China Hawks’ “Yale Consensus” Wish-Casting
On building a strawman out of myopia, military solutionism, and American exceptionalism.
A guy I once worked with in the Pentagon ended up serving in the National Security Council during Trump 1.0. He’s a proud China hawk, with an audience of fellow China hawks who lap up his Cold War liberalism. He regularly rallies them to confrontation with his writing, making them feel better about their commitment to combating what they see as a great evil (the CCP). Guys like him hate me, which is a good thing in the “judge me by my enemies” sense.
Occasionally, people will forward me something from his hawk-blog along the lines of, “Can you believe this?” I was forwarded one of these missives just today. In it, the guy was dismissing an op-ed in Bloomberg for making the argument that cutting off Chinese firms from the US was harming the US and inadvertently strengthening Chinese firms.1