Empire needs an enemy. To redirect its citizens’ attention from domestic problems, it points over there to some foreign entity that must be dealt with. Often described in existential terms, these conflicts keep the global power structure with one supreme entity on top with its vassal states giving it an air of legitimacy, while any nations that stand in opposition are faced with the threat of subjugation.
The United States has capitalized on its win of the geographic lottery by commanding the direction of international governance since the beginning of the 20th century. With a victory in World War I, the Allies could present their vision of a post-war future, notably in the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. Germany could be punished for its actions (though they mirrored those of other colonizing powers like the United Kingdom and France), the League could maintain global stability (though the U.S. never joined), and the specter of another world war could be avoided (though another one obviously still occurred).
The Russian Revolution threw a wrench in those plans. After Russia pulled out of World War I as Vladimir Lenin came to power in 1917, communism entered general American public consciousness for the first time. The American government, faced with an ideological movement that viewed the foundations of American power as exploitative and immoral, cracked down. With the Second Red Scare during and after World War II, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director J. Edgar Hoover led the anti-communist crusade, principally targeting federal employees.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War, the prospect of global communism no longer presented a threat to the American empire. The U.S. could go after its geopolitical enemies as it pleased, conducting its regime-change operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
Now, though, one of the last remaining countries governed by a communist party has become a global power: the People’s Republic of China. China’s rise has been the target of endless attacks by American politicians regardless of party affiliation. It is easier to attack a nominally communist nation than address pressing domestic issues like the housing crisis or wage stagnation. That is the choice both former President Donald J. Trump and President Joseph R. Biden have made, to the detriment of not just American citizens, but anyone affected by American empire.
Laying the groundwork
Anti-communism remains a common sentiment in the U.S. government even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In February 2023, the House of Representatives passed a resolution “[d]enouncing the horrors of socialism.” Now, what is socialism? It appears the House does not know, because it never defines it. Instead, socialism serves as a stand-in for any figure or idea the U.S. government does not like.
The resolution attributes the deaths of “over 100,000,000 people worldwide” to “famine and mass murders” that occurred in communist countries. There are two main problems here: (1) the death count, and (2) the connection between this ideology and instances of mass death. The source of the 100 million deaths is The Black Book of Communism, a polemic that consistently conflates Nazism with communism and inflates death tolls, such as during the 1931–1933 famine in the Soviet Union, and two of the book’s authors have since renounced their association with it.
The resolution notes the Cambodian genocide, which occurred at the hands of the Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge. But the story of the killing fields is not as simple as this resolution’s authors would like it to be. Pol Pot was a communist by convenience, not by conviction. His ideology centered around ethnonationalism, and any proclaimed allegiance to communism was empty. The United States, in its Cold War battles against the Soviet Union, supported the Khmer Rouge against Vietnam, which overthrew Pol Pot. Vietnam was (and still is) led by a communist party, and it was largely anti-Vietnamese Cambodian ethnonationalism that impelled Vietnam to invade.
The resolution then denigrates post-revolution changes made by Fidel Castro in Cuba, bemoaning the redistribution of capital after the fall of U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. It is no surprise that the United States maintains a stranglehold on Cuba; after all, it lost one of its proxy states (and the one closest to the U.S. mainland) to a leftist revolutionary.
Venezuela’s economic turmoil is a consistent reason for interventionist politicians to advocate for the overthrow of Nicolás Maduro, but that turmoil runs along the cracks created by the unstable foundations of a petrostate. Venezuela’s hyperinflation rate peaked in 2018 due in part to reckless money-printing policies, the country’s aforementioned reliance on oil exports, and general government corruption. After both the 2018 and 2024 presidential elections in Venezuela, the U.S. rejected the results citing “overwhelming evidence” it never released and endorsed opposition candidates to sow distrust in Venezuelan election authorities.
The resolution closes with writings by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison that extol the virtues of private property and “the sanctity of the individual.” This idolization ignores both Jefferson and Madison’s belief that such property included human beings; both men owned slaves. That is not to say they are not critical figures in American history, but putting an originalist interpretation of the Constitution and the authors of the Constitution themselves on a pedestal denies the need for progress and change.
Today, American anti-communism takes on a more rhetorical form, with this resolution being the most recent example of it. But the U.S. has not been shy in militarily confronting forces abroad that could rise and oppose its hegemony. The brutality of the U.S.’s global anti-communist campaign is inadequately recognized in the United States, with lesser-known instances of interventionism swept under the rug.
