The Real Origins of the U.S.-China Cold War
Foreign Policy,
by
Hal Brands
&
Charles Edel
Original Article
Posted By: humboldt,
5/10/2020 3:58:06 PM
How should Washington deal with an authoritarian regime that is expanding its influence abroad and repressing its citizens at home? That is the question the United States faces today in dealing with Xi Jinping’s China. But it is not a new challenge. After World War II, the United States faced another authoritarian state intent on expanding its borders, intimidating its neighbors, undermining democratic institutions, exporting its authoritarian model, and stealing U.S. technology and know-how. The result, after a period of initial debate and uncertainty in U.S. policy, was the Cold War: a 40-year competition over power, influence, and the contours of global order.
Reply 1 - Posted by:
panther361 5/10/2020 4:10:48 PM (No. 407311)
Never under estimate and never ever forget this is a deeply communist country.
Democracy and communism same same matter and antimatter.
4 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
stablemoney 5/10/2020 4:18:33 PM (No. 407316)
I hope the first thing we will do is change our behavior. We have been foolish. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has encouraged and financed it. It doesn't require condemning anyone else to admit we have been fools, and change our behaviour.
12 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
bamboozle 5/10/2020 4:22:37 PM (No. 407319)
China is a nation whose ancestors were wearing silk when our ancestors were running around the forests of Northern Europe wearing bearskins. They invented gunpowder and lots of other things. To the Chinese mind they are the center of the world and of civilization. Their drive to become what they see as being their rightful as numero uno is driven both by this xenophobic cultural history as well as the madness of Communism. This is a dangerous mix.
14 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
seamusm 5/10/2020 4:23:23 PM (No. 407320)
I, for one, will avoid buying anything made in China. I will not undermine American workers just to buy a cheaper item. I will not pretend that Chinese citizens work in the US as anything but pawns and spies of the Chinese Communists seeking to steal our intellectual property.
14 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
davew 5/10/2020 5:19:17 PM (No. 407349)
We need to understand China in terms of a very complex game of Go that has evolved in its sophistication since the end of WWII and the Taiwanese independence. The Korean War, Vietnam War, the Cultural Revolution, and the Trade War are all points on the same Chinese continuum that is founded on the ideology of Mao and Xi. The Wuhan virus was a sneak attack like Pearl Harbor or 911 as President Trump has stated. Our own military has established that having the COVID-19 virus permanently disqualifies recruits from serving in our armed forces, further limiting our power.
Joe Biden is Xi's puppet as demonstrated by his decision to turn the high level CCP defector, Wang Lijun, who had escaped to our consulate in China and asked for asylum, over to the Chinese secret police in 2012. He is currently rotting in a Chinese prison where God knows what they are doing to him. As Trump said, if Biden wins China will own this country.
10 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
GO3 5/10/2020 5:27:55 PM (No. 407352)
I agree that we need to change our behavior towards China including not financing its military and economic power with our dollars. I do have a problem though with some of these foreign policy egghead articles which ignore ground truth as to who is at fault for these confrontations. First, at the end of WWII the Red Army deliberately violated the demarcation line outside of Prague (a city Patton's Third Army liberated) and were advancing on our positions. We opened fire and rightly so. Only then did they scurry back behind the line. Second, we have fought the Chinese before - in Korea. Was MacArthur foolish advancing to the Yalu? A couple of schools of thought on that one, but still a ruthless, surprise attack which returned the favor by advancing south of the 38th parallel followed by two and a half years of bitter see-saw fighting. Admittedly, its personal for me because the Chinese almost sent my Dad home in a box. I have never, and will never wish them well or view them as mere competitors.
7 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
chance_232 5/10/2020 5:30:18 PM (No. 407353)
How many Chinese soldiers crossed the border into North Korea to push the US out? How many tens of thousands of Americans were slaughtered in the Chinese surprise attack?
China has a China first policy. China will always do what's best for China and at no point will it ever be apologetic for it. Communist Chinese are not the same thing as white American squishy leftards.
9 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
davew 5/10/2020 6:12:28 PM (No. 407362)
The next war will not be fought on the ground but in space. China is actively building sophisticated ASAT capabilities that can take out all our low and middle orbit intelligence, communication, and GPS satellites. They have their own GPS capabilities that don't rely on our technology. They would never overtly attack our systems but have plans to monitor the sun for coronal flares (no pun intended) that naturally produce outages of soft electronic systems used by our older satellites. Using the flares as a mask they would then destroy our satellites using lasers, space debris, or even mechanical grippers to destroy their solar panels. Our military would blame the flare and not detect their ASAT attack until it was too late to do anything. This would allow China to, for example, invade Taiwan without our Pacific forces even knowing it was happening.
This is why Trump formed the Space Command in 2019 to try to catch up before its too late.
6 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
TCloud 5/10/2020 6:49:19 PM (No. 407394)
Capitalism vs Socialism. They have played Capitalism like an old fiddle and have been able to enrich themselves while remaining a thorn in the side of Capitalism. Militarily, I see them as *duck soup* for the might of US firepower!
2 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
GO3 5/10/2020 7:31:23 PM (No. 407425)
#s 7 and 9. What's interesting is that no matter how much the initial Chinese attack set us back, the price for them was astronomical. As related in the book, "Triumph on Hill 1240," a Chinese general was riding in a captured jeep going south to visit his front line units. As he moved from north to south, small humps in the snow grew in number until they looked like a garden of tens of thousands of small snow covered trees at the furthest southern point of their advance. His driver told him it was the bodies of Chinese soldiers who had been killed, frozen and then covered with snow. The general thought to himself, "This is a successful attack???"
2 people like this.
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Comments:
While not addressing China's behavior in the COVID-19 crisis, the article makes clear the origins of its hostile behavior along with the need to seriously confront China's global ambitions.