The Dispatch
Share this post
The White House Is Trying to Have It Both Ways on China
thedispatch.com

The White House Is Trying to Have It Both Ways on China

Trump outwardly praises Xi Jinping, but he and many of his advisers relish having a new evil empire to galvanize support around.

Jonah Goldberg
May 6, 2020
29
34
Share this post
The White House Is Trying to Have It Both Ways on China
thedispatch.com

The future is particularly murky these days. It’s anybody’s guess how the pandemic, the presidential election, and the economy are going to play out. Just about the only thing that’s assured is that U.S. relations with China will never be the same.

Businesses are radically rethinking their supply chains, and whether you call the rest of us voters or consumers, attitudes toward China are souring. A Harris poll last month found that two-thirds of Democrats and 9 out of 10 Republicans hold China responsible for the spread of the coronavirus. Already, a slew of lawsuits have been leveled against the Chinese government. The West’s political orientation toward China is shifting too, as countries around the world increasingly point fingers at Beijing.

The issue isn’t whether a China-U.S. reckoning is coming, only whether we’re smart or dumb about it.

Early on, the knee-jerk response from Democrats, the World Health Organization, much of the media, and the Chinese government itself was to claim that any criticism of the Chinese government’s actions was bigoted or xenophobic.

On the merits, this is ridiculous. The Chinese government is a cruel, oppressive regime. Its refusal to be transparent and cooperative with the international community has been outrageous, and it’s not bigoted to say so. But the Communist Party of China is not “the Chinese” or even “China,” and blanket-blaming a whole nation and its people for a pandemic makes no sense. It’s as dumb as stipulating that any negative word about Beijing is xenophobic.

The current debate over the origins of SARS-CoV-2 is another excellent example of how dumb we can be about criticizing China. The claim that the virus originated in a Chinese lab is not synonymous with the deranged conspiracy theory that China created the virus and purposefully unleashed it.

There’s no evidence that the virus is manmade; scientists would be able to tell with genetic sequencing. Nor is it plausible that China’s interests would be served by the deliberate release on its own soil. A more credible (but unproven) theory is that the Chinese were studying the virus and it was accidentally released. Or it may have emerged “naturally,” as the Chinese government contends, from a Wuhan meat market.

As the question of where the virus came from has heated up, Republican China hawks, in and out of the Trump administration, rarely volunteer that they don’t mean “manmade” when they say “originated.” And much of the media coverage similarly ignores or downplays this distinction. Some pro-Trump media personalities seem eager to fuel anti-Chinese sentiments, while the anti-Trump crowd seems to prefer to see a more mockable conspiracy theory.

This mutually beneficial ambiguity gets a boost from the administration’s vacillation over how much blame it wants to assign to China and how it wants to direct it, all with an eye toward riling up Trump’s base and distracting from early missteps in combating the pandemic.

On one hand, President Trump values his personal relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping and covets a major trade deal with him. Trump is on the record praising Xi’s coronavirus leadership and remains reluctant to criticize Xi directly. On the other hand, Trump and many of his advisers and surrogates relish having a new evil empire to galvanize support around.

(The schizophrenic nature of all this is ironically analogous to conservative criticism of the Trump administration. A herd of pro-Trump politicians and media figures are sharply critical of the administration’s response to the pandemic while simultaneously refusing to criticize Trump. The result is heated talk of states needing to be “liberated” from governors following the president’s guidelines and presidential advisers being scapegoated for presidential decisions.)

The ambiguity about China’s misdeeds was on display during the Sunday talk shows.

When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told ABC’s Martha Raddatz that “China has a history of infecting the world,” Raddatz admirably asked, “Do you believe it was manmade or genetically modified?”

Pompeo replied, “Look, the best experts so far seem to think it was manmade. I have no reason to disbelieve that at this point.” After Raddatz pointed out that the exact opposite is the case—that experts, including the U.S. intelligence community, believe it is not manmade—Pompeo said, “That’s right, I agree with that.” Then he went on to make a defensible case against the Chinese government, never mentioning Xi by name.

It’s surely possible he merely misspoke. But his dancing back and forth between dumb and smart was at minimum symbolic of an administration that wants to have it both ways.

Anger at Xi’s government is warranted, as is a recalibration of our relationship with China in the long aftermath of the pandemic. But treating a nuclear and economic superpower as an existential enemy primarily to satisfy domestic political needs—during an economic and public health crisis—strikes me as the dumbest way to go.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

34
Share this post
The White House Is Trying to Have It Both Ways on China
thedispatch.com
34 Comments

Create your profile

0 subscriptions will be displayed on your profile (edit)

Skip for now

Only Dispatch Members only can comment on this post

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in

Check your email

For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.

Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in.

Leo Monterosso
May 6, 2020

The cognitive dissonance that must exist within Trump Administration officials is terrifying to consider. On one hand serving the nation on the other realizing that Trump is off his rocker, I'm amazed that there are not more stories Administration officials like SOS Pompeo making contradictory statements.

Expand full comment
ReplyCollapse
Kevin Johnson
May 6, 2020

All true and relevant criticism of Trump posited and accepted. As a retired diplomat, I would note that the old cliche “foolish consistency is the hob goblin of small minds” applies to foreign policy. Jonah combines twitter and media supporters of Trump with administration officials to describe a hot mess, throwing in ridiculous extreme opposition for balance. All good. On policy actions themselves though, the best approach is strategic “inconsistency”, or ambiguity, going forward. Not calling here for bowing to the strategic genius in chief, but for evaluating administration policy as follows: it is both true that it is right and necessary to make China (government) pay for its awful misdeeds on covid to deter more and worse in the future; AND to avoid a total rupture with Beijing. Stating this doesn’t make it easy, although we have a history of successfully trading with awful regimes while selectively condemning and even confronting them on specific issues. But one must accept this logic to avoid heated debate over choosing either business as usual with Beijing...or war. Accepting the blended alternative, as a smart guy like Sen. Cotton does, allows us to debate the specific content of such a policy (not saying Cotton gets it perfect) rather than slide into shouting “neocon war monger” and “chicom lover” at each other. I don’t think Trump understands this, but his interest in preserving China trade while shifting blame (justified on the merits and to deter worse, even if partly motivated by politics) is so far consistent with a mature policy. So...praising Xi while also criticizing Chinese and WHO actions, both in public, while trying to keep contacts and trade talks going in private, is a plausible approach. Pompeo must have mis-spoken on man-made issue. Bottom line: sending dual messages to China at this point is justified. So far,I don’t think USG, as opposed to twitter fever swamps, has gone overboard on this issue with China.

Expand full comment
ReplyCollapse
9 replies
32 more comments…
TopNewCommunity

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2022 The Dispatch
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Publish on Substack Get the app
Substack is the home for great writing