In Indonesia in the mid- to late 1960s, for example, the United States unconditionally backed the anti-communist government led by Suharto, which was in the middle of a brutal crackdown against leftist groups like the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI, in Bahasa Indonesia). According to Geoffrey Robinson’s The Killing Season, “the United States and its allies provided military assistance, secret assurances, and financial support to antileftist elements in the army leadership.” Even with an understanding that Suharto’s government committed mass killings, the U.S. maintained the support it gave him since he came to power in a coup. It supported a false flag attack on the PKI because Indonesia served as a front to expand global capitalism.
U.S. intervention in Indonesia is just one example of its commitment to spreading anti-communism internationally, laying the groundwork for the current confrontations with China.
Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic is the biggest challenge the world has faced since the Second World War. In a perfect world, countries would have developed a strategy to form a unified front against the virus, recognizing the missteps that inevitably would occur before moving forward. Alas, the pandemic has morphed into a political battlefield, with the United States and China being two major actors.
COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China, in a spillover event likely from bats to humans that occurred in November or December 2019. But starting in January 2020, American government-funded media floated the idea that the pandemic started from a lab leak. Radio Free Asia (RFA) quoted a Chinese Red Cross official on January 9, 2020, noting the existence of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which did research on “[g]enetic engineering technology.”
The predecessor to the modern RFA was explicitly anti-communist and ran by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The RFA is now managed by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which answers to the Secretary of State. At the start of the pandemic, that position was occupied by Mike Pompeo, the former CIA director. The potential for the RFA to be used for government propaganda should require any of its reporting to be placed under serious scrutiny. But right-wing politicians and commentators took the potential to accuse China of negligence — or even bioterrorism — resulting in a global pandemic and ran with it.
Trump administration officials began promoting the lab leak lie, speaking (sometimes anonymously) to various networks. But the unfounded allegations did not end with the term of the 45th president. In the Biden administration, the Department of Energy said, without providing public evidence, that it had “low confidence” that the lab leak theory was correct, and current FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said he had “moderate” confidence in the theory.
In March 2023, Senator Josh Hawley introduced the “COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023”, which both the House and Senate unanimously passed. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence produced a report three months later, unequivocally rejecting the lab leak theory and attributing the origin of the pandemic to zoonosis. Independent researchers came to a similar conclusion.
But the U.S. government has not stopped at just questioning the origin of the virus. At the tail end of the Trump presidency and into the beginning of the Biden administration, the Pentagon ran a disinformation campaign in the Philippines, Central Asia, and the Middle East to discourage residents from taking the Chinese-developed Sinovac vaccine. The Pentagon has stood by its campaign, a campaign that indirectly sought to prolong a pandemic that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Filipinos alone.
The pandemic provided fodder for anti-China hawks in the U.S. government to allege China was not only negligent but ultimately complicit in the deaths of millions. But while the pandemic-related Red Scare propaganda produced by the executive branch subsided after Mr. Trump left office, concerns over a rising “totalitarian”, communist-led state would not abate.
Always watching
The specter of the COVID-19 pandemic beginning as a product of bioterrorism found new life with the balloon incident of early 2023. In response, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken canceled a planned trip to Beijing, the U.S. shot down three hobbyist balloons, initially believing they were also Chinese in origin, and the fears of Chinese surveillance in the United States ballooned.
The balloon entered American airspace over Alaska, traversing western Canada and the mainland U.S. before an F-22 Raptor fired one AIM-9X Sidewinder missile at it, taking it down off the coast of South Carolina. China has maintained that the balloon was a civilian airship focused on meteorology, an assertion the U.S. has categorically rejected. There are conflicting interpretations of the purpose of the balloon’s payload. One article by The Washington Post points to similarities between the craft in question and stratospheric balloons, while another article by Internet Protocol Video Market, an American surveillance research group, says there are “fundamental differences” between meteorological balloons and this Chinese one. An analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a mainstream think tank in Washington, D.C., explained the common characteristics between meteorological crafts and the Chinese balloon, yet still advocated for it to be shot down.
By American intelligence apparatuses’ own admission, the Chinese balloon did not collect information as it flew over the U.S., contradicting reporting — often reliant on unnamed government officials — that asserted China had collected “intelligence from sensitive sites.” But by the time it became clear that the Chinese balloon likely was not part of a grand plan to take down the United States, the damage had already been done to U.S.–China relations.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer raised the idea that the balloon may be carrying “bioweapons […] from Wuhan,” a continuation of the COVID-19 lab leak theory, and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said the balloon was a precursor for “devastating EMP [electromagnetic pulse] weapons.” North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called for NATO nations to “step up what we do to protect ourselves.”
