Ivan Eland
China has become the principal rival of the United States in the minds of the American foreign policy elite and the public. That assessment is fairly recent. From the American Revolution until the end of the 1800s, Britain was America’s perceived nemesis. Afterwards, Germany replaced Britain as a major European rival before and during the Twentieth Century’s two world wars, with Britain being a U.S. ally. During World War II, the communist Soviet Union joined Britain as a U.S. ally to combat Germany and its Axis partners, Italy and Japan. However, immediately after hostilities ended, the Allies’ three former foes joined the United States and Britain in countering the USSR during the more than four-decade-long Cold War.
In the late 1950s, the two communist powers—the Soviet Union and the more radical China—began feuding, and American President Richard Nixon took advantage of the turmoil in the early 1970s to make a major diplomatic overture to Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong. Mao died in 1976; China opened its economy to private and foreign businesses beginning in 1978, thereby becoming a less thoroughgoing communist country. Yet when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and it was clear that the Soviet enemy had been severely weakened, the United States began to look askance at even an economically reformed China. America’s suspicions were reinforced by the Chinese government’s armed suppression of a democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that same year.
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