newyorker | Members of the Trump Administration have taken direct aim at China’s
ambitions. Last fall, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that America
and its allies must insure that “China retains only its proper place in
the world.” During a visit to Europe, he said, “China wants to be the
dominant economic and military power of the world, spreading its
authoritarian vision for society and its corrupt practices worldwide.”
The Administration’s argument, in its bluntest form, frames China as a
hardened foe, too distant from American values to be susceptible to
diplomacy. In April, Kiron Skinner, Pompeo’s director of policy
planning, said in a public talk, “This is a fight with a really
different civilization.” She added that China represented “the first
time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.”
(The comments caused an uproar. In August, Skinner left the State
Department.) Behind closed doors, Trump aides dismiss Skinner’s
invocation of race. But they also liken China to such sworn enemies of
America as Iran and the Soviet Union, and argue that only hard-line
pressure can “crush” its expansion.
Half a
century after Henry Kissinger led the secret negotiations that brought
Nixon to China, he still meets with leaders in Beijing and Washington.
At the age of ninety-six, he has come to believe that the two sides are
falling into a spiral of hostile perceptions. “I’m very concerned,” he
told me, his baritone now almost a growl. “The way the relationship has
deteriorated in recent months will feed, on both sides, the image that
the other one is a permanent adversary.” By the end of 2019, the
Washington establishment had all but abandoned engagement with China.
But there was not yet a strategy to replace it.
In
the void, there was a clamor to set rules for dealing with China in
business, geopolitics, and culture, all surrounding a central question:
Is the contest a new cold war?