Hostility toward China is not a one-side-of-the-aisle issue. Before it became clear that the other three objects the U.S. shot down were not Chinese, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer said the whole ordeal “humiliated” China and Mr. Biden called it “a great embarrassment” for a country led by a “dictator,” referring to Chinese President Xi Jinping with an epithet he would repeat over the next year.
But let’s assume for a moment that the balloon was, in fact, meant to surveil the United States. It is not uncharacteristic for countries to use both balloons and satellites for spying; in fact, the United Kingdom is explicitly growing a program for high-altitude surveillance balloons provided by American defense company Sierra Nevada Corporation as part of Project Aether. The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office plans a fourfold increase of its spy satellites by 2033.
Another Chinese balloon crossed Latin America, with China once again saying the breach was inadvertent and due to the craft’s “limited maneuverability.” China took that balloon down. After these incidents, the head of the China Meteorological Administration, Zhuang Guotai, was fired. Now, it is certainly possible that the leadership shakeup in China was part of a face-saving effort after its spying activities were exposed. But it is also possible that the man in charge of maintaining order in Chinese aircraft ventures failed at his job and was subsequently removed. American media went with the former argument, relying on the opinions of “some analysts” without explaining who those people are.
The Department of Defense released photos of the balloon debris after the craft was shot down, though the picture only shows the balloon structure, not its payload, which likely sunk. U.S. Northern Command said it recovered sensors in the debris, though that has not been independently verified.
Ultimately, the balloon incident is one event on a continuum of events that have ratcheted up distrust between China and the U.S. As other sources of drama have arisen, the balloon scandal faded into the background. But the notion that China is not only rising up to counter American power but is prepared to confront it directly, bolstered by knowledge obtained illegally, is a common refrain in this new Red Scare.
The Cuba Problem: Part I
Cuba has been a lasting thorn in the side of the United States since the Cuban Revolution, in which Fidel Castro led the 26th of July Movement to oust the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista and created a communist party-run government. Communism was no longer a distant concept only contemplated by far-off peoples; now, it had taken root a mere 100 miles from the Florida shore.
The U.S. has a centuries-long history of intervening in foreign countries, so it is no surprise that it maintains an obvious grip on Cuba. There has been a six decades-long embargo of Cuba (which is denounced by the United Nations year after year) that leaves the island nation without the means to support its people. In a United Nations vote, only two countries — the United States and Israel— voted against demanding an end to the embargo, with the U.S. claiming it voted against the resolution “to support the Cuban people.” Normally, supporting a people does not mean restricting their access to food and medicine, but apparently that is the belief of the U.S. (and Israeli) government. The U.S. also maintains the Guantánamo Bay military prison where American military and intelligence officials used now-infamous “enhanced interrogation techniques” (read: torture) against prisoners, some of whom never faced trial or even an official charge. Thirty detainees remain in custody outside the traditional American legal system on Cuban soil, which the Cuban government consistently condemns.
Apparently, bases in Cuba are only acceptable to the United States when it is done by the United States and without the consent of the Cuban government. In a Wall Street Journal article, the authors cite anonymous U.S. officials to warn about “an electronic eavesdropping facility” China plans to establish in Cuba. Couched in Cold War-era rhetoric about how adversarial powers like China are engaged in an “escalatory phase” against the U.S., the Journal downplays the key role the U.S. has played in escalating tensions with China. It merely mentions Chinese concerns about American activities in the South China Sea and its military relationship with Taiwan before returning to fear-mongering about the threat of the destabilizing “Communist dictatorship” of Cuba.
In keeping with its pattern of violating Cuban sovereignty, the United States sent a nuclear-powered submarine to Guantánamo Bay, which the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs called “a provocative escalation” while reiterating Cuba’s demands for the U.S. to return its “illegally occupied territory in the province of Guantanamo.”
For their parts, the Chinese Foreign Ministry called the allegations of a Chinese spy base in Cuba “rumors and slander,” and Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío said assertions contained in the Journal are yet another act of “aggression against Cuba.” Clearly, China and Cuba reject the idea that any base is a new provocation against the United States. But one does not have to take the Chinese and Cuban governments at their word. The New York Times has reported that China has maintained signal intelligence facilities in Cuba since before 2019, and a Reuters journalist freely entered the base in Bejucal, where the U.S. alleges the spy base is contained. The Cuban residents near the site do not believe it is Chinese controlled, and if it were, China would likely not allow a Western journalist to waltz in freely and take a look around.
