by James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer
The question before the American voter now is whether they will endorse this return to Engagement as espoused by the Harris-Walz team or the defeat of the CCP that a Trump victory will make possible.
The idea of engagement with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to shape the behavior of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is an old belief system. In terms of national policy, it has failed whenever it has been tried. Surprisingly for many today, the Soviets were the first to try it. In February 1950, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and Chinese dictator Mao Zedong signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance. Stalin got what he wanted. In return for a $300 million loan and military aid and the return of the Chinese Eastern Railway, Port Arthur, and Dalian from Soviet to PRC control, he nudged Mao towards support of North Korean dictator Kim Il-Sung’s invasion of the South, which would occur on June 25, 1950.
The Soviets greatly aided the PRC’s development in every respect after Stalin’s death in 1953 because they believed that the PRC would be a valuable paladin against the U.S. and its allies. They sent over 10,000 economic and political advisers to the PRC to aid the collectivization of the PRC’s economy, the Soviet model of the planned economy based on heavy industry, scientific development, and the development of conventional weapons for the PRC’s army, navy, and air force. Moreover, they added the PRC’s fissile material production to the PRC’s nuclear program. Although the Soviets never gave the PRC the bomb as Mao wanted, they mightily aided the PRC’s conventional and nuclear material development, which would lead to the PRC’s eventual detonation of a nuclear device in 1964. By 1960, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev recognized that aiding the PRC was supreme folly and abruptly terminated Soviet support. He saw that making the PRC stronger meant making the Soviet Union weaker. Khrushchev rued the day the Soviet Union started to aid the PRC’s development.
About a generation later, the U.S. would pick up where the Soviets halted. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy toward the PRC has been dominated by the Engagement School. Its logic held that U.S. political and economic engagement with the CCP would encourage the PRC into becoming a “responsible stakeholder” in the Western economic system and, ideally from the Engagement School’s perspective, a democracy. Of course, none of that happened.
Instead, the Engagement School saved the CCP and ensured that its tyranny continued. The PRC became wealthier and more powerful year after year and used that power to remake the international order to suit the CCP’s interests and to threaten U.S. national security, allies, and partners. The transfer of U.S. manufacturing and investment fueled this growth and continues to weaken U.S. economic might and social stability. If it was not apparent before, the COVID-19 pandemic sharply demonstrated to Americans the painful costs of depending on the PRC for personal protective equipment, antibiotics, and pharmaceuticals.
In his policy toward the PRC, Khrushchev possessed a far better understanding of the CCP’s Olympian ambitions than did the U.S. national security community. It took him only a few years to come to this important realization. Unfortunately, it has taken the U.S. decades, and even then, the U.S., especially under the Biden-Harris administration, still has not broken from the folly of engagement. While strategic logic is clear: halt engagement to stop aiding the rise of the enemy of the U.S., the Biden-Harris administration has resumed a policy of neo-Engagement with the PRC. Over the past 18 months, the world has witnessed U.S. cabinet secretaries from State, Defense, Commerce and Treasury make their Engagement Pilgrimages to Beijing, culminating with the presidential summit in San Francisco, where many of the elite in the U.S. business community feted Communist dictator Xi Jinping.
The news of the selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz to be the vice presidential candidate for the Democratic Party is a triumph for neo-Engagement. While news of his association with the PRC is still unfolding, already we are learning of his purposeful anniversary on the 35th anniversary of the CCP’s brutal murder of its citizens on June 4, 1989, at Tiananmen Square, obscenely to have a reason to remember his wedding date. Worse still are these comments: “I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship” and “I think we need to stand firm on what they are doing in the South China Sea, but there [are] many areas of cooperation that we can work on.”
This determined commitment to Engagement is egregious to common sense and the interests of American national security. It remains a fundamental fact—unconstrained and unaccountable Engagement with the PRC is suicidal. This was understood by Khruschev, but more importantly, it was something well understood by the Trump administration. In an unprecedented break with decades of appeasement, it was the Trump administration that began the difficult task of ending the policy of Engagement.
Today, Americans are faced with a stark choice: choose to sustain the failed policy of Biden’s neo-Engagement with the CCP, which will lead to national surrender to Chinese Communism, or choose to defeat the CCP in order to sustain the independence, freedom and liberty that defined America and the hallmarks of American success.The question before the American voter now is whether they will endorse this return to Engagement as espoused by the Harris-Walz team or the defeat of the CCP that a Trump victory will make possible. Americans have little to learn from Khrushchev, but his wisdom in recognizing the folly of Engagement with the CCP due to its threat and then executing the next necessary step of terminating support for the CCP are strategic insights the U.S. must share and act upon.
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James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer are authors of Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure from which this article is drawn.
James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/11/u-s-or-soviet-engagement-only-benefits-the-prc/
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