump’s tariffs on China will reduce U.S. gross domestic product by $55.7 billion and cost 173,000 full-time jobs. But anyone who watched the committee hearing would not have heard a peep about such sobering statistics.
Even when it came to China’s military buildup and its increasingly assertive foreign policy — where the threat to U.S. interests is clearer — the committee and its witnesses neglected to mention some important facts. There was much discussion, and appropriately so, of China’s attempts to take over the South China Sea and Taiwan. But no one pointed out that China has been much more cautious in the conduct of its foreign policy than Russia. While President Vladimir Putin has launched several wars since taking power in 2000, China hasn’t done so since its conflict with Vietnam in 1979.
And while it’s true that China is building up its military to enable an invasion of Taiwan, CIA Director William J. Burns cautions that no decision to attack has been made and that war is not “inevitable.” But that balanced assessment went unmentioned amid the committee’s relentless hyping of the Chinese threat.
What was the point of this hearing anyway? “Our goal is to communicate to our colleagues and the American people why the Chinese Communist Party is a threat,” Gallagher said. I think it’s safe to say that the American people have already received that message loud and clear. Americans’ views of China are at the lowest levels ever recorded. In 2022, 82 percent of respondents told the Pew Research Center that they have an unfavorable opinion of 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. Witness the unhinged reaction when a Chinese surveillance balloon drifted across the continental United States.
Many Americans acted as if Beijing were actually attacking us — rather than surveilling us, something that both the United States and China routinely do with their spy satellites. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) actually claimed that Beijing was trying to send a “message” that the “United States is a once-great superpower that’s … in decline.” In fact, there are indications that the balloon flew over the U.S. mainland only because strong winds blew it off course.
With U.S.-China tensions ratcheting up at a dangerous rate, the select committee could perform a real service by presenting a balanced and nuanced picture of how the United States should deal with China. But that’s not what it is doing. It is engaging in bipartisan alarmism. As one former National Security Council official told me: “This isn’t an evidence-driven exercise to identify America’s long-term interests and how China relates to them. It is a propaganda exercise that Beijing would find easily recognizable.”
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