Hidden by American fears of a Chinese base near the U.S. is the fact the United States maintains an international military apparatus with at least 750 bases in at least 70 countries. Not just in Europe, either, but in the Middle East, South America, and, most crucially for China, in Chinese neighbors like South Korea and Japan. The U.S. has sent surveillance flights over the South China Sea and billions of dollars worth of military and other aid to Taiwan, which is the brightest red line for China. If any country is being encircled by what it considers to be a hostile power, it is China. It is hypocritical for the U.S. to denounce China from possibly setting up one base in Cuba while the U.S. maintains hundreds of bases in the Asia-Pacific region alone. Foreign military installations are only acceptable when the U.S. does it, and if another country makes a slight move to respond, it is that country that is the aggressor. And while there has not been a military flare-up between Beijing and Washington, a slow-burning economic war has begun.
Insecurities and exchanges
In 2018, former President Trump escalated a trade war with China, which has continued through the Biden administration. While this economic conflict certainly had an adverse impact on American farmers, it is critical to focus on the origins of the technological battles between the two countries.
In the clean energy sector, the semiconductor industry, and the artificial intelligence race, both China and the U.S. are charging ahead to one-up the other. But instead of a cooperative rise, the quest to maintain global hegemony on the part of the U.S. or to rise to an unquestioned equal level of global power on the part of China has laid the groundwork for tariffs, merger scuttles, allegations of intellectual property theft, and hacking.
The United States has accused China of hacking Microsoft networks first in Guam in an effort to slow a U.S. response to a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan, then in U.S. bases around the world. The U.S. is no stranger to creating back-door code, though; according to documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency (NSA) hacked into Huawei networks after years of accusing the Chinese telecommunications company of being a threat to American national security.
This trade war has been heating up over the past decade, and under the Biden administration, there have been no signals that the United States seeks to lower the tension. The U.S. has blocked China from importing advanced semiconductors, expanding upon a restriction that only applied to certain companies like ZTE and Huawei. It has moved to prevent private equity and venture capital firms from investing in quantum computing and artificial intelligence in China.
These moves by the United States have been met with a response by China, as should be expected. Chinese antitrust regulators refused to rule on a proposed merger between Intel and Tower Semiconductor worth an estimated $5.4 billion, and China has prohibited companies from purchasing chips from Micron Technology, considered to be direct responses to American attacks on the Chinese tech sector.
While U.S.-China trade disputes have tended not to dominate the airwaves, the Biden administration is still charging ahead to carve a path of escalation and isolation for his successor. In September 2024, for example, the Department of Commerce proposed prohibiting any Chinese software or hardware in vehicles in the United States, following the imposition of a 100 percent duty on electric vehicles from China. These moves have deep implications for combating climate change, which is ostensibly a priority for the American government, a priority that instead consists of nothing but smoke and mirrors.
World on fire
The global effort against climate change that is the direct result of massive industrialization is directly dependent on the actions of both the United States and China, the two largest emitters of carbon dioxide. But instead of cooperation, the United States has focused on obstructing progress whenever possible with optics-based changes lauded as major leaps into the future.
China has quadruple the population but half of the carbon dioxide emissions per capita as the United States. Government officials have embraced hand-wringing in an effort to obfuscate not just American historical responsibility for climate change but to avoid drawing attention to the actions they are currently taking that fly in the face of whatever humanitarian goals they claim to have.
Consider the recommendations of Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen. She has urged China to join the Green Climate Fund and the Climate Investment Funds, which are bankrolled by institutions like the World Bank. But it is through organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that Western powers, led by the United States, maintain their hegemony over the rest of the world for the sake of continued exploitation.
Despite pledges to the contrary, poorer countries have been shackled by debt and the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. To receive loans, the World Bank effectively requires privatization, following in a pattern of economic imperialism rooted in neoliberalism that flourished in the 20th century. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has criticized both the World Bank and the IMF, noting that “Africa now spends more on debt service costs than on health care.”
China’s Belt and Road Initiative, on the other hand, has expanded infrastructure worldwide, from Sri Lanka to Venezuela. Contrary to claims of “debt-trap diplomacy,” China has cancelled billions of dollars worth of debt in Africa, which is acknowledged even by U.S. state outlets like Voice of America (VOA). Maybe, then, the call is coming from inside the house.
