During the Cold War against the Soviet Union, especially during its final two decades, many liberals became “useful idiots” who believed Soviet leaders had abandoned communism and the goal of global hegemony. These were not the “political pilgrims” (Paul Hollander’s phrase) who viewed communism as the bright wave of the future and urged the United States not to stand in the way of its global advance. Rather, these were “dupes” of the American left that TAS editor Paul Kengor wrote about who unwittingly aided our Soviet enemy. We are in a new Cold War with another communist great power and the “useful idiots” and “dupes” are back.
We need look no further than at the supposed “realists” at The National Interest, the vociferously anti-Trump Jacob Heilbrunn’s magazine. Currently featured there is a piece by Paul Heer of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that assures us that President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) do not seek to replace the United States as the leading world power, but instead only want a place at the table in the global order.
Titled “China Is Not Seeking to Remake World Order,” Heer’s essay plugs a new book by Brookings Institution scholar Melanie Sisson, The United States, China, and the Competition for Control. Sisson is a thoughtful and prolific observer of the global scene, and Heer is the author of an insightful book about George Kennan’s views on the Far East. But neither of them are experts on communism — and there is the rub. Geopolitical analysts who treat communist regimes just like any other autocratic regime have failed to learn the awful lessons of the 20th century.
The Soviet Union and Soviet leaders were shaped by both Russian history and communist ideology. Soviet leaders never renounced their ultimate goal of world revolution. Even Mikhail Gorbachev was a committed communist who nevertheless bowed to the realities of a weakened Soviet system under intense pressure from the Reagan administration in the late 1980s.
Xi Jinping has been shaped by Chinese history and communist ideology. Both Sisson and Heer acknowledge that there is significant literature that supports the contention that the CCP’s goal is to replace the U.S.-led world order with one led by Beijing.
Sisson and Heer mention Elbridge Colby’s The Strategy of Denial, Elizabeth Economy’s The World According to China, and Rush Doshi’s The Long Game. To those, could be added Steven Mosher’s The Bully of Asia, Stein Ringen’s The Perfect Dictatorship, Graham Allison’s Destined for War, Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes, Red Star Over the Pacific, and Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon. Sisson and Heer write these off as “selective and debatable interpretations of Chinese policy statements and documents.”
And Heer places considerable stock in a statement China’s Foreign Minister made to Secretary of State Rubio in their recent phone conversation that China has “no intention of overtaking or replacing anyone.”
Believing the Communists
How comforting it must be to believe that Chinese leaders and ideologists don’t really believe in what they have repeatedly said since taking power in 1949. The useful idiots and dupes of the first Cold War kept telling us in the 1970s and 1980s that Soviet leaders no longer pursued Lenin’s dream of a world communist revolution. They took Soviet leaders at their word when those leaders talked about “peaceful coexistence,” and recommended that the U.S. pursue “constructive engagement” with the Soviet regime.
China, Sisson and Heer tell us, has an “attachment to the current order,” which means that the U.S. “should be pragmatically engaging China within the institutional structures of the postwar order in an effort to maximize the extent to which that order serves or at least is conducive to U.S. interests and values.” Washington’s policy approach, they argue, should emphasize “mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence.” And Heer concludes by quoting Chinese “scholar” (read propagandist) Wang Jisi on the need for both sides to reach “strategic consensus” on global and bilateral issues.
China’s president Xi has stated that China’s “future destiny” is guided by Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong’s thought, which has led the “Chinese people out of the darkness of that long night” (when China was weak and poor and suffered under Western dominance). Michael Pillsbury calls China’s plan to replace the U.S. as the leader of the world order the “hundred-year marathon” to overcome China’s century of humiliation at the hands of Western powers. That’s the history part. The ideological part is the victory of communism (socialism) over capitalism. And the consequences of that outcome to the new Cold War can be gleaned on every page of The Black Book of Communism.
Rejecting Sisson’s and Heer’s counsel does not necessarily mean war, but it does mean that we are once again locked in a “long twilight struggle” with a communist great power whose end will only come when one or the other system changes. Constructive engagement did not help us win Cold War I, and it will not help us win Cold War II.
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