Opinion|America Is Blundering Toward War With China

Before Iran, before Iraq, before Afghanistan there is no country that America has gotten as wrong as China. If this is mystifying, it is only because historical memories are short. America struggled through the previous fiascos. Getting it wrong again would be catastrophic. This is why it is crucial that President Trump strike the right balance in his summit this week with China’s leader, Xi Jinping.

During World War II, the United States backed China’s Chiang Kai-shek against the Japanese fascists who had invaded in the 1930s. The Roosevelt administration assumed that China under Chiang’s Nationalists would constitute one of the Big Four powers after World War II, along with the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union. When the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong swept to victory in the 1946-1949 civil war, Washington was shocked that a movement it had barely acknowledged had toppled the beloved Chiang. It was also enraged that the Soviet Union and China were now both in Communist hands. Someone had to be held to account.

Thus was born the “who lost China?” debate, a critical element of the Red Scare of the 1950s. The State Department officials held to account were precisely the ones who during World War II had been warning, to no avail, that the Communists were likely to militarily triumph. Rather than being celebrated for their clairvoyance, these officials were denounced as traitors whose weak support for the Nationalists had led to Chiang’s fall. The idea that the State Department could have prevented a Communist takeover across a landscape of 550 million people — 37 times the population of South Vietnam during our war there — gravely misjudged the limits of American power.

The Foreign Service officers themselves weren’t innocent. Though accurate about Mao’s chances, they misunderstood the nature of his rule. They conceived of Mao’s Communists as benign compared with Chiang’s Nationalists. Based in the Nationalist wartime capital of Chongqing, they knew intimately Chiang’s authoritarian tendencies. They made only short visits to the Communist base camp in Yan’an, visits that were stage-managed by Mao and his propagandist Zhou Enlai. Impressed by the order and discipline of Yan’an, they were blind to Mao’s totalitarianism, which would eventually result in the murder and starvation of as many as 70 million Chinese.

The 1950s purge of State Department specialists actually lasted into the 1960s. The Vietnam War was encouraged by Europeanists and generalists because the China hands who would have warned against the dangers of guerrilla war in Asia, and who would have noted that Vietnam had never been a puppet of Communist China, were no longer in key positions in government. There is a direct historical link, through China, from the Red Scare of the early 1950s to the fiasco in Vietnam in the middle and late 1960s.

The diplomatic opening to China accomplished by President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, in 1972 finally ended the Who Lost China debate. China was no longer lost and had instead become a geopolitical chess piece to be played against the Soviet Union. Nixon’s and Kissinger’s conception held until 1989, when the combination of China’s brutal crackdown at Tiananmen Square and the end of the Cold War meant that China was now both reviled, and, with the demise of Communism in Europe, less of an asset.