The master strategist who formulated America’s successful containment strategy against the Soviet Union was George Kennan. This is also the big message of his own book, On China.īy contrast, America thought hard and deep before it plunged into the Cold War against the Soviet Union. To be fair to him, he didn’t exactly say that America lacked a long-term strategy toward China, but that was the message he conveyed over lunch. We had a wonderful conversation over two hours. Despite the weather warning, he turned up. On the day of the lunch, I was afraid that it would be canceled as a snowstorm was predicted. I still remember vividly the one-on-one lunch I had with him in a private room in his club in midtown Manhattan in mid-March 2018. The man who alerted me to this was one of America’s greatest strategic thinkers, Dr. Yet, even though the American establishment has, by and large, enthusiastically supported Trump on China, it is curious that no one has pointed out that America is making a big strategic mistake by launching this contest with China without first developing a comprehensive and global strategy to deal with China. He has said: “The greatest-and perhaps only-foreign policy accomplishment of the Trump administration has been the development of a coherent and genuinely bipartisan policy toward Xi Jinping’s China.” * He also added that it was right for the Trump administration to declare China “a strategic rival.” General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that “China probably poses the greatest threat to our nation by about 2025.” * The summary of America’s 2018 National Defense Strategy claims that China and Russia are “revisionist powers” seeking to “shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model-gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions.” * Christopher Wray, the FBI director, has said, “One of the things we’re trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat… and I think it’s going to take a whole-of-society response by us.” * Even George Soros, who spent millions trying to prevent Trump from being elected, has praised Trump on China.
Indeed, he has received strong bipartisan support for it, and a strong consensus is developing in the American body politic that China represents a threat to America.
The president has divided America on all his policies, except one: his trade and technological war against China. Although President Donald Trump launched the first round in 2018, it will outlast his administration. The geopolitical contest that has broken out between America and China will continue for the next decade or two.
0 kommentar(er)
