Chinese military preeminence in East Asia would be a geopolitical shock, with dire effects on America’s alliance systems.
U.S. President Joe Biden, right, stands with Chinese President Xi Jinping before a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit meeting, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022, in Bali, Indonesia.On Thursday, President Joe Biden gave a speech linking the Israel-Hamas conflict and the Russian invasion of Ukraine and framing U.S. involvement as part of a grand strategy to contain our enemies and rivals.
These absences are not particularly surprising. It’s normal for American presidents to say chest-pounding things such as “There is nothing, nothing beyond our capacity” rather than to talk about possible limits on our strength. And because we don’t actually want to be at war with China, it makes a certain sense to avoid lumping Beijing in with Moscow and Tehran.
Moreover, China offers a somewhat coherent ideological alternative to the liberal-democratic order. The Putin regime is a parody of Western democracy, and Iran’s mixture of theocracy and pseudodemocracy holds little broad appeal. But China’s one-party meritocracy can advertise itself — maybe less effectively since Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power but still with some degree of plausibility — as aThese general strategic realities obviously aren’t as threatening as actual aggression.
Whatever anxieties you have about our current political divisions, whether you fear left-wing disillusionment with America or right-wing disillusionment with democracy or both, such a defeat seems more likely than anything to accelerate us toward a real internal crisis. Which is why, even with other foreign crises burning hot, a debacle in East Asia remains the scenario that the United States should be working most intensely to avert.
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