Hell yes I’m behind the curve. That’s my wheelhouse!1 Anyway, Kevie D., whom I’ve often trashed, has to be on something to write shtick like “The Passive-Aggressive Superpower”, averring that “Unilateralist tough-guy talk will get us nowhere against China,” and overtly snickering at the puffed-chest prose of two of his fellow NR authors, Rich Lowry and Sen. Marco Rubio, as he does so.
Despite all the tough talk posturing that passes for China “policy” in the U.S., Kevin says, this is what we’re really doing:
[W]e bitch and moan and complain, we make toothless threats, and we sometimes dickey around with tariffs, as though that were going to bring Beijing to heel. That’s a joke: The Trump administration, whose trade warriors present themselves as the tough guys when it comes to China, got bought off, and cheap, with some easily broken promises about increasing U.S. exports to China in the future.
Yet, if we were serious, this is what we should be doing:
Getting real reform out of Beijing would take something else entirely. It would be nice to have, say, a leading voice in an Asia-Pacific economic bloc that includes every major economic power in the region except China, one that was designed specifically to counteract the outsized influence Beijing has in the area — which is exactly what the Trans-Pacific Partnership was supposed to be. That instrument was scuttled by so-called nationalists who couldn’t figure out which end of that shotgun to point at the target.
If we really want to see change in China — and don’t want to go to war in pursuit of “regime change” — then we have to be willing to use the tools that will actually get that job done, which isn’t a national sales tax on imported flip-flops. And it isn’t the United States threatening to leave the WTO: It is the United States, Canada, Mexico, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia threatening to expel China from the WTO and impose economic sanctions on the Beijing government, and doing so with a united diplomatic front. “Globalism” is precisely the instrument with which to bring Beijing to heel. Unilateralist tough-guy talk (and we’ve been hearing that since Bill Clinton in the 1990s — remember the “Butchers of Beijing”?) has got us nowhere and will get us nowhere.
Yep, you read that right: an author in the National Review endorsed the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a good idea, a very good idea! And that “globalism”—globalism!—is essential! And that both war and regime change are bad ideas! Granted, Kevin didn’t mention that the TPP was actually designed by the Obama administration, and also felt obliged to cover his ass just a little by taking a poke at Bill Clinton—the obligatory “Democrats are just as bad” gambit required of “conservatives” who criticize Herr Donald—but you can’t ask for everything. At least I don’t.
Afterwords
Kevie also throws in some etymology jive on “choate” and “epicenter” that go on just a bit, but are still entertaining. (To me at least. See footnote 1 below.) I will take slight issue with Kevie for talking about “bringing Beijing to heel”. That isn’t going to happen. We didn’t really bring the Soviet Union “to heel”. The USSR collapsed most of all for the monumental incompetence of communist “economics”, which put political control—obsessive political control—over any practical economic considerations. The result was a massively dysfunctional economy that simply fell apart under the burden of grossly swollen and useless military (sound familiar?) and an “empire” that cost the “mother country” hundreds of billions of rubles to subsidize every year.2 China’s economy today is far superior to that of the Soviets, has a moderate military, and no empire.
We should pursue an actively “globalist” policy to restrain the global effects of the authoritarian Chinese mindset. But we must also accept the fact that China’s economy is “likely”—how likely I don’t know—to grow until it is significantly larger than ours, and that ultimately we will be effectively scrambling for allies just to maintain ourselves, and not necessarily savory allies at that, like India and Russia. China’s “outsized influence”, as Mr. Wiliamson is wont to call it, is going to grow, not shrink, no matter what we do, and we must be prepared to respond to that intelligently. We should have the sense to scale back our military presence in Asia, rather than continuing to treat the Pacific Ocean as an American lake. And the very last thing we should do is pick a fight with both China and Russia at the same time, as our indefatigable American hawks insist on doing, as a way to foster their ever-expanding defense budgets.
1. “Funny” that this archaic expression—how many people have seen a wheelhouse?—seems to be au courant these days. It’s adapted from baseball slang, of course, but its current use strikes me as deliberately old-timey, rather like the whole notion that baseball is somehow hip. Yeah, I’m glad the Senators won the World Series, but can’t we grow up a little? Taking sports seriously is something I find quite affected. It’s a game, kids. (Still, I did like this intense “Baseball Bits” bit—almost 13 minutes long!—on Willie Mays’ famous catch of Vic Wertz’s long fly ball at the Polo Grounds in the first game of the 1954 World Series, which I remember.)
2. French economist François Crouset, in his book, A History of the European Economy 1000-2000, says that the Soviet empire operated in the reverse of the classical British model: the home country subsidized the “colonies” by selling them natural resources, principally gas and oil, at low prices while buying second-rate manufactured items at inflated ones.
