The China threat helped pass an over $200 billion international competitiveness bill with rare bipartisan support. It’s a stance that has wide consensus in the foreign-policy community. It is ideologically infused as democracy versus autocracy. And when China’s leader warns foreign powers to back off lest they “crack their heads and spill blood on the Great Wall of Steel,” what could be wrong with mobilizing around the threat posed by China?
Plenty. The China threat is being inflated in ways that, as with the Soviet threat in the Cold War and terrorism post-9/11, are counterproductive for foreign-policy strategy and distort domestic politics in dangerous ways.
