For geopolitical experts Jim Fanell and Bradley Thayer, President Joe Biden’s April 2 call with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping underscores a recurring error by the United States in the past several decades: the naive over-engagement with a peer competitor sworn to defeat it.
The line of thinking underlying this policy of engagement—that the CCP isn’t the threat it is, and that engagement works—was the very reason that the communist state became capable of standing eye-to-eye with the United States in a short period of 30 years, Mr. Thayer, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, told The Epoch Times in an interview on April 5.
“Year after year, we consistently underestimate the CCP’s threat, which has allowed the CCP to stay in power … and become the formidable threat that it is,” the expert said.
“When a state rises, other states balance against it—that’s the logic of power politics. But the PRC [People’s Republic of China] rose, and the United States didn’t do anything about it: that’s an anomaly in global politics,” he added.
So how did this happen?
How could the United States have lost its dominance after winning the Cold War and allowed the rapid rise of a peer enemy?
And what can the United States do now to change course?
The authors write that American elites were willfully blind to the threat of a hostile party-state, even aiding its growth, whereas the CCP had been biding its time until it had the power to confront the United States and change the international order.
But this blindness, the authors say, wasn’t coincidental.
Instead, it was largely orchestrated by then-CCP leader Deng Xiaoping via an ingenious plan for “threat deflation,” exploiting a fortuitous international landscape, the greed of U.S. elites, and the strategic naivety of the American leadership following the end of the Cold War, the authors argue in the book.
Power Politics and ‘Threat Deflation’
Much like a “root cause analysis,” commonly performed in the engineering industry after an equipment or process failure, Mr. Fanell and Mr. Thayer present in the first part of their book a set of root causes for the United States’s underestimation of the CCP’s threat, a mistake the authors say was unprecedented in U.S. history.First, the authors argue, the United States let its guard down after the Cold War: American military and civilian leadership adopted the “end of history” mindset, and the dominating narrative in the U.S. intelligence communities was that the West’s economic and political systems triumphed those of others. This narrative, when applied to the case of the CCP, convinced the elites that the CCP would eventually evolve into a superior market democracy system as Western capital flowed into China.
Second, Deng Xiaoping successfully executed a political warfare strategy of “hide one’s capabilities and bide one’s time” (韜光養晦) or what the authors call “threat deflation.” The CCP, following Deng’s strategy, maintained a low profile at a time when it was weak and, at the same time, attracted Western capital to China; behind the scenes, the CCP used cheap labor to attract Western investment, which brought profit to Western elites, who, in turn, would influence U.S. domestic policy to become more favorable toward the CCP.
What the US Must Do Now
In the book’s second part, the authors advance a set of solutions that the United States should adopt immediately to defend its way of life, values, and culture in the great-power competition with the communist state.They argue that strong presidential leadership is needed to shift the paradigm in the U.S. national security community to one that more closely adheres to the principles of power politics, a framework for analyzing the changes in the relative distribution of global power and the correlation of forces among great powers.
In addition, the authors provide a list of actions the United States can begin to carry out, such as creating a “Team B” dynamic involving industry, scientists, and government service to create “quick fixes” to some of the immediate threats the CCP poses; supporting nuclear proliferation in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to complicate the CCP’s strategic calculus; taking bold action against the CCP in the South China Sea, including evicting the Chinese regime from facilities it illegally occupied; and informing global audiences with the message that the CCP is an illegitimate entity.
One aspect of “Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Mistake” that distinguishes it from its contemporaries is its analysis of the CCP’s rise through the lens of power politics. By referencing their analysis of this framework, the authors thoughtfully convey the following: first, what the United States should have adopted as a strategic framework following the Cold War—but didn’t, thus causing it to underestimate the CCP; second, why the United States should adopt this framework starting from today.
Overall, the book provides a focused analysis of arguably the most consequential great power competition in the modern age. It flows from persuasive details about how and why the United States underestimated its chief threat to various principles of strategy, giving readers a clear understanding of the root cause of the problem and how to fix it.
“Our warning is clear: engagement [with the CCP] is a failed ideology. If we continue down that path, it’s only going to result in harm for not just the United States but for the rest of the world that enjoys freedom,” Mr. Fannell told The Epoch Times in an interview on April 2.
