Foreign Affairs Article Provides Insight Into the Mind of the Enemy
The message here is that the United States no longer has the military supremacy to deter or deny China’s forcible reunification with Taiwan.
by FRANCIS P. SEMPA
November 23, 2023, 11:20 PM
Coffeemill/Shutterstock
The featured article on the Foreign Affairs website on Thanksgiving Day was by Wang Jisi, identified as “Founding President of the Institute of International Studies at Peking University.” The article is entitled “America and China Are Not Yet in a Cold War,” and Wang’s essay provides advice to America’s leaders and people on how to avoid a Cold War. Much of the article reads like many such essays in Foreign Affairs written by American and other Western writers, intellectuals, and policymakers: moderate in tone, seemingly fair-minded, thoughtful, prudent, and scholarly. Yet, tucked in the middle of Wang’s essay is a recommendation to U.S. and Taiwanese officials to encourage the “peaceful reunification” of Taiwan with China. Wang, you see, is also a member of the Foreign Policy Advisory Committee of China’s Foreign Ministry. He is, in other words, a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Wang decries the fact that the “two powers seem to be moving into an intensifying strategic competition that carries some features of the Cold War” but may even be more dangerous. China and the United States, he writes, both have their “hard-liners.” “Washington today sees its rival as an ideological foes,” Wang notes, and the “CCP holds high the banner of Marxism.” Wang acknowledges that the CCP “dominates China’s politics, economy, and society and does not allow any deviation that might challenge its authority.” And while Americans loathe communism, Chinese elites “view the United States as a sinister challenge to China’s internal political security and to the CCP’s authority.”
Wang writes that Beijing views itself as a “developing,” i.e., rising power, and views America as a declining power. And he points out that China “has achieved a rough military balance of power with Washington thanks to the growing Chinese nuclear arsenal.” The message here is that unlike in the 1950s and even as late as the 1990s, the United States no longer has the military supremacy, including nuclear supremacy, to deter or deny China’s forcible reunification with Taiwan. So, let China do peacefully what it otherwise will do militarily. Avoid both a Cold War and a hot war by abandoning Taiwan.
https://spectator.org/foreign-affairs-article-provides-insight-into-the-mind-of-the-enemy/
