My Take | The question of our time: what exactly are America and China fighting about?
- Having helped provide the ladder on which China has climbed to the commanding heights it has reached today, it’s too late for the US to take it away, but try it will
Frequently, the most basic question about a heated topic is also the most intellectually disarming. Thomas Friedman of The New York Times asked just such a question the other day: “What exactly are America and China fighting about?”
The famous columnist and author has been travelling in China and the island of Taiwan asking important people the question. “A lot of people hesitated when I asked,” he wrote. “Indeed, many would answer with some version of ‘I’m not sure, I just know that it’s THEIR fault’.”
I can understand their reaction. I suffered a brain freeze for several hours. How should one answer it or even begin to do so?
The NSS seems as good a place as any to start looking for an answer. Even though it was released almost exactly one year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, there was no sense of tragedy or sadness, but rather enthusiasm, even exhilaration and self-aggrandisement at the supposed historic opportunity presented to the United States to reshape the world in its own image as the world’s sole superpower. And that opportunity was presented by 9/11.
As a mission statement, the NSS feels so obsolete, like reading something from another era, as indeed, it was. Practically all the assumptions and beliefs that were set out to be the basis of Bush’s foreign policy have been reversed, superseded, or proven false by subsequent events. But, as they say, you need the past to understand the present.