China-Hawk Ideology Has Feeble Foundations
A specific set of propositions power all the paranoid, threat-inflating arguments about China. They’re as unrealistic as they are unfalsifiable.
Last week I addressed a series of claims that China hawks—specifically Noah Smith—have been making:
“Diplomatic engagement is a threat.”
“MAGA is isolationist.”
“America must ‘balance’ Chinese power.”
“Cold War 2 is already happening and we must win it.”
“Trump was a China dove and Obama’s pivot to Asia was ‘largely rhetorical.’”
I debunked those claims, but I also promised to write a companion piece because those claims were themselves built on a series of connected meta-beliefs that are unjustified:
1) China seeks global (or regional) domination,
2) war over Taiwan is inevitable,
3) Chinese victory in Taiwan is a step on the path to domination,
4) China is already at war against us, and
5) getting “tough” on China is the only way to prevent disaster.
It’s logically impossible to assert all five of these statements at once. Specifically, if war is inevitable, getting “tough” would be accelerationism, not war prevention. Some hawks refuse to acknowledge this contradiction, while others have reconciled themselves to saying that war is not inevitable as long as America gets tough and optimizes for war now (as if it’s not already doing that).
At any rate, this collection of meta-arguments form a catechism—an unfalsifiable belief system—that naturally leads you to the more concrete assertions from the previous post (about Cold War 2 and diplomacy being a threat, etc.).
This entire constellation of beliefs is false.
So first, I’ll take each of these propositions and explain why they have no merit. Then I’ll briefly go back to a passage in Noah Smith’s original post and highlight where I think he (and most hawks) go wrong—it’s a worldview thing, and it leads their declarations of faith to assume the worst while conflating primacy and war preparation.