Big Bad Putin? Covid Kingdom China Is the World’s Real Boogeyman
“China is going to eat our lunch?” Joe Biden asked dismissively on the campaign trail in 2019. “Come on, man…. They’re not competition for us.” The Trump administration has taken a very different posture. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has warned that Beijing is undertaking the “fastest, most rapid, most expansive peacetime military buildup in history” and called it “the single greatest challenge this nation has ever faced.” And, of course, President Trump has targeted China with tariffs that have become a bone of contention domestically.
Of course, some good, intelligent people, such as economist Thomas Sowell, consider the tariff strategy misguided. But wherever we stand and whatever the truth on that, a striking reality is inescapable.
China is not just our main geopolitical adversary; rather, it’s the most fearsome and foreign of foreign threats.
It is, in fact, from the Western perspective, the closest thing there is to an aggressive, planet-imperiling, alien civilization on Earth.
They Do Not Come in Peace
That Biden and many of his co-ideologists minimize the Chinese threat is replete with irony. (Though many of them do make money off Beijing.) Just consider, for instance, Barack Obama’s comment to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in a 2012 debate. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” he said. He was responding to Romney’s claim that Russia is our main geopolitical foe. Now, however, all Obama’s friends seem to love this ’80s foreign policy.
In reality, though, Russia’s economy is one-eighth the size of China’s. So with military power flowing from economic power, that Putin could somehow reconstitute the Soviet empire doesn’t seem very realistic. Moreover, Russia isn’t successfully censoring our movies and putting its propaganda in our schools. China is. (Really. Click here, here, and here.)
Then, the word “fascism” is bandied about much today; we hear that it’s a threat imperiling us. Children also learn that we fought WWII to keep the world safe from fascism. Yet what is the most powerful fascist country to ever exist?