Since the Trump administration adopted a confrontational approach to deal with China, the relations between the world’s two most powerful countries have been stuck in dire straits. The U.S. blames China for its growing “assertiveness” and “aggression” for the quagmire facing the two countries. However, looking into the talks and deeds by current and former U.S. officials provides insights into what was actually at play behind the change of China policy.
Former U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger, billed as the architect of China strategy under the Trump administration, serves as a good case study on what has driven U.S. hostility towards China.
“The Secret History of the Five Eyes,” an upcoming book by Richard Kerbaj, a British multi-award winning journalist, filmmaker and writer, revealed that Pottinger shouted at British officials for five hours during a May 2019 meeting in London in a desperate attempt to force the U.S. ally to scrap a plan that would allow Shenzhen-based telecom giant Huawei limited access to help build Britain’s 5G network.
During the meeting, Pottinger shouted and was entirely uninterested in the U.K.’s analysis of Huawei’s product security, according to the book, which is based on interviews with intelligence officials and recently declassified archives. An edited extract of the book was published on the London-based Sunday Times on Aug. 21.
The U.S. delegation didn’t have any compelling technical arguments that undermined the British assessments of Huawei, according to Kim Darroch, then Britain’s ambassador to the U.S.
Britain did not want to exclude Huawei altogether because its products were significantly cheaper than those of its competitors, Nokia and Ericsson. The CIA then tried to discredit the U.K.’s position on Huawei in the eyes of its European allies, and in May 2020, Trump introduced further sanctions that barred Huawei from using U.S.-made chips in its equipment. Two months later, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson finally banned Huawei from operating in Britain as his government’s telecom experts could no longer guarantee the security of Huawei’s products because of the U.S. chip ban.
The episode shows Pottinger and other U.S. officials were determined to force the U.K. to ditch Huawei out of political reasons, rather than any technical concerns related to Huawei’s products.
Pottinger, a former foreign correspondent for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal in Beijing and a former U.S. Marines intelligence officer, first joined the Trump administration in 2017 as senior director of the National Security Council’s Asia division. His influence on U.S. policy towards China was immediate on taking up his role, according to U.S. media reports. One year after he parachuted into the White House, Pottinger had played a key role in Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on US$200 billion of Chinese goods, according to The Sunday Times. Pottinger was also instrumental in devising other actions aimed at containing China.
Pottinger, who now chairs the China program at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, worked with other Trump officials to reorient U.S. policy on China toward a confrontational approach, crafting new guidelines including an “Indo-Pacific strategy review,” as well as the Asia part of the National Security Strategy, which labeled China a “strategic competitor,” according to The Washington Post. He also branded China a “revisionist power” that has a strong will to change the “norms accepted by status quo nations.”
Along with other China hawks, Pottinger has been hyping up China’s threats. On June 8, 2022, at a webinar hosted by law firm Arnold & Porter, Pottinger claimed that China wants to do away with the Westphalian treaty system that emerged 400 years ago in Europe and create a global collective led by the Communist Party of China.
Pottinger made the claim based on Ian Easton’s new book “The Final Struggle: Inside China’s Global Strategy,” which cited a Chinese military textbook titled “Strategic Support for Achieving the Great Chinese Resurgence” (《实现中华民族伟大复兴的战略支援》). However, a search for the textbook on many Chinese libraries and online book stores turns out nothing.
The Westphalian system, established after the Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, was based on principles such as sovereign independence, equality of the nation states and territorial integrity. China has been a staunch supporter of the principle of respecting sovereign independence and territorial integrity. It is the U.S.-led West that has launched wars against other countries using various pretexts, upending the Westphalian principles. A recent study shows that by 2019, the U.S. had engaged in almost 400 wars across the world since its founding in 1776, Iran’s Press TV has reported.
Pottinger also has the penchant for attracting eyeballs with outlandish claims. Speaking at the webinar, he alleged that there is increasing recognition that China has declared a new cold war on the U.S. and that it is China, not the U.S., that started the decoupling between the two countries.
China becoming the “manufacturing floor of the planet” over the past decades was an aberration, Pottinger said at the webinar. He advocates diminishing trade with China and creating different groupings like AUKUS and the Quad to isolate China.
By this way, the U.S. can outgun China without firing a shot, according to his reasoning. “We actually won the cold war without firing a shot at the nuclear-powered adversary,” he said. “The U.S. will benefit from some of the lessons of the cold war [if they are applied] to the current competition.”
What Pottinger and other China hawks have said demonstrated that the U.S. desire to contain a rising China as well as the fears over declining U.S. hegemony, rather than China’s “aggression” or “totalitarianism” as claimed by them, are reasons behind unrelenting U.S. hostility towards the Asian country.
The United States becoming the second-largest economy in the world “is a thought that is inconceivable to many Americans,” Kishore Mahbubani, a former Singaporean diplomat and currently a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, said during an interview with Bloomberg on Aug. 3.
Pottinger declared that a “paradigm shift has taken place” as the confrontational China policy has occurred in two successive U.S. administrations. Apparently he is happy to see the two countries continue to lock horns.
However, as Mahbubani pointed out, this geopolitical contest is neither benefiting the U.S. nor China, and is certainly harming the rest of the world at a time when humanity needs to focus on more important common challenges.
(The author is a deputy editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Daily.)