OPINION:
Happy New Year! However, 2023 is getting off to a bad start as it appears America is heading back to a foreign policy of unconstrained and unaccountable engagement with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Unconstrained engagement has enabled the PRC to rapidly expand its totalitarian model and ruthless repression globally, while building a military capable of defeating the United States in foreseeable combat operations in Asia.
A return to this failed, self-destructive policy of enabling the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) expansionism and genocide through “engagement” is the path to national suicide.
As the new Republican-led House of Representatives begins its term, its promised “China Commission” should take on as one of its core missions the evaluation of all American government engagement with the PRC over the past two decades. The House should demand accountability from the executive branch and apply empirical measures of effectiveness to judge whether a return to the policy of engagement should be continued and more importantly, funded by Congress.
In his now-famous speech on July 20, 2020 at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo firmly stated that we “must admit a hard truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come, that if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done. We must not continue it and we must not return to it.”
At the time Mr. Pompeo made this speech, it appeared America’s 50-year history of unconstrained, unaccountable and counterproductive engagement with the PRC had finally been broken.
And while there was a sense of relief and renewed hope among many that the United States could reverse this self-destructive policy and begin a new course to defend the nation against the malign intentions of the CCP, there were others who were horrified as to what proper defense of American interests meant for their profits and status. This faction included politicians, academics and government officials who viewed Mr. Pompeo’s proclamation as a declaration of war against an ideology — a religion, if you will — that proselytizes engagement with the CCP as the only path to regional peace and global stability.
Recent statements from several senior national security officials indicate the Biden administration is reversing the policies of the previous administration and resuming a policy of engagement with China.
For instance, on Nov. 30, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo stated that the “U.S. isn’t seeking to sever ties with China.” Of greater concern, on Dec. 15, U.S. Indo-Pacific Commander John Aquilino went on PBS stated that he had been working for a year and a half to get a call with his PLA counterpart. In other words, his PLA counterpart had intentionally ignored him for 18 months. Adm. Aquilino said he hoped to engage with his PRC counterpart so that he would be “able to talk and potentially de-escalate” anything from “turning into a real problem.” Clearly his PLA counterpart places no such priority on de-escalation and avoiding real problems.
Then on the last day of the year, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman tweeted: “the United States will continue to maintain open lines of communication with the PRC. In 2023, we will build on the productive discussion @POTUS and President Xi had in Bali. We must work together — for the good of people around the world.”
While there are numerous examples of where engagement with the PRC failed to result in positive outcomes, such as North Korea, the South China Sea, PLA terrorist intimidation of Taiwan, and economic warfare against countries like Australia calling for investigation into the origins of COVID-19, Ms. Sherman failed to provide one example of how U.S. engagement with the PRC is good for the U.S. or “people around the world.”
Perhaps by coincidence, on the same day, the PRC’s China Daily launched a propaganda campaign supported by American academics and pro-PRC engagement advocates such as Ken Lieberthal and Jan Berris. China Daily gleefully quoted these enablers, who made assertions such as “looking forward to regularized communications to prevent miscalculation that might lead to conflict” and “over the past five decades, we have built up … a deep web of people-to-people relationships,” which is why engagement must “get better” as the relationship worsens.
Such appeasement is expected in certain elements of the foreign policy community, but one expects sterner, more rational perspective from the defense community. Unfortunately, that is not the case. In key offices within the Department of Defense, there is an innate but data-bereft belief that military-to-military engagement with the PRC will preclude conflict from erupting from an unintended event between our two militaries above, on, and below the sea.
This blind faith ignores the fact that the PRC’s senior military leaders have repeatedly refused to pick up the phone when their American counterparts called during crises. It also ignores the fact that what the CCP plans to do to Taiwan, the Senkakus, the South China Sea and elsewhere is fully intentional: it will be well planned and based on a sophisticated, highly effective deception and political warfare campaign.
This naivete reflects a political ideology, one that has dominated U.S. foreign policy circles for 50 years. The evidence of this political ideology, as espoused by renowned so-called China Hands, was reflected in the July 3, 2019 letter to The Washington Post entitled “China is not an enemy.”
In that letter, leading proponents of the engagement school such as M. Taylor Fravel, J. Stapleton Roy, Michael D. Swaine, Susan A. Thornton and Ezra Vogel completely ignored the CCP’s plans for global hegemony, its genocide and brutal political repression, and its totalitarian “China Model” of governance. Instead, these enablers asserted that “the United States should encourage Chinese participation in new or modified global regimes in which rising powers have a greater voice.” Basically, they called for appeasing the CCP.
The ideology of the engagers rests upon a myth that the United States must have robust and continuous engagement with the PRC because otherwise, the world will be destined for war. This myth is based on several fallacies, to include questionable analysis in an overhyped book by Harvard’s Graham Allison called “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?”
It is fair to say that Mr. Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” has taken on the trappings of a holy doctrine in the religion of China’s engagers, and the catch-all rationale for the U.S. never responding the PRC acts of aggression for fear of offending Beijing and starting a war. Which explains why the current secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has made visiting the PRC his top priority for starting the new year, as well as utter fawning statements about his new counterpart in Beijing, the former PRC ambassador to the U.S., Qin Gang.
It is in this context, that Mr. Pompeo’s remarks in 2020 marked a pivot point for the fundamental reversal of America’s China policy, one that had dominated every administration from Presidents Richard Nixon through Barack Obama. The speech reflected the triumph of long-standing debate between those who argued that unconstrained and unaccountable engagement with the PRC had not, and will not, improve regional stability nor promote global peace and economic stability, against those of the entrenched pro-engagement community.
While no empirical studies have been undertaken by the U.S. government or any American university or think tank, one simply must look at the war in Ukraine, or the daily bomber and fighter flights and aircraft carriers circling Taiwan like carrion, or the global economic disaster unleashed by the PRC’s pandemic to understand that U.S.-China relations today, and the world in general, are worse off than they were before 1979.
It is in this context that the House of Representatives’ “China Commission” must undertake a program of researching and analyzing the past two decades of U.S. engagement with the PRC, across all departments, and then applying a rational set of measures of effectiveness for each area of national security, soft to hard levers of power.
So, I say again, Happy New Year — but be aware that the 50-year-old U.S. policy of unconstrained, unaccountable and highly destructive “engagement” with the PRC is back. The question is, will the new House of Representatives block this suicidal policy and hold these engagers — the CCP’s American enablers — to account, or will we endure the devastation of another era of unconstrained and unaccountable engagement?
• Jim Fanell is a retired Navy captain and former intelligence director for Navy’s Pacific Fleet.
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