Domestically, China’s and the U.S.’s actions against climate change have continued to diverge. By 2025, China will double its capacity to produce 1,200 gigawatts of energy from wind and solar power, achieving its original goal set for 2030. Its sources of non-fossil fuel electricity has already exceeded 50 percent of the country’s total. Per the International Energy Agency, China has 60 percent of the “world’s manufacturing capacity for most mass-manufactured technologies” and “40% of electrolyser manufacturing.” In simpler terms, China is the world leader in clean energy technology. China’s new power capacity in solar accounted for 42 percent of the world’s total in 2022.
The United States has instead focused almost solely on militarism, even in the context of climate change. The Department of Defense is the largest institutional fossil fuel user in the world, and since the forever wars starting in 2001, the military has used between 77 and 80 percent of all federal energy consumption. If the U.S. military were a country, it would be the 47th largest emitter in the world. But instead of working to pare such pollution down, military spending (and thus military emissions) have ballooned. The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 increased military spending while spending for literally everything else decreased. By following the money, it is clear that the U.S. prioritizes war and violence over adequately addressing climate changes, let alone any other issue.
But it is not just the American government that seeks to obscure the truth of environmental efforts; American media plays a major role in shaping the public consciousness, and as such, the public perception of the American government’s trustworthiness and accomplishments. Take The New York Times as a case study. In one article, the Times framed Chinese concerns over wastewater discharges from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which partially melted down after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, as nationalistic propaganda and disinformation. It cited a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency as proof that the discharge was safe and quoted a researcher, Azby Brown, to back up that point. But the article leaves out that just a week prior, the Times published an opinion piece by the same Mr. Brown expressing serious concern about the release of the wastewater, highlighting the obscurity with which the Japanese nuclear authorities operated after the disaster. At the very least, the Times has demonstrated a propensity to paint China in a negative light whenever possible, even when there is a more nuanced discussion to be had.
In the 2024 American election cycle, the Democratic Party has discarded its concern over the climate in favor of policies for which it denounced figures like Donald Trump just a few years prior. When running for president for the first time in 2019, Kamala Harris stated, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” Funny how now, a mere five years later, she argued that she is actually more in favor of fracking than Mr. Trump. It’s as if the Democratic Party never actually cared about climate change. The political environment in 2019 and 2020 made it chic to say the right words, but now, climate change gets one question that invites meaningless answers from both candidates.
When Trump was in the White House, Democrats hounded his expansion of oil and gas drilling in the U.S. But with Biden, under whom the U.S. is producing the most oil in history and a new drilling project (the Willow project) has been approved, an administration that has issued more drilling permits on public lands than Donald Trump does not even warrant a line in the conversation about climate change.
While certainly not perfect, China has engaged in meaningful efforts to transition toward renewable energy sources. Climate change consciousness was a mere flash in the pan in the United States, with both major parties preferring to demonize a country that actually sets actionable plans and sticks to them.
TikTok
Headlining conversations about U.S.-China tensions and their ever-expanding trade war are concerns about the national security implications of TikTok. Because of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, the Singapore-based TikTok has possessed American politicians who still maintain their Cold War mentality.
Politicians on both sides of the political aisle have accused TikTok of serving as a proxy for the Communist Party of China (CPC) to infiltrate the impressionable minds of American children, stealing the data of millions of Americans to use as it sees fit. Those concerns, by the FBI’s own admission, are purely hypothetical, and the United States government can and does already take data from American social media companies. TikTok has challenged any ban on its use by private American citizens as a violation of the First Amendment.
The Energy and Commerce Committee deposed TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Zi Chew in 2023, resulting in over five hours worth of public testimony that demonstrated not the malicious power of TikTok but the incredible lack of internet literacy of American politicians.
While a few representatives asked questions and listened while Mr. Chew responded, the vast majority spent their time engaging in hyperbole lacking evidence about TikTok being “the spy in Americans’ pockets,” asking convoluted “yes or no” question that lacked a simple answer, then proceeding with whatever preconceived answer they had in their head, misrepresenting Mr. Chew’s responses, or even outright refusing to let him answer. On numerous occasions, Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers explicitly prevented Mr. Chew from answering representatives’ questions. If nothing else, the testimony of Mr. Chew laid bare the sore lack of technology knowledge on the part of American politicians (see Representative Richard Hudson’s confusion over whether an app like TikTok can access wifi).
Despite the lack of evidence of wrongdoing by TikTok or any consideration of the constitutional implications of banning apps wholesale, the U.S. has enacted a law (couched in a bill that, among other things, provided lethal aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan) that mandates TikTok be sold or be outlawed.
