Opinion | To counter China, the US must rise above talk of race and a clash of civilisations

Instead of appealing to the dangerous notion of a race war, the Trump administration should focus on China’s threat to global institutions. Allies that may not care to join a fight to safeguard US interests are more likely to do so to defend the liberal order

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US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet in November 2017 in Beijing. Most of the world – including a sizeable share of Americans – has no interest in being plunged into another cold war just to preserve US hegemony. Photo: Reuters

Published: 10:30pm, 15 May 2019Updated: 2:02am, 16 May 2019

Late last month at a security forum in Washington, Kiron Skinner, director of policy planning for the US Department of State, described today’s US-China conflict as “a fight with a really different civilisation and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that before”.

As a trial balloon, this apparent attempt to define the Trump administration’s confrontation with China did not fly.

By framing the creeping cold war between the US and China as a clash of civilisations, Skinner – whose position was once held by luminaries such as George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Richard N. Haass, and Anne-Marie Slaughter – was being neither original nor accurate.

Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington developed the concept more than a quarter of a century ago, and the Chinese Communist Party itself is an ideologically bankrupt entity.

Worse, Skinner’s full remarks were freighted with racial overtones. Unlike America’s competition with the Soviet Union, which she described as “a fight within the Western family”, the rivalry with China supposedly represents “the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian”. Never mind that the US fought Japan in the second world war.

One hopes Skinner’s talk of a clash between Caucasian and non-Caucasian civilisations was just a slip of the tongue. Those who would intentionally traffic in such ideas must know they could lead not just to the economic or military defeat of one side, but to the destruction of an entire society.