The Stalin reference in the title has to do with the comparison of the world situation during the decade after the Second World War and today. Here he seems to be making a straight-up defense of Truman's Cold War policy based on the "secret policy paper known as NSC-68," although he calls the language in the now-(in)famous NSC-68 "sound eerily like" speeches on China by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien that McFaul is criticizing sharply.
McFaul does criticize other aspects of Cold War view taken by US administrations:
But the United States also at times overreacted and oversimplified, seeing every leftist and national liberation movement as an enemy to be defeated. That mindset contributed to some of the worst American excesses during the Cold War, including McCarthyism, the fictitious “missile gap,” the Vietnam War, and support for brutal right-wing dictatorships, including even apartheid in South Africa.He also notes in terms that cannot be said to be an unquestioning praise for US Cold War policies:
And the Cold War was not cold; the scholars David Holloway and Stephen Stedman estimate that 20 million people died between 1945 and 1989 in 130 wars, many of them fueled by superpower rivalry. Mistaking Xi for a new Stalin [or a NSC-68 perception of "Stalin"!] could lead the United States to repeat those mistakes.Interestingly enough, another Foreign Affairs piece, The Ideology Delusion: America’s Competition With China Is Not About Doctrine by Elbridge Colby and Robert Kaplan 09/04/2020, also cautions about using ideological rivalry as the organizing principle for US China policy.
The Cold War lasted 40 years. For most of that period, victory was uncertain. For Washington to be successful in what may be an even longer contest, it must diagnose the severity of the threat precisely and calibrate efforts to contain and deter Beijing accordingly. False analogies from the Cold War hurt both of these efforts. Washington shouldn’t spend trillions on nuclear arms, missiles, and space weapons. It shouldn’t fight proxy wars. And most important, it shouldn’t stumble into a direct confrontation with China. U.S. foreign-policy makers must resist the impulse to check every Chinese move around the world, like Truman believed he had to do with Stalin. This line of thinking compelled U.S. Cold War strategists to double and triple down on the tragic, unnecessary war in Vietnam. Today, Americans know that they did not need to contain communism in Vietnam to defeat the Soviets. (And by the way, Eastern Europeans—Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and many others—played the central role in defeating Soviet communism and ending the Cold War, not Americans.) Threat assessments, in other words, should never go unquestioned. Are freedom and democracy really under worldwide assault if Laos or Rwanda imports Chinese-made Internet equipment? Or if the Chinese develop Belt and Road Initiative projects in Ghana or Italy? Should every Chinese citizen in the United States be treated as a spy? By trying to contain the Chinese everywhere, Washington may undermine containment in areas where its vital national security interests are actually at stake. [my emphasis]
I've been not-a-fan of Robert Kaplan's for a while. See my posts: Over the cliff with the neocons one more time? 09/03/2007; Neocon bigwig Robert Kagan Kaplan on the virtues of war and chaos 01/03/2015; Robert Kaplan promotes war and the alleged virtues of imperialism 06/04/2015.
Elbridge Colby served as deputy assistant secretary of defense in 2017-18 during the Trump Administration. He is a principal at a shady group called the Marathon Institute, which Eli Clifton profiled in Pundits with undisclosed funding from arms manufacturers urge ‘stronger force posture’ to counter China Responsible Statecraft 05/14/2020. Clifton reports:
And from 2014 to 2017 and 2018 to 2019 Colby worked at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) which counts Northrop Grumman as one of its biggest donors (contributing more than $500,000 between October 1, 2018 to September 30, 2019) as well as contributions from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Bell Helicopter, BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Boeing and DynCorp.Kaplan is also associated with CNAS, whose own list of 2018-19 donors is available online.
Kaplan and Butcher's-Bill Kristol were the founders of the now-defunct Project for New American Century (PNAC). which was also focused on promoting China as a military threat to the US. But wrecked their brand name with their advocacy of the Iraq War which dramatized their catastrophically bad judgment in foreign affairs.
The Center for a New American Security, founded in 2007, features luminaries from the Obama Administration, providing a somewhat more bipartisan cast than we normally associate with the old PNAC. A couple of recent special reports from CNAS involved their preferred China policy, Rising to the China Challenge: Renewing American Competitiveness in the Indo-Pacific 01/28/2020 and Total Competition: China’s Challenge in the South China Sea 01/08/2020.
The Foreign Affairs article by Elbridge and Kaplan is fairly vague about their view of the threat they see China representing to the United States, such as:
China very likely seeks to form a regional trade area favorable to its economy—a modern-day analog to the tribute system that placed China at the heart of East Asia from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. In a world now defined by rising barriers to trade, China would gain enormous advantage in shaping a large market area that conforms to its standards and benefits its workers and companies. Its drive for hegemony also has a strategic purpose. China has long felt fenced in by U.S. allies and by other rivals. Now it intends to compel neighboring states to take their security cues from Beijing. And after a “century of humiliation,” China is eager to stand tall, asserting its power in Asia and beyond. [my emphasis]But they do argue against a focus on ideological differences between China and the US:
Even beyond Congress, though, there is wide agreement forming across the political spectrum about why China poses a threat to the United States. For many, it is above all because China is an oppressive one-party state, governed by a Marxist-Leninist cadre, whose leader, Xi Jinping, has amassed more personal power than anyone in Beijing since Mao Zedong. Both the Trump administration and Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden have lambasted China for its execrable human rights record, which includes, among other brutalities, putting a million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps. The leading Democratic Party-aligned foreign policy thinkers Kurt Campbell and Jake Sullivan wrote in these pages last year: “China may ultimately present a stronger ideological challenge than the Soviet Union did. . . . China’s rise to superpower status will exert a pull toward autocracy. China’s fusion of authoritarian capitalism and digital surveillance may prove more durable and attractive than Marxism.”That particular line of argument from China hawks is worth watching. I'm a bit suspicious of the Elbridge-Kaplan argument. The donors to organizations like CNAS (and probably the Marathon Institute) are probably willing to go with ideological or non-ideological arguments as long as the sell more weapons and military services.
The criticisms of China are true. The United States is indeed in an exceptionally serious competition with China that requires it to take a hard line on many fronts. And Washington should never shy away from its unabashed embrace of republican government and respect for human dignity. But ideology does not lie at the root of the matter between the United States and China—even if elements in China’s Marxist-Leninist elite think it does. The very scale of China’s economy, population, and landmass and its consequent power would cause profound concern for U.S. policymakers even if the country were a democracy. Seeing this competition as primarily ideological will misconstrue its nature—with potentially catastrophic results.
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