But American politicians cannot even keep their fear-mongering straight. Despite being second-in-command in the administration that is seeking its prohibition under fears of jeopardizing national security, Kamala Harris joined the app in July 2024 after becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. Her opponent, Donald Trump, joined the month prior.
What this waffling about the threats and benefits of TikTok makes clear is that TikTok is merely a token to be used by the United States regardless of who is in power to turn up the heat on China. If the American government truly viewed TikTok as a means for China to weaken the United States, it would not tolerate the two major presidential candidates opening and operating accounts after a ban was signed into law. But in hoping Americans do not make the connection between politicians’ blatant hypocrisies, the U.S. government can continue its efforts to characterize China as a dictatorship hellbent on obstructing peace wherever possible.
Isolation
In early 2023, the U.S. House of Representatives, by a vote of 365–65, established the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, the first committee with the express purpose of competition with the political leadership of another country. The House made clear by a substantial margin that instead of seeking to mend relations with China, a rising power, it would be prudent to seek escalation. (The committe e’s first public meeting was held just over a month after the committee’s creation, and was interrupted by two protestors.)
But this verbal antagonism is not relegated just to the legislative branch. On several occasions, President Biden called Chinese President Xi a “dictator,” including after meeting with Mr. Xi at the 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco. His rationale for the name-calling was that Mr. Xi is “a guy who runs a country that is a communist country.” If the head of government of a country is genuinely seeking cooperation with another power, he would not leave a summit and promptly call that leader and his government a dictator. Yet that is exactly what Mr. Biden did, because he has never sought peace with China (or peace generally).
The 2022 National Defense Strategy specifically targets China as a “multi-domain threat” that, in quoting Mr. Biden’s National Security Strategy, “is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order, and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do so.”
Zeroing in on Chinese diplomatic capabilities reveals that in the two major conflicts confronting the Biden administration — Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the Russo-Ukrainian war — China has taken an approach that, at least on its face, is substantively oriented toward ending the wars.
In July 2024, China mediated negotiations between Hamas and Fatah, two opposing Palestinian factions that had been engaged in ongoing civil strife since Hamas was elected to power in the Gaza Strip in 2006. With full U.S. backing, Israel is dedicated to the wholesale destruction of Gaza, and the United States has shown absolutely no desire to engage with Hamas on any diplomatic level. Without a change in American policy regarding support for Israel, it is unlikely that any peace will come for Palestine. But at the very least, China has attempted to make inroads, which is more than the U.S. can say.
One year to the day after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a twelve-point proposal to end the conflict. The fourth point focused on the “resumption of negotiation,” encouraging bringing both Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table. The American response would be that China is using the possibility of peace as a way to inaccurately portray itself as a neutral actor when it would, in fact, benefit only Russia. But in a war between two states, seeking peace diplomatically requires the presence of both nations, something that the American approach conveniently ignores.
At the so-called peace summit in Bürgenstock, Switzerland, in 2024, Russia was not invited. Diplomacy without one side of the conflict present is oxymoronic, but that is exactly the point. The United States can feign interest in ending the conflict, when in reality, it is more than happy to extend it indefinitely in the interest of weakening Russia, ignoring war’s inherent death and destruction.
In Vilnius, Lithuania, the year prior, NATO’s official communiqué targeted China in paragraph six of 90, bemoaning China’s “stated ambitions and coercive policies.” It may seem peculiar that China is top of mind for NATO, as China does not touch the North Atlantic. Sure, it has ties with states that resist NATO, but it does not come into direct contact with the North Atlantic. But the efforts to preemptively isolate China that find adherents in the U.S. House have led some NATO officials to consider expanding its reach into countries like Japan. This potential expansion is, understandably, a red line for China, and France successfully pushed NATO to shelve the notion. But after decades of giving false assurances to Russia and creeping closer and closer to its borders before Russia pulled the trigger and invaded Ukraine, NATO represents a legitimate threat to Chinese national security.
Even without NATO officially in Asia, the expansion of American war-mongering in the region is itself an act of encircling China, after which the U.S. proclaims it is actually China that is ratcheting up tensions.
In the Philippines, the U.S. has established four new Enhanced Defense Cooperation Arrangement bases. The last U.S. base there closed in 1992 after widespread protests and the Filipino Senate’s nonrenewal, but with China’s ascendence, the U.S. has thrown caution to the wind. In Guam, the U.S. Marine Corps opened Camp Blaz, the first new base on the island in 70 years, to host 5,000 Marines. As China has strengthened ties with the Solomon Islands with their “comprehensive strategic partnership,” the American media has presented China has threatening the balance of peace in the region. In a New York Times news analysis, the paper relied on one polling agency to suggest increased ties with the Chinese was not the will of Solomon Islanders, though the methodology of the poll cannot be analyzed.
