Why America has always needed an enemy, even as a young republic

It’s rare to find an opinion piece that embodies nearly all the false premises and presuppositions that underpin the American empire, now in undeniable retreat. But Rahm Emanuel, former White House chief of staff to Barack Obama, mayor of Chicago and until recently US ambassador to Japan, has managed to do just that.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal on August 31, Emanuel claims that the question today for Americans is: “Can China be the external threat that restores internal cohesion to our politics?”

He goes on, of course, to claim that “the China threat is both real and potent”. “Can Americans stop fighting each other long enough to appreciate the threat from China?” he asks.

China has never been the enemy

In posing these pseudo-questions, he has already inadvertently given the game away. Is China really the great threat the US has made it out to be? Or is it the convenient “enemy” of the moment? I have long argued that the China threat has been one of those threat inflations Washington politicians rely on to “scare the hell out of the American people”. Those were the immortal words of Senator Arthur Vandenberg to Harry Truman as he argued the need to paint a picture “clearer than the truth” about the emerging Soviet menace, and to bend the American public to their will.

Emanuel claims the last global financial crisis revealed the true face of China and its ill intentions towards the US. Luckily, those events are still very recent so most of us can remember what really happened. The truth is that China saved America and the advanced economies of the West by preventing the Great Recession becoming another Great Depression.

Still, Emanuel writes: “In the wake of 2008, Mr Xi [Jinping] made three determinations. First, that Beijing should view America less as a strategic competitor than a strategic adversary. Second, that the shine had come off the American system after the financial crisis. Third, that American society was too divided to act with common purposes in the face of a geopolitical challenge. Today Mr Xi understands that President [Donald] Trump’s division and chaos is working to China’s advantage.”

Rahm Emanuel called the China threat “both real and potent”. Photo: Kyodo News via AP

Sorry, but this isn’t how the Chinese – and in fact many mainstream Western, including American – economists see it. And it is most definitely not China’s fault that American voters chose Trump a second time. You can’t blame the other team for your own goal.

South China Morning Post