President Xi Jinping and the CCP leadership act aggressively at home toward the Chinese people. China’s foreign policy also is more aggressive abroad. In response, the West finds itself playing “whack-a-mole” in an attempt to contain the communist giant, although few leaders publicly will employ the word “contain.” Is it solely about competition in trade or does the reality of a rising Chinese state expose far more nefarious underpinnings? Does it bely an evil end game being played out inside the current rules-based international order? Is China already conducting global war by other means? These are only a few of the questions leaders from around East Asia grappled with this week virtually at the East Asian Summit 2020 Senior Officials Meeting.
There are no outward signs that China’s offensive geostrategic strategy is receding in amplitude or breadth, according to US officials. David Stillwell, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs, reassured meeting participants that Washington stands resolutely with its friends in South East Asia, including to uphold rule of law and oppose China’s unlawful effort to bully and steal the offshore resources of its neighbors. What that resistance means in realist politique terms remains vague.
Seventy-five years ago, Word War II ended with regime change and moves toward democratization in parts of Germany. That July leaders met at the Potsdam Conference and Churchill was defeated in his reelection bid. The Labor Party came to power in Great Britain. All were classic democratic moments. China’s opening to the west 40 years ago shows no such signs of an evolution in governance. Instead its leadership calls for global transformative change, not of its own repressive policies, but for an end to western-style democracy in every nation. Xi Jinping and the CCP leadership intend to dominate globally using a Chinese communist model to assure its own hegemonic rule. Last week China’s WTO Ambassador Zhang Xiangchen derisively called those in the US who denounce China’s end goal “headless chickens.”
American safetyism, a term first coined by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in “The Coddling of the American Mind,” describes a moral culture in which a people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. Rather than viewing safety as one concern among many, it becomes a sacred value. The United States and other free nations aided China’s rise to power while ignoring Beijing’s unwillingness to play by the norms established in the modern nation-state system. Failing to hold China and the CCP leadership accountable for its behavior over the last four decades, due in part to a fear of global conflagration, allowed China to accelerate its plans to dominate the world order. Today China is one of the five main challenges listed in the current US National Defense Strategy. Safetyism, and decades of a lack in political will power, has made the US and the West less secure. The world faces an uncertain future due to the intrinsic evil posed by China.
It no longer is possible to hide, ignore it, or wish it away. China effectively is at war with the West, incrementally dismembering parts of the international rules-based system. The authority to decide for war or peace is a sovereign right of governments, as is the decision on what is the appropriate type of war and how much to conduct. China made its decision. Now it is up to western world leaders to hold it accountable and determine the most effective means to fight China. Typical definitions of “just war” include the concepts that it must be for a just cause, have good intention behind it, and be in proportion to the end that the war seeks to achieve. It moves us beyond the realism of Thucydides. Have we arrived at a point of an economic jus ad bellum with China?
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The fallacy is that just war, and that is what China is conducting from its perspective, trumps unjust means. In the post-1990 period international organizations began codifying war as a duty when there is a responsibility to people in danger. All war is evil; some are necessary. The time has come for legitimate authorities in the West to consider seriously if China’s aggressive actions are “just” about commercial trade and if the free world is willing to accept becoming collateral damage in the communist giant’s ongoing reshaping of the global landscape.
DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government. Each Friday, she presents key updates on China.
Photo: Main battle tanks attached to a tank detachment with a brigade under the PLA 76th Group Army rumble through cobbled path during a long-distance maneuver to a designated field in plateau area on July 14, 2020. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Cao Xuguang)