When the U.S. establishes the AUKUS security partnership with the United Kingdom and Australia, it is not a threat to peace in the Pacific. When AUKUS explicitly seeks to secure for Australia nuclear-powered submarines, it is not a threat to peace. When the U.S. antagonizes China in the South China Sea, it is not a threat to peace. Perhaps the American ambassador to China Nicholas Burns put it best in a discussion hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce when describing American political thought in the Asia-Pacific: “China is going to be one of the greatest challenges for Americans going forward […] We’re the leader in this region.”
Xinjiang
The strongest criticism against China from the United States and its allies has been that China is committing genocide against Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. China has been accused of imprisoning millions of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim in internment camps and subjecting them to forced sterilization, prompting United Nations investigations.
While at first denying the existence of detention centers, China now describes them as vocational centers focused on clamping down on extremism after various terrorist attacks in the region. As of 2024, there have been 288 documented attacks in China since 1989, with the majority occurring in Xinjiang. In response, China has passed several laws seeking to combat this violence, and it is in some of these laws that condemnation of China’s heavy-handed response has its basis. In the 2015 Counter-Terrorism Law, for example, Article 80 allows for detention and fines even when “the circumstances are minor and do not constitute a crime,” while Article 81 defines “extremism” quite broadly, allowing for more widespread detentions than would typically be permissible. These laws can and should be criticized, but through a series of extrapolations, instead of being accused of expanding its carceral state, it is being accused of attempting to eliminate an entire people.
In 2018, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination reviewed the situation in China. It is here that the only U.S. member of the panel, Gay McDougall, asserted that over one million Uyghurs and others have been detained by China. Though not providing evidence at the time, it appears that that number of detentions comes from an extrapolation of interviews with eight Xinjiang residents.
The Uyghur population has grown at a slower rate compared to other groups in China, to which Voice of America and polemicists like Adrian Zenz, the face of Uyghur genocide accusation in the West, point as evidence that China’s is engaging in a “genocidal campaign.” With the U.S. positioning against China in everything it does, having the VOA charge the U.S.’s chief geopolitical adversary of such a tremendous violation of human rights is unsurprising. For his part, Mr. Zenz has stated that he was “led by God” to take down China. In relying on figures like these, think tanks like the New Lines Institute have accused China of violating “every single article of the UN genocide convention” in a report that cites Radio Free Asia 17 times and Mr. Zenz dozens more. The Select Committee focused on the CPC also relies on Mr. Zenz to accuse China of genocide.
Separate from American propagandists, there emerges a more nuanced portrait of the situation in Xinjiang. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) report never once uses the word “genocide,” New Strait Times journalist Khairah N. Karim wrote that one site she visited in Xinjiang “certainly did not look like a prison or a detention camp” (though she acknowledged the staging of her tour), and Project Syndicate writer Yi Fuxian attributed the slow population growth to a general, but crucially not genocidal, crackdown, an economic slump, and an increase in education.
Seemingly to bolster its position that China’s rationale of counterterrorism is unfounded, the United States delisted the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization, saying it barely existed in the first place. That position does not mesh with the fact that the U.S. imprisoned 22 Chinese Uyghurs in Guantánamo Bay. Similarly unpersuasive is the assertion that the U.S. cares about mass incarceration, given that the United States outpaces nearly every single country in its incarceration rate per capita. In 24 states, their incarceration rate would top even the United States.
China’s policies in Xinjiang may, as the OHCHR notes, constitute “crimes against humanity.” But to accuse China of genocide requires proof of an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” That proof does not exist beyond the religious fantasies of figures like Mr. Zenz. When an actual genocide is staring the United States in the face, the U.S. does not just passively watch it occur but actively support its continuation. In tandem with accusing China of using bioweapons (the COVID-19 pandemic) and civilian surveillance (balloon incident and TikTok), the United States is seeking to use blatant abuses of international law to isolate China further, evidence be damned.
