Three Decades of Delusion

Andrew A. Michta
 

Our elites learned all the wrong lessons from the end of the Cold War.

America today faces a potentially existential challenge to its national security as two great power adversaries, Russia and China, contest its post-Cold War dominion. The reason? For 30 years it has been led by corporate, media, and policy elites who failed to acknowledge the enduring verities of great power politics. Instead of carefully reassessing our strategy when the Soviet Union imploded, after 1990 our intelligentsia embraced without hesitation the ideological bromides—principally cooked up in our think tanks and universities—about the “end of history,” our “unipolar moment,” and the inevitable triumph of the so-called liberal international order across the globe. Never before has a drive towards empire been based on such a glaring inability to calculate power relationships and to learn from history.................

Historically, efforts to capture elites have preceded state capture. The Chinese communist leadership seems to have learned all too well the British imperial dictum that “we do not run Egypt, we run the Egyptians who run Egypt.”The Chinese communist leadership seems to have learned all too well the British imperial dictum that “we do not run Egypt, we run the Egyptians who run Egypt.”

The massive inflow of Chinese money into the United States, and increasingly into Europe, has translated into a relentless string of influence operations not only through Confucius Institutes, but across our think tanks, corporations, and the media.

Chinese money would also go on to support commissioned research at our premier research universities, with contracts stipulating that U.S. researchers turn the results over to their Chinese counterparts and refrain from criticizing Chinese policies (over the past six years 115 of our colleges and universities received $1 billion in monetary gifts and commissioned research from China). Corporations—still American in name—lobbied vigorously to maintain the status quo long after it had become clear that the United States was at risk of being transformed into a tributary state to China.

This makes the past 30 years of globalization an historically unprecedented time. We handed over to communist China the jewels of American technology and industry, while relentlessly educating Chinese scientists and engineers (last year of the approximately one million foreign students at U.S. colleges and universities, 370,000 were Chinese, mainly in STEM graduate programs). Yet few in our think thanks or corporate boardrooms batted an eye. Instead, they decried our punitive tax code and insisted that onerous regulations had left American corporations no alternative but to ship their factories and supply chains to China............To Read More...