Last year was the year of accusing anything and everything—from parks to science—of racism and white supremacy.
I missed that bandwagon, but given that we’re only a month into 2021, I figure there is still time to hop on. So here goes nothing: People who advocate treating Russia as America’s primary threat, as opposed to China, are white supremacists. There, I said it.
In October of last year, presidential candidate Biden was out warning that Russia, not China, is the biggest threat to American security. Biden’s claim was nonsense then and is nonsense now. With President Biden back in the news describing China as neither rival nor enemy, but rather our biggest “competitor,” a word that evokes the camaraderie of rival sports teams, it is a salient time to revisit this claim.
There is not a single aspect in which Russia comprises a bigger threat to the American way of life than China, a rapidly expanding dictatorship bent on exporting elements of its authoritarian governance model to the rest of the world.
A few facts and data points to illustrate this:
The US and USSR went toe to toe once already in 20th century. The clash ended with the latter’s dissolution.
Russia’s population has been in decline since the early 1990s, dropping more than 4 million people from 1992 to 2019. China’s population has increased by two Russias in the same time frame.
Russia’s GDP is exactly where it was seven years ago in 2014. In the same time frame, China’s GDP has grown by 2.5 Russias. China’s economy is now eight times larger.
When the US government enacted sanctions against Russia in 2014, the Russian economy shrank by 40% in the following two years. By contrast, in spite of an all-out trade war with China, America’s trade deficit with the People’s Republic has grown to an all-time high while their GDP has continued to approach ours. Economically, we dominated Russia with ease but have had no such luck with China.
The US imported $22.3 billion of good from Russia in 2019, less than a twentieth of what we imported from China in the same time period. The American way of life has almost no reliance on Russian output. Without imports from China, I would have no laptop on which to write this article and you would have no smart phone on which to read it.
China’s military budget is now three to four times larger than Russia’s. China’s domestic security budget is even larger than that of its military, and no doubt funds research and development of technologies that have military applications.
In 1990, China’s and Russia’s average life expectancies were roughly equal. Today, China’s life expectancy barely lags behind that of the US.
Russia has certainly earned a reputation for being the world’s premier perpetrator of cyber warfare, but in the past decade China has quietly caught up.
Whether framed in terms of the economy, population, or technological prowess, China has surpassed Russia. Along all of these axes, they’re not even close.
We Americans are hyper-vigilant against Russia, a fallen superpower, while many of our most successful business magnates and institutions continue to promote engagement with China, a burgeoning superpower that wants to replace us.
China has undertaken a massive program to militarize the South China Sea, constructing military installations that would only be put to use if the US and China were to enter into a hot conflict. While we in America worry about an overblown threat of the Russian boogeyman and fight with each other about how to label bathrooms, China has spent the last decade preparing for a war with its number one rival. We rightfully condemn authoritarian overreach by the Russian government but pay little attention to similar actions by China.
To give a recent example of how this dynamic plays out in the media, Russia’s involvement in the SolarWinds hack received wall-to-wall coverage for several news cycles. On the other hand, the recent news about Chinese operators hacking of the same company received much less coverage.
To look at these facts and conclude that Russia, not China, is the greatest threat to American security can only stem from the baseless confidence that we will never be threatened by a non-white country.
Thus, to call Russia a bigger threat than China is an act of white supremacy in its purest form.
I used to work for a hardware company in Silicon Valley. We did a lot of business with China, primarily government customers. As is required of American companies doing business with the Chinese government, we had to partner with a local company to sell and support our products there. We trained their engineers and applications specialists, we showed them the ins and outs of our machines and the software that powered them.
Back at the office in California there would occasionally emerge an uncomfortable conversation about the possibility of our technology being pirated. But such concerns inevitably gave way to two assumptions—one, that the China market was too lucrative to ignore (greed), and two, that we would always be able to stay ahead of any would-be Chinese competitor because we had American Innovation™ on our side (hubris).
I imagine similar conversations have taken place in board rooms across the country over the past several decades. However, slowly but surely, China went from manufacturing widgets to dominating production of smart phones, pharmaceutical ingredients (including opiates, which killed over 50,000 Americans in 2019), and steel. China is far and away the biggest producer of lithium ion batteries, without which there is no electric car industry. We were caught with our pants down by the Covid-19 pandemic in part because Chinese factories produce the vast majority of our personal protective equipment (masks, gloves, gowns, etc). We allowed ourselves to become reliant on a hostile foreign power for the products on which our country runs. Why? As above, greed and hubris.
Not long ago, it was normal to see articles from reputable outlets hypothesizing about why China can’t innovate. Yet in the past decade, China has produced one of the world’s most popular social media applications, grown one of the largest digital finance companies (Ant Financial’s IPO would have been valued at a record-setting $313 billion had it not been kneecapped by the government), and cornered the drone market.
The fact that Trump was elected in the first place, largely because of a disillusioned white working class, is a testament to the havoc China had already wrought on the American manufacturing sector. Russia never has and never will constitute such an economic threat to US.
China is the only credible challenger to American dominance in the 21st century.
And so I’ve grown tired of hearing America’s politicians and political elite to talk ad nauseam about the Russia threat.
It baffles me to hear Nancy Pelosi & Hillary Clinton, two of the most powerful women in America, call for a repeat of the Mueller Investigation, as if Russia was somehow behind the January 6th Capitol riot. After all, in their eyes, with Donald Trump, “all roads lead to Putin.”
It baffled me in mid 2019 to hear candidate Joe Biden proclaiming that China could never “eat our lunch.” Despite Biden’s toughening rhetoric towards Chinese dictator Xi Jinping (“this is a guy who is a thug”), he has taken actions, such as suspending a Trump-era executive order banning the use of Chinese products in America’s power grid, that belie a sense of overconfidence in America’s ability to outcompete China.
Russia is a threat, yes, but it’s a joke to say it constitutes our greatest threat. When Chinese officialdom outwardly says that “the time for China’s rise has come” and exhorts members of the country’s security forces to prepare for a “long protracted battle” with the US, I take note. Everybody should take note.
A future in which Russia displaces us simply isn’t in the cards. A future in which China does so is eminently possible, if not likely, given the current trajectory.
So it’s time to stop exaggerating the Russia threat while minimizing the threat that China poses. To do so is to reveal a belief, couched in white supremacy, that America couldn’t possibly be seconded by an Asian competitor.
Great article. I love the objective non left or right Taint...
Well said. I am concerning elite knew it but not speak it also link to greedy and hubris. Because they need China market and their family needs china wealth as well. They betrayed this country.