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Inside Out | US exceptionalism thrives, but not all in Washington see US-China rivalry as a tussle between good and evil
- Blame US exceptionalism for the seemingly widespread view of some US experts and Trump advisers that China threatens American values and freedoms – a threat the US needs to eradicate for good. Such a ‘Washington consensus’ is far from the truth
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Watch the BBC’s documentary Rivals – an assessment of the state of relations between the United States and China – and the irresistible conclusion is that the US faces a unique, existential threat that requires urgent and decisive action, to curb China’s rising power and protect the US from its mendacious efforts to undermine the freedoms that the US stands for.
Expert after expert is interviewed to press the same conclusion. For example, General Robert Spalding, who was at the heart of drafting the US national security strategy and the author of Stealth War, How China Took Over while America’s Elite Slept, said: “This is the most consequential existential threat since the Nazi party in WWII.”
Weave in such expert views with those of the Hudson Institute’s Michael Pillsbury, Samuel Huntington in his 1996 book Clash of Civilisations, University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer in his interview with Peter Navarro on “strangling China and the inevitability of war”, and the works of Trump advisers such as Steve Bannon and Navarro in his books including The Coming China Wars, and it is easy to feel the force of a “Washington consensus” to put China in its place.
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The message is that the perceived China threat is not simply a product of a paranoid White House but deeply embedded across US society, and that views will not change whether Donald Trump wins the 2020 presidential election or whether Democrats or Republicans control Congress.
The message aims to justify not just a tariff war, but systematic efforts to hobble China and its uniquely threatening economic and political system, to block Chinese access to US technology, to block Chinese international investment, and to block their academics from working in US universities. This is a Manichaean battle between the forces of good and evil in which the US is called upon, as the “exceptional power”, to use all its moral and material means to contain China’s malevolent progress.
US exceptionalism is not a new idea, as Cato Institute’s John Glaser explores in a recent piece. For John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, it would be America’s responsibility as “a nation guided by God’s Providence” to act. For Ronald Reagan, it would be America’s responsibility as “the last best hope of man on earth, a haven of democracy and freedom in a world of tyranny”. If it were Madeline Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, she would excuse US exceptionalism just as eloquently: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation.”
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