“Deterring China,” the War Fanatic, and a Permanent War Economy
Mike Gallagher’s latest idea to “deter” China deters nothing, aims at containment, and builds a permanent war economy. Guess who benefits from that?
Former Congressman Mike Gallagher has cashed out. He made a troubling splash as the McCarthyist chair of the China Select Committee in the House of Representatives, declaring explicitly that its purpose—his purpose—was:
to win this new Cold War with Communist China. . . . China and Russia have been waging a Cold War against us for the better part of a decade.
It’s important to understand that for every well-meaning liberal who wants to say that the Cold War is a bad analogy for competition with China, there are ten policy entrepreneurs like Gallagher who explicitly insist that we are nevertheless in a Cold War with China and to the extent we are not, it’s because this time it’s worse.
Predictably enough, Gallagher has taken up office at Palantir, a Silicon Valley firm that has hired a shocking number of my former colleagues because its profitability depends entirely on contracts from the national security state. He occupies an executive position there not because he’s a computer scientist (he’s not) or because he’s an expert on advanced technology services (he’s not).
It’s because he has political connections and a China-vilifying imagination that justifies the Orwellian services that Palantir offers the Pentagon and the intelligence community. In a peaceful world, Palantir wouldn’t know what to do with itself. Its VC money would dry up. In a war-torn world of rival civilizational blocs, number go up, baaaby. Profit is and purpose.
His choices are inevitable. “Great-power competition” should be understood as an elite, reactionary project of the military-industrial-congressional complex. Everyone in this network makes a living off of amplifying Sino-US rivalry, and they naturally circulate from role to role. Gallagher is a symptom of a larger problem of corruption, militarism, and ethnonationalism in America that shapes—even predetermines—his career choices.
But I’m not writing this to drag Gallagher, fun as that might be. Rather, it’s to dissect and diagnose his latest misguided idea for “deterring” China.