My Take | US envoy wants China to reach out as Capitol goes on war path
- Serious diplomacy is impossible when hyperventilating politicians in Washington claim to see Beijing bogeyman hiding behind every tree
I wonder who Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China, was addressing.
“We’ve never been shy of talking and we hope the Chinese will meet us halfway,” he said the other day. “We have never supported an icing of this relationship … We don’t want a conflict with China. We don’t want to return to a cold war with China. And we need greater stability in this relationship.”
Ostensibly he was talking about Beijing but he might as well be addressing his own country. If an intelligent extraterritorial alien landed in Washington these days, he/she/it would no doubt conclude American politicians really wanted “an icing of the relationship” and “a conflict with China”. What they don’t want is “greater stability”.
Numerous government departments, and not just the Pentagon, have cited the “China threat” to demand bigger budgets. The White House uses it at every turn to push for not only foreign but also domestic policy. Every man and his dog in America is now raising the spectre of China to demand satisfaction for his wish list.
In a typical argument, former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton wrote in The New York Times that the Republicans holding up the debt ceiling – the US government’s ability to borrow or issue sovereign debt – are “playing into the hands of [Vladimir] Putin and Xi [Jinping]”. Seriously? Hasn’t Janet Yellen been hinting to Beijing that it needs to buy more US debt and then maybe, just maybe, Washington might ease off some punishments?
But this Chinese obsession, which is sheer bipartisan certifiable insanity, is shown most of all by the US Congress. In just the first three months of its current 118th session, according to Responsible Statecraft, the web publication of the Quincy Institute, a liberal think tank, it has already introduced 273 bills or amendments that contain “China” as a key word; the number is higher if “CCP,” “PRC,” “Beijing,” or “Taiwan” are included. That’s more than the whole of most previous sessions.
One of the first things the newly sworn-in lawmakers did was to vote overwhelmingly to set up the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. Note the deliberately offensive title. It’s the CCP, not China, that is, a not-too-subtle dig at its supposed illegitimacy as representative of the Chinese people. The sheer pettiness of it!