The Cuba Problem: Part II
China is the biggest threat to American geopolitical hegemony, and the fact that the U.S. can reuse its Red Scare tactics of the 20th century makes tainting public opinion quite simple. Anti-communism is not a new ideal that needs to be taught to the American masses; it is an ideology that barely needs to be fed to become something akin to a national religion, a religion that does not discriminate by country. Cuba’s existence as unabashedly communist, as has already been explored, vexes the United States to no end. Such annoyance provides rife breeding ground for wild conspiracy theories about American foes, and any signal of discontent among the Cuban population is capitalized on to encourage regime change.
After food and medicine shortages spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic, protests erupted in Cuba. Mr. Biden used the moment to reiterate that Cuba is “a failed state” because “[c]ommunism is a failed system — a universally failed system,” conveniently leaving out the 60-year blockade the United States has imposed on the country.
American media also embraced anti-Cuba hysteria, failing basic editorial practices. In one NBC News video, the agency used videos it purported were anti-government protesters; in reality, they were counterprotestors demonstrating in favor of the Cuban government and against foreign, namely American, intervention. It tried to blur protestors’ signs that would make this lie abundantly clear, with one reading, “Las calles son de los revolucionarios” (“The streets are of the revolutionaries”). Those revolucionarios deposed Fulgencio Batista in the communist revolution. It stated protestors were chanting “freedom,” when in reality, they were chanting “Fidel.” (The fact that native Cubans would likely be speaking Spanish apparently never crossed the minds of the journalists and editors behind the video.)
One of the most bizarre stories to come out of contemporary American anti-communism is the obsession with “Havana syndrome,” which evolved from being attacks against American diplomats and their families with “sonic weapons,” then “microwave attacks,” then “directed energy attacks.” Pundits and politicians accused Russia, China, and Cuba. As it turns out, the CIA determined that the symptoms were not the result of an attack by a foreign power, and the National Institutes of Health determined there were no physical traces of harm.
The mass hysteria stirred up by the United States that communist states (or former communist states) were primed to achieve proletarian internationalism at a moment’s notice, and thus the United States must have an enormous military budget and always be at war, resulted in hundreds of anomalous cases of neurological impairment and irresponsible accusations by high-ranking government officials, including the former president, that a foreign power was attacking American citizens.
This blatant act of American propaganda, and the willingness among the media to repeat unfounded allegations ad nauseam, highlights that when it comes to its adversaries, the United States is willing to rely on lies worthy of cheap science fiction to perpetuate a belief among its citizens that they both live in the “indispensable nation” and are at constant risk of collapse into the inferno of communism.
On Empire
The United States has enjoyed decades of imposing its will on countries that do not listen to its orders. It views the existence of successful states governed by communist parties as existential threats to the U.S.-dominated world order, warranting any level of hawkishness, violence, and exploitation.
That world order is in decline. China has undergone an incredible transformation into an economic, diplomatic, and military powerhouse, one that has the capacity to rival the United States. That change strikes intense fear in the hearts of the managers of the American empire, an empire that may not be as clearly visible on a map as the empires of old, but one that touches nearly every aspect of the world, from supply chains to war machines.
China’s growing power cannot be denied, and it is for that reason that the United States has engaged in a multi-year trade war seeking to slow its development of semiconductors and artificial intelligence. It is for that reason that the U.S. has expanded American military outposts in an attempt to surround China. It is for that reason that the media beats Americans over the head with unsubstantiated allegations against China and Cuba, because an alternative worldview spells the end of American exploitation.
It is for that reason that the United States is seeking an ever-expanding military budget. It knows that should a war with China become hot, the United States would not win. In recent war games simulations, the U.S. loses munitions and materials in a matter of days. President Biden’s commitments to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion are an exercise in playing with fire. After decades of warnings by Russia against the expansion of NATO, and decades of ignoring those concerns, Russia invaded Ukraine. That war has lasted for over two years, and there is no sign that a negotiated peace is around the corner. But China is not Russia. The United States, though it loathes to admit it, understands that war with China would spell unforeseen destruction, destruction that could reach the shores of the United States.
Instead of seeking reconciliation and peace, however, the American empire continues to do what it does best: antagonize. That antagonism killed millions during the Cold War in Southeast Asia and Latin America. That antagonism has ushered in a new era of war. That antagonism is the empire’s last gasp as it fights to maintain its hegemony.
The propaganda of this new Red Scare serves as a distraction from the fact that there is an alternative. There must be a united front against that vision of endless violence. For the sake of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire of war, for the sake of the planet in the face of climate change, for the sake of a multipolar system that works in the favor of the majority, not just in the favor of those with capital, the vision of the American empire must fall. And in closing its eyes for the final time, true cooperation and hope can rise.