There are three general categories of wrongheaded political arguments. Encountering the first category, the reader will think, “I understand why the writer believes this.” Encountering the second category, the reader will think, “I understand why the writer believes that there is an audience that will believe this.” Encountering the third category, the reader will recognize that nobody would believe this, which raises the question of what exactly the writer and the writer’s audience get out of the shared experience of the argument.

Peter Beinart, once a serious writer, has sadly fallen into the habit of writing things that can only fall into the third category. Today’s New York Times column by Beinart is a classic of the genre:

Republicans may disagree on the best way forward in Ukraine. But overwhelmingly, they agree that China is the ultimate danger. . . . There’s mounting evidence that prominent figures on the American right see that danger in racial terms. That’s the problem with Republicans’ return to Asia First. Many in the party don’t only see China’s rise as a threat to American power. They see it as a threat to white Christian power, too.

Concern about the threat of China is . . . racist? Christian? Is it really a specifically white Christian thing to be alarmed by a totalitarian government that puts non-white Muslim ethnic minorities into concentration camps?

Beinart starts off with a reasonable enough thesis: that Republicans are increasingly converging on an Asia First foreign policy that prioritizes the threat from China over European-based threats, including that of Russia. He draws some parallels to the past to argue that this is not new: Robert Taft and a faction of post-war conservatives wanted an Asia First strategy in the late 1940s and early 1950s (they lost that argument to Dwight Eisenhower for the next six decades), and the tendency can be traced back even to William McKinley’s presidency, during which the United States annexed Hawaii, expanded its possessions as far east as the Philippines, and sent troops to China during the Boxer Rebellion.

Indeed, I would argue that Beinart does not go back far enough. William Seward, the first Republican secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, was a prominent booster of a Pacific Rim–focused policy. He had been a vocal proponent of such a posture in the Senate in the 1850s. Even at the height of the Civil War, Seward focused intently on getting Russian and British cooperation for the laying of the Collins Overland Line, a proposed trans-Pacific telegraph wire that would cut through British Columbia and Russian Alaska, cross the Bering Strait, and from there build a telegraph network into China, Russia, and Japan. The project (promoted during a time when no telegraph wire connected the U.S. to Europe) never panned out, but the negotiations ultimately led to Seward’s purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, extending American territory far into the northern Pacific.

Seward was against entanglements on the European continent — a mainstay of American policy of all parties from George Washington until 1917 — and saw a de facto alliance with Czarist Russia as a useful deterrent to European threats to the United States, giving us a freer hand to look westward across the Pacific after the 1848 acquisition of California. In his 1861 instructions to the new U.S. ambassador to St. Petersburg, Cassius Clay, Seward stressed that “Russia like the United States is an improving and expanding empire. Its track is eastward, while that of the United States is westward. The two nations, therefore, never come into rivalry or conflict. . . . Russia and the United States may remain good friends until, each having made a circuit of half the globe in opposite directions . . . shall meet and greet each other in the region where civilization first began.” In a December 1863 letter to Bayard Taylor, the chargé d’affaires under Clay in St. Petersburg, Seward was even more effusive: “In regard to Russia, the case is a plain one. She has our friendship, in every case, in preference to any other European power, simply because she always wishes us well, and leaves us to conduct our affairs as we think best.” It was also during Seward’s tenure that the Lincoln administration dispatched part of its Pacific fleet away from Civil War duty to conduct a joint Western punitive expedition against Japan and began an armed expedition to Korea that led to U.S. troops landing there in 1871 during the Grant administration.

Unlike McKinley or some of the Asia Firsters of Robert Taft’s era, Seward had no particular interest in Christianizing the Far East. Therein lies the beginning of the problem with Beinart’s entire theory. It is a good general rule not to go searching for baroque explanations of other people’s motives — especially those of your political opponents — when there are easy, obvious, and logical explanations already available that adequately explain their behavior. Beinart himself admits that “Americans don’t need religious reasons to put Asia first. It boasts much of the world’s economic, political and military power, which is why the Biden administration focuses on the region, too.”

Russia is indeed a serious problem, and a more immediately pressing one due to its ongoing invasion of its Ukrainian neighbor, but facts are facts. China is nominally the world’s most populous nation, and no lower than a close second on the list; it has ten times as many people as Russia and about nine times Russia’s GDP. It spends more than three times as much on national defense. It has the world’s largest army and the world’s largest navy. China, Russia, and Iran are allies, and there is no real question who is the senior partner in that alliance.

It is the Chinese market, not the Russian or the EU market, that brings American enterprises such as Apple, Hollywood, and the NBA to kowtow and bend their own statements and products to meet the approval of the ruling regime. It is Chinese technological imperialism that sends forth products such as TikTok to plant spyware on the smartphones of so many Americans. That’s even before we get into all the ways in which the Chinese regime is domestically oppressive, from its pervasive surveillance and censorship to its corruption of religious denominations to its combination of these things into the social-credit-score system of social control.

Oh, and there is also the fact that nearly 7 million people worldwide have died from an epidemic disease that almost certainly escaped from a poorly secured Chinese government laboratory, a pandemic whose spread was made worse by the lies and concealment of the Chinese government in its early stages. No single government in human history has caused death so widespread in such short order. Hardly a corner of the globe in 2020–22 was left untouched by the misconduct of the Chinese regime. Few are the towns and cities around the earth that hold no graves from a pandemic that escaped from Wuhan with inadequate warning to China’s global neighbors.

Beinart thinks Republicans are somehow the ones with a China problem:

In March, a Gallup poll found that while Democrats were 23 points more likely to consider Russia a greater enemy than China, Republicans were a whopping 64 points more likely to say the reverse. There is evidence that this discrepancy stems in part from the fact that while President Vladimir Putin of Russia casts himself as a defender of conservative Christian values, President Xi Jinping leads a nonwhite superpower whose regime has spurned the Christian destiny many Americans once envisioned for it.

Given the rational evidence that China is in fact the greater threat, perhaps this suggests that the Republican voter base and Republican politicians are, you know, right? Maybe the problem is that Putin’s anti-gay policies and the fact that he’s a white guy who styles himself like a Bond villain causes base Democratic voters to overstate his threat relative to Xi? Maybe the mindset of treating non-white peoples who were on the losing side of the nineteenth century as permanent moral creditors of the West has blinded the American Left to the Chinese threat, rather than distorting the perspective of the American Right? (As for the Right, Beinart cites as one of his chief examples Vivek Ramaswamy, who of course is neither white nor Christian. As for the current administration, he is altogether too incurious about its motives or its actual policies.)

It is striking that Beinart never bothers to argue that China is not actually, in reality, a lesser threat than Russia. If you have to attack the motives of people who have reached the correct conclusion, it may be time to reconsider your calling as a political commentator.