It’s a useful exercise to parse the language in an article in today’s New York Times regarding Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s latest visit to China. See it here.
It says Blinken will “try to preserve the recent and delicate stabilization of ties between the United States and China.” It says that Blinken’s visit last year “came at perhaps the worst moment in U.S.-China relations in recent years” and that “Since then, relations have thawed somewhat.”
I don’t blame the reporter for using that language because it is the language that the State Department prefers to use. But in actual fact, the Chinese have been the driving force behind both Russia and Iranian aggression in Ukraine and the Middle East respectively, creating enormous military and diplomatic challenges for the United States. China is providing economic and technological assistance to Vladimir Putin’s army and is buying such large quantities of Iranian oil that the mullahs can fund Hamaz, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other armed groups. It is an international coalition bent on destroying the Western democracies and their allies. It is a kind of world war.
Moreover, China’s technological assault on American IT systems is reaching new levels. The U.S. government knows that Chinese state-supported players have placed malware in America’s critical infrastructure–but it cannot completely eliminate it. The Chinese have penetrated Microsoft email systems that support the State and Commerce departments, and in the VoltTyphoon episode, they also sought to penetrate U.S. military communications. That may have been the point of last year’s spy balloon–to collect American military communications in an attempt to decipher them. The whole point of the fight over TikTok is that the application can collect information on its 170 million American users and tilt the scales of how they perceive key domestic issues such as jobs and student loans.
China is also engaged in outright aggression against the Philippines, Taiwan and Japan but it remains in the “gray zone” and falls short of traditional definitions of war.
It seems to be the State Department’s communications strategy is to portray Blinken as being an effective manager of U.S.-Chinese relations. But the realities are not as rosy. We already are engaged in a global, technology-intensive battle that we have not yet been able to fully understand, much less react to. Sorry to say, but Blinken is sleepwalking through the greatest confrontation that America faces today.
