The US Can’t Debate “Great-Power Competition” with China
David Brooks had a maddening column in the New York Times that was shared approvingly by many of my old/former friends who still make their living associated with the national security state.1
The piece attempts to rally America to what wonks see as the cause of our time. What is that, precisely? For them, it’s not the cause of economic democracy, opposition to oligarchy, poverty alleviation, abolishing secret police, the Movement for Black Lives, anti-fascism, the protection of trans kids, reducing carbon emissions, global peace, freedom of speech, or the end of genocide. No time for any of that stuff when you have a “great-power competitor” challenging your status as the world’s preeminent power.
First of all, this is pure silliness:
compare America’s behavior during Cold War I (against the Soviet Union) with America’s behavior during Cold War II (against China). I look at that difference and I see a stark contrast — between a nation back in the 1950s that possessed an assumed self-confidence versus a nation today that is even more powerful but has had its easy self-confidence stripped away.
So the difference between the Cold War and today’s Sino-US rivalry is…American self-confidence?
It’s amazing what you can get away with in the New York Times. Are we to ignore the dramatically different material position the US occupied in the 1950s compared to today? Are we to ignore that the Cold War actually involved a clash between capitalism and an alternative model of exploitation whereas today we face an inter-imperial rivalry within capitalism? Or that the Soviets actually had a global revolutionary project whereas China’s mostly trying to figure out how to cultivate sustainable export markets while avoiding war?
David Brooks would have us believe that none of that matters, it’s simply about vibes; a will to power. Insane.
But there’s a bigger issue here, specifically his argument that a new Cold War should be spurring upstream investments in national power:
China’s total research and development funding has grown 16-fold since 2000. Now China is surging ahead of the United States in a range of academic spheres…By the period between 2019 and 2023, the Chinese led among 57 of those 64 key technologies, while the United States led in only seven…how is America responding to the greatest challenge of Cold War II? With huge increases in research? By infusing money into schools and universities that train young minds and produce new ideas? We’re doing the exact opposite.
No doubt, the US should be investing in higher education and advanced research while making friends around the world. But the US refusal to make those common-sense choices is part of the same pathology that makes US elites (because normal people don’t give a shit) obsess about China. The China bogeyman is not the way to unlock democracy; it’s the justification for foreclosing on democracy.
Mike Brenes and I wrote a whole book about that, The Rivalry Peril (which you can pick up on Amazon right now for less than $10).
Washington is too compromised intellectually and morally to recognize that social democracy should be a prerequisite to competent (and ideally not competitive) geopolitics. America has been a functional oligarchy for a while. And the US security state is now rapidly expanding its tyrannical war of terror against Muslims to all manner of people—Mexicans, immigrants, foreign students, peace protestors, US citizens with f*cking tattoos, even military veterans. Under these conditions, why does anyone think a foreign rivalry will bolster democracy?
If you can’t invest in public education, healthcare, or social democracy for its own sake, you’re not going to be able to do it because another great power in the international system challenges where you fall on a list of countries ranked according to various economic indicators. That status chasing is what’s primarily at stake today in competition with China, little else. And that status-chasing was not what was driving US imperial competition in the early Cold War.
More importantly, scaring your way into a progressive revival will not work if the dominant party in a two-party system treats progressivism itself as some kind of existential threat. Rather than democratic renewal, what will happen instead is what’s happening now, which Mike and I warned about in The Rivalry Peril. Your political opponents will: out-hawk you on China; expand the imperial presidency; divert social spending into more military projects while austeritizing the American working class; deepen the reliance of the US economy on military Keynesianism; heighten US jingoism abroad; antagonize the enemy you claim to fear; and rob the world of any prospect for economic development, all while spiking anti-Asian racism in the US.
The well-meaning non-Republicans who dominate Washington will end up endorsing most things, if not everything, on this heinous list of nightmares because they tell themselves that progressive anti-China democracy is just around the corner. Lucy will definitely not pull the football away next time, Charlie Brown.
Meanwhile, China is doing its thing, investing in its future, and generating partial solutions to at least some of the problems facing the world (eg, surpluses of green tech and development finance). China has large domestic challenges of its own, but they’re unique only in their scale, not their character. And while I have no great love for the Chinese state, I also don’t stay awake at night worrying what China will do next; wish I could say the same about the US state.
Every word I’ve written here will be familiar if you’ve read The Rivalry Peril. But it all raises the question of why Washington believes any of this great-power competition stuff in light of common sense, the fact that it’s clearly not working out, and the prominence of our academically rigorous book-length arguments that basically predict what we’re experiencing now.
Why, instead of embracing sanity and working for peace and democracy, are the wonks venerating…David Brooks?! Why are they literally incapable of thinking outside the constraints of Cold War reasoning? And it’s been five months since The Rivalry Peril dropped—why has nobody in the national security bubble engaged with the arguments in our well-reviewed book despite it directly addressing everything that Washington believes in a policy argot that Washington speaks in? We even wrote shorter versions in the mags and journals they read, so what gives?
The answer is erasure. Policing out of existence ideas and voices you don’t agree with is an easy and in-built way to preserve a slaves-to-power groupthink bubble. David Brooks, then, is emblematic of a larger problem—a problem I was once complicit in. As I once did, he feigns ignorance about the existence of any argument other than the kind that recommends inflating the China threat and accumulating evermore power in the hands of the American state. Great-power competition is an elite consensus, antagonistic to the needs of actual human beings, preserved by willfully failing to engage evidence-based arguments about its many, many perils.
Projects of national power mean nothing in a context where power and wealth are comically unequally distributed and where exposure to violence from the state is concentrated primarily at the working majority whose lives are already precarious. Yet, anyone who gives voice to this truth gets uninvited to [insert platforms for elite voices].
Elites bemoan that Trump is destroying the sources of America’s material power. That much I can understand. But they do so failing to see that Trump is the vengeance of the working class, albeit in its most absurd, perverse, self-defeating form.
At this late hour—when the US security state is threatening imperial annexations, economically coercing the world, and deploying forces in American cities alongside secret police—Washington wonks are still singleminded on a great-power competition rather than any of our real problems, all of which are heightened by rivalrous geopolitics.
These guys are capable of co-opting arguments that challenge their hold on power by engaging with them—they did it with BLM and the climate justice movement. They know how to domesticate powerful critiques of the wealth-hoarding and militarist status quo they defend.
But they struggle to do so when it comes to great-power competition because if they did they would have to explicitly admit that vulgar indicators of American power are more important than Americans being buried in debt or unable to afford their rent. They would explicitly have to accept the myriad horrors that US policy during the Cold War visited on Americans and the world. They would have to acknowledge their role as class warriors fighting on the wrong side of the line.
Makes complete sense to me, Van. But people like me are not your audience. They're also not reading Gil Bailie's Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. Bailie uses ideas based on sociologist Rene Girard's work to emphasize every human culture's fixation on rivalry as the way to ease its inevitable internal tensions. It's an age-old dynamic, clearly revealed in the behavior of political powers in the Bible, yet ever new, ever current, and ever blind to its own history. Your argument would, I think, be made even more forcefully if it took Girard's ideas into account.