July 9th, 2008 by Sam
Hysteria over China’s supposed looming threat to US national interests (read: hegemony) continue to underlie the foreign policy consensus among both political parties, the mainstream media, and “responsible” intellectual opinion. In an interview with the The Real News Network, Aijaz Ahmad dispels some of the myths surrounding China’s alleged aggressiveness. When asked about arguments suggesting that the possibility of China’s economy outgrowing the US’s may potentially pose a future threat, Ahmad responds:
“Well first of all that’s a very very irrational argument: if you lose out in peaceful economic competition you should just go and invade some country. That’s an extremely irrational argument. And a frightening one . . . As of now, Chinese posture is completely defensive . . . first of all, China has not fought a war outside its territory since the Korean war. For the last 60 years, China has had no troops beyond its territory. Its military expenditure, when you look at it . . . even its nuclear program, is essentially defensive in character. It is frightened that it will be attacked by the United States . . .”
And unlike the land of the free and the home of the brave:
“[China] does not set out to tell any country what its internal social system should be, because it has not arrogated to itself the power to police the world either military or politically.”
Internally, China is rightly condemned for its gross human rights violations and repressive police state policies. But serious consideration of China’s foreign policy can hardly merit the frenzy that is regularly expressed by both “doves,” like Sen. Jim Webb (see above video), and “hawks,” like Sen. Joe Lieberman, who justifies increases in defense spending due to the “serious danger of falling behind China,” a country which possesses a defense budget a tenth the size of our own. As Robert Scheer notes, “The only adversary that interested China,” according to a Pentagon report citing intellegence community estimates, “was Taiwan, and as recent events have indicated, that game is over.” Scheer describes the recent warming of relations across the Taiwan Straits as a “nightmare scenario for America’s military hawks in desperate need of an excuse for soaking up more than half of the U.S. government’s discretionary budget.” But we shouldn’t “shed tears just yet for the denizens of the military-industrial complex. Why should they doubt our continued willingness to throw money at weapons that have no targets, when few in Congress or the media ever bother to notice,” let alone honestly challenge the paranoid and imperialistic assumptions that lead us to assume that those targets exist in the first place?
