- FOUNDATION FOR DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES - Clifford D. May Founder & President - The Washington Times - MAY 3, 2023 -
On Christmas Day, 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and the Cold War ended. Or did it? The answer depends on whether the Cold War was a conflict between two powerful nation-states or a struggle between two opposing ideologies.
If it was the latter, the Cold War didn’t end with the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Rather, following a hiatus, Communist cold warriors in Moscow were superseded by Communist cold warriors in Beijing. And leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) take Marxism/Leninism at least as seriously as did the last Soviet rulers.
Adquira o livro de Heitor De Paola:
"O EIXO DO MAL LATINO AMERICANO E A NOVA ORDEM MUNDIAL"
Why did we not see this transition? Largely because the conventional – and bipartisan – wisdom held that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was slip-sliding away from communism, embracing freer markets and freer trade in pursuit of prosperity. Other freedoms would surely follow. We Americans could facilitate these historical changes.
Notably, in 2001, President Clinton successfully pushed to give the PRC permanent normal trade relations with the U.S and membership in the World Trade Organization, a foundational institution in the rules-based international order established by Americans following World War II.
“Everything I have learned about China as president and before and everything I have learned about human nature in over a half-century of living now,” Mr. Clinton said at the time, “convinces me that we have a far greater chance of having a positive influence on China’s actions if we welcome China into the world community instead of shutting it out.” Few Republicans disagreed.
Joe Biden, as a senator and vice president, was a strong advocate of closer relations with the PRC. “As a young member of a Foreign Relations Committee, I wrote and I said and I believed then what I believe now,” he told Chinese visitors in 2011, “that a rising China is a positive, positive development, not only for China but for America and the world writ large.”
Running for president almost a decade later, he told voters that China’s rulers are “not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.”
His National Security Strategy, published last October, asserts that the Cold War is over and “We do not seek conflict or a new Cold War.”
However, the NSS does allow that “a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next. … Democracies and autocracies are engaged in a contest to show which system of governance can best deliver for their people and the world.”
A competition, a contest – and may the best system of governance win! Sounds like we’re discussing an Olympic sport rather than determining whether the future belongs to free nations or totalitarian dictatorships.
“It does us little good to repeat again and again that we aren’t seeking a new Cold War when the CCP has been stealthily waging one against us for years,” Matt Pottinger told the House select committee on the CCP a couple of months ago. A Mandarin-speaking former White House deputy national security advisor, Mr. Pottinger now serves as chairman of FDD’s China program.
Recognizing that a Cold War is underway is more than a semantic matter. It provides a framework for formulating policies based on lessons learned.
During a cold war, the U.S. should have two primary objectives. The first was articulated most succinctly by Ronald Reagan four years before he became president: “We win and they lose.”
That doesn’t necessarily imply the termination of CCP rule in China. It doesn’t even mean “containment” – the core of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union.
It does suggest, as Mr. Pottinger has proposed, “a close cousin. Call it ‘constrainment’” – preventing the PRC from becoming the global hegemon, enforcing its rules internationally while the U.S. resigns itself to becoming a has-been power in a world where liberty dies.
If you think I exaggerate you’re not listening to Chinese President Xi Jinping who has declared that it is his “historical mission” to utilize “the tools of dictatorship” to realize a future in which “capitalism will inevitably perish and socialism will inevitably triumph.”