David Dodwell

Outside In | Can US think tanks put the battle of narratives with China to rest?

The Council on Foreign Relations’ China-focused project could be a chance to rethink flawed assumptions underpinning the rules-based order

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US secretary of state Antony Blinken speaks at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on June 28, 2023. Photo: AP

David Dodwell

Published: 8:30pm, 12 Jul 2024Updated: 9:14pm, 12 Jul 2024

The New York-based foreign policy think tank known as the Council on Foreign Relations has launched a new project called the China Strategy Initiative. According to its website: “Competition with China poses a challenge unlike any the United States has faced before.” The initiative will aim to “answer the questions that go to the heart of American China strategy”.

This initiative speaks to an overriding US imperative to re-engage a battle of the narratives that can credibly unify as many as possible of its key allies in explaining exactly why China’s rise constitutes an existential threat to the globally benign status quo.

Winning the narrative battle has been pivotal to governments justifying their rule throughout recorded history, and today is no different. That is why victors always write the history books: the story is often more important than the truth.

This Council on Foreign Relations initiative is likely to be important, partly because some inconvenient truths are undermining the credibility of the US narrative. The unifying narrative that has lent authority to the US claim to global leadership since World War II seems increasingly threadbare.

Since the defeat of the Axis powers and the creation of the United Nations and other Bretton Woods Institutions, the US has worked brilliantly to generate a steady narrative justifying the “rules-based order”, which has provided a unifying story for the maintenance of peace and global prosperity. As Alexandra Homolar and Oliver Turner wrote in Oxford Academic in January, this delineated a “morally superior grouping” that “established a benign and mutually beneficial system of international organisation”.

“Overall, the [rules-based order] origin story is one of peace, stability and prosperity”, they wrote. It provided what they call “a unifying story for the maintenance of formal security alliances” that has been “dividing the world into those who belong to the community of righteous actors and those situated outside”.