To remain on the path he seems incapable of abandoning, Clifford D. May has effectuated intellectual somersaults to convince his audience that the old Cold War is still on, and has not been replaced – as some believe – by a struggle between two nation-states or two opposing ideologies.
May pulled those tricks by writing an article that came
under the title: “The new — or perhaps renewed — Cold War,” and the subtitle: “You can't win it if you don't know you're in it.”
The article was published on May 2, 2023 in The Washington Times.
It is obvious at the outset that the writer aims to develop
an argument by which to establish that war is more dangerous than a struggle
between opposing nations or ideologies. Thus, ignoring the Chinese history of
the last seven decades, Clifford May made it sound like America continues to be
at war because it made the mistake of misunderstanding the evil intent of the
Communists, and not because the 1950s Cultural Revolution made of China the
super techno-industrial giant that it is today.
Instead of admitting to that reality, here in condensed
form, is how Clifford May effectuated two somersaults, one of which attribute
to Americans the many successes that the Chinese people and their leaders have
scored for themselves in the relatively short period of time they had available
to them:
“We did not see China’s transition because the conventional
wisdom held that the People’s Republic of China was sliding away from communism,
embracing freer markets and freer trade in pursuit of prosperity. Other
freedoms would surely follow. We Americans could facilitate these historical
changes. In 2001, President Bill Clinton pushed to give the PRC permanent
normal trade relations with the US and membership in the World Trade
Organization. As a senator and vice president, Joe Biden was a strong advocate
of closer relations with the PRC. He believed that a rising China is a positive
development, not only for China but for America and the world. Running for
president a decade later, he told voters that China’s rulers are not bad folks.
But guess what? They’re not competition for us either. His National Security
Strategy, published last October, asserts that the Cold War is over and we do
not seek conflict or a new Cold War”.
To strengthen his argument, Clifford May effectuated a
second somersault when he invoked what Matt Pottinger had told the House select
Committee on China, namely that in a cold war, the US should have two primary
objectives. The first was articulated by Ronald Reagan even before he became
president: We win, and they lose, said Reagan.
To which Clifford May has added that this doesn’t imply the
termination of CCP rule in China. It doesn’t even mean containment — the core
of US policy toward the Soviet Union. It does suggest ‘constrainment’ —
preventing the PRC from becoming the global hegemon, enforcing its rules
internationally while the US resigns itself to becoming a has-been power in a
world where liberty dies.
And this leads to the false assertion that the second vital objective in a cold
war will be to prevent it from becoming hot. But because this will be
impossible to achieve without there being evil characters to deter and keep at
bay or silence by defeating and taking out for good, Clifford May began this
part of his argument by imagining appropriate but non-existent evil characters,
as you’ll see in what follows:
“Listen to Chinese President Xi Jinping, who declared that
it is his ‘historical mission’ to utilize the tools of dictatorship to realize
a future in which capitalism will inevitably perish and socialism will
inevitably triumph. Marxism, he said, was created in order to change the
destiny of human history. Whoever rejects that world will be rejected by the
world”.
Of course,
Chinese President Xi Jinping said no such thing. But defamation is a standard
somersault that’s frequently pulled by Jews behind the back of their victims
such as you see them do incessantly to the Iranians whom they accuse of
planning a second Holocaust. You also see the Jews do it to their other
challengers in the region; those they accuse of terrorizing the Jews who are
themselves the terrorists that never cease to descend on occupied Palestine —
coming from everywhere in the world — armed with the deadliest and most
terrorizing American-made weapons you can imagine.
But what’s
the purpose of the defamation? It is to establish the superiority of America
over its foes, thus cement the idea that deterrence will not lead to war by the
process of reciprocal escalation. In fact, Clifford May would have you believe
that if America were to embark on a strong drive to arm itself, it will scare
China and its allies enough to prevent them from misbehaving in the Pacific
region or anywhere else in the world.
Finally, Clifford May has endorsed Michael Pillsbury’s
coauthored report in which the two writers argued that “protecting the US
homeland and prosperity and diminishing China’s ability to harm the US will
require a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach”.
And being the unrepentant warmonger, Clifford May continues
to cling to the idea that this may be a heavy lift, but the alternative could
be for historians of the future to write that the collapse of the Soviet Union
was a battle won in a war lost because Americans wrongly believed the war had
ended.