Part III: F*ck Asia, Two Faces Toward China
Where Asia and China fit in a grand strategy of global white supremacy + oligarchy via empire
A follow-up analysis dissecting the just-released US National Security Strategy. Check out Part I here and Part II here. And while I’ve got you, if you appreciate this kind of work, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep it going.
The least interesting thing about the Trump administration’s new national security strategy (NSS) is that it totally erases Asia. Not to say that flattening a continent into nothing is inconsequential; only that it’s not a dramatic departure from either expectation or precedent.
The NSS imagines the world’s largest, most militarized, and most populous region as merely a site from which to extract critical minerals, a place where a collection of freeloaders owe the US tribute (Bannon famously said, “they’re not allies, they’re protectorates”), and a benchmark for measuring US military superiority. That sounds bad because, well, it is. But honestly, it’s not such a long distance from how previous presidencies saw Asia…which is why several China hawks I track are pleased with the NSS.
The low-key imperialists—who tend to be singleminded about China—are happy, for now. By contrast, the hawks who take seriously the “liberal” part of Cold War liberalism are aghast at this betrayal of a document.
For close to a decade now, US policymakers have thrown around “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” to describe Asia and what they seek for it. That phrase used to imply pious idealisms—free and open are right there in the slogan—even though nothing in US policy remotely resembled it. But now, the phrase has been explicitly translated in this new NSS to mean only:
preserving [U.S.] freedom of navigation in all crucial sea lanes, and maintaining secure and reliable supply chains and access to critical materials.
These tasks—control of sea lanes and secure access to natural resources, not the defense of allies—are the primary reasons to wield military force in the region, and, in turn, why the US must continue to arms-race China, just as it was doing under Biden.
But Asia isn’t presented as mattering beyond that. India, for example, does not even exist in this strategy except as a contributor to “the Quad,” a four-way meeting with Japan, the US, and Australia that Steve Bannon has long viewed as the greatest hope for containing China (Bannon is a poor geopolitician). Asia happens to be where military strategists have hallucinated the first- and second- “island chains”—invisible lines that do not exist in any meaningful way except that people involved in the war-prepper industry have decided that they are useful referents to justify military buildups.
The NSS also presents two faces toward China.
One face preserves the status quo on Taiwan, rejects Taiwanese independence, opposes any move to resolve borders by force, and downplays the significance of China and Russia as threats compared to the threats of immigrants, drug cartels, and non-white, non-Christian populations. It is this face that has traces of realism, leaving open the possibility of a sphere-of-influence arrangement with China that would correspond to the exclusionary sphere the NSS already granted itself in Latin America.
The other face, though, continues to present China as an “adversarial power.”
All the language about military primacy, defending sea lanes, and power projection across island-chains—it’s literally (and solely) about China. So while the tone of the NSS dilutes the relative emphasis on China by stressing many threats—most of which are not other nation-states—the imperative for arms-racing China is one of the organising features of this radical document.
And this is why certain China hawks have learned to stop worrying and love the white-supremacist NSS. It doesn’t deviate from the path of the great-power competition Bidenistas. DC’s lanyard class can keep doing it’s thing, preparing to lose a great-power war, even as other parts of the national security state might find new opportunity in Caribbean invasions or surveillance tech meant to deny peace activists their rights.
When it comes to China in particular, the most notable thing about this NSS is how it aims to accommodate the punishing realities of a war with China that have become too obvious to ignore:
The Trump administration is making a grand bet with this NSS. On the one hand, it’s still using China as the “pacing threat,” in so many words, to justify the world-historical grift that makes the war machine a trillion-dollar siphon on taxpayers. At the same time, it doesn’t want the smoke from an unwinnable war. The real wager, then, is that the US can arms-race without tipping into war by toning down the anti-China histrionics, decelerating decoupling, and perhaps even coming to a sphere-of-influence arrangement—a “G2.”
But even the most competent statesman would struggle to manage that contradiction.