The essay below is in a more polished, formal register than my normal writing. There are no expletives, for example. I wrote it for an external publication, but once it was drafted, I realized it didn’t really fit anywhere. Too long for an op-ed. It would work at Foreign Policy or Foreign Affairs, but I published at both places in the past two weeks; you can’t double tap them like that. And the tone doesn’t quite mesh with the lefty zines.
Anyway, the essay works through the politics of China policy at a moment of great flux. We find ourselves in a very screwed up situation where Trump and multinational capital interests are two of the biggest impediments to our World War III trajectory…and that does not imply they are forces for peace.
The world is more upside down right now than you might think. As a TV president said in a show I was watching last night, “The world is 19 times more f*cked than anybody can imagine.”
Team Biden might have left office believing that it kept America out of World War III, but it made so many decisions with a militarist bent that it’s far too early to declare even that much.
Zero-sum biases plague US foreign policy, especially toward China. And Trump has inherited a China-obsessed war machine that’s even more lethal than the one he presided over during his first term. So if the end of everything were to happen in the coming years, Biden’s choices to heighten rather than ameliorate rivalry with China—the world’s other greatest power—will almost certainly have been among its conditions of possibility.
For our planet to survive this era, the United States needs to adapt to China (and the world) in a more relational and less predatory way. But not only is that a tall order; the US national security state itself actively impedes it. A breakthrough toward a more just and stable world will require resorting to politics, not simply the bureaucratic production of policy. And while violence is intrinsic to how Trump operates, he is, ironically, making himself essential to keeping us out of World War III even as he makes it more likely over the long run.
The “Competition” Consensus
Substantial evidence now exists that, whatever disagreements about China may reside within the US foreign policy community, they are minor, tactical, relative to the larger shared consensus in favor of viewing China as a threat and a competitor that ought to be America’s foreign policy priority.