Joseph Nye, the intellectual champion of “soft power” and adviser to Democrat presidents reaching back to Jimmy Carter, is one of those liberals whom Lenin purportedly called “useful idiots”: intelligent, well-meaning intellectuals who always seem to give the benefit of the doubt to their country’s enemies. In his May 6th syndicated column, Nye laments the change in U.S. strategy toward China from “engagement” to “great-power competition,” but claims that cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remains possible in certain areas.
It was the Reagan administration that won Cold War I by reversing the flaccid detente policies … Jimmy Carter.
Nye reports that he recently visited China as the chair of a “Sino-American ‘track two dialogue,’ where citizens who are in communication with their respective governments can meet and speak for themselves,” as if the Chinese participants in this dialogue from the Central Party School in Beijing are anything other than hardcore communists towing the CCP line. The Chinese group, apparently, knows what issues to bring to the forefront to tickle liberal hearts: climate change, global public health, arms control, artificial intelligence, free trade (meaning no economic decoupling), and people-to-people contacts. (READ MORE from Frances P. Sempa: Defeating China’s ‘Great Game’ in Cold War II)
We need, Nye writes, to “restore a sense of mutual understanding” between the U.S. and China. On climate change, Nye’s group urged its CCP Party School counterparts to urge their government — the world’s biggest polluter and carbon producer — to more rapidly add renewable sources of energy to its numerous coal-fired plants. On global public health, Nye writes, “both governments handled COVID-19 badly,” and we shouldn’t “argue over whom to blame,” despite China’s obvious culpability for the Wuhan lab leak and its cover-up which killed millions throughout the world.
On arms control, Nye acknowledges that China’s goal is to reach parity with the U.S. and Russia, but welcomes discussions of “strategic stability” and “non-proliferation.” Perhaps Nye should recall what Jimmy Carter’s Defense Secretary Harold Brown said about arms control with the Soviet Union: We build, they build; we stop, they build. Does he really believe China will stop at nuclear parity?
On artificial intelligence, Nye claims that both sides share an interest in “human control” of military weapons. On economics, Nye agrees with his CCP counterparts that economic decoupling “would be bad for both sides.” On people-to-people contacts, Nye wants to stop the “hassling” of academics and scientists by immigration officials on “both sides.”
Nye, like many of the national security bureaucrats that populated the Carter administration, sees some form of detente as the only way to avoid great power war with our principal communist enemy. Nye, like many of those same bureaucrats who served in the Clinton administration, believes that engagement and trade between adversaries will help prevent war. Nye, like many of the Obama administration policymakers, believed that China could be persuaded to join a U.S.-led liberal world order. Nye, like the Biden administration’s national security team, refuses to acknowledge that we are in an existential conflict with China — just as we were with the Soviet Union — and that one side will prevail in that conflict, hopefully without war as in Cold War I.
It was the Reagan administration that won Cold War I by reversing the flaccid detente policies of the first president Nye served, Jimmy Carter. Reagan summarized his strategy in simple terms that do not appeal to liberal intellectuals such as Nye: “We win, they lose.” Ronald Reagan won the Cold War with “hard” power, not “soft” power: a massive military build-up across all domains; an offensive geopolitical strategy to undermine communist control of satellite nations; a rhetorical offensive that highlighted the evils of communism; economic and political warfare. Victory in that Cold War was won by “peace through strength,” not finding areas of cooperation. (READ MORE: The US Has Never Pivoted to the Indo-Pacific)
We can all agree with Nye that it is in America’s interest to avoid a kinetic war with China. That war, however, won’t be avoided by “soft power” and exploring areas of cooperation on climate change, public health, arms control, and trade. It won’t be avoided, in other words, by basing policy on Nye’s useful idiocy.
