China rising

A New Red Scare

In a ballroom across from the Capitol building, an unlikely group of military hawks, populist crusaders, Chinese Muslim freedom fighters and followers of the Falun Gong has been meeting to warn anyone who will listen that China poses an existential threat to the United States that will not end until the Communist Party is overthrown.

If the warnings sound straight out of the Cold War, they are. 

The Committee on the Present Danger, a long-defunct group that campaigned against the dangers of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, has recently been revived with the help of Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, to warn against the dangers of China.

. . . .

Fear of China has spread across the government, from the White House to Congress to federal agencies, where Beijing’s rise is unquestioningly viewed as an economic and national security threat and the defining challenge of the 21st century.

“These are two systems that are incompatible,” Mr. Bannon said of the United States and China. 

“One side is going to win, and one side is going to lose.”

China is not an existential threat, though it most likely will eventually eclipse the US as an individual global power.

And it is not at all clear that a China no longer controlled by its egregiously non-communist Communist Party would be less challenging.

Bannon might be hoping that the fall of the Chinese Communists might precipitate a somewhat disabling partial breakup of China, as the fall of Soviet Communism led to the breakup of the Soviet Union.

He might be right.

But still.