Hard-line views on how the U.S. should approach China have been around for some time, but the most extreme among them have usually existed only on the margins of the policy debate in Washington. In recent months, however, an expanding coalition of mainstream U.S. politicians and foreign policy analysts has pushed dangerous and irresponsible views that go far beyond traditional or reasonable concerns about China and which could very well spark a future conflict. This new wave of ultra-hawkish hardliners is getting greater attention in the mainstream media, and some of them may be in a position to shape the next administration’s China policy, making it all the more urgent to push back against their most extreme positions.
Prime examples of their views are reflected in House Speaker Mike Johnson’s remarks accompanying his announcement that the next Congress will renew the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, along with other recent remarks he has made on global threats and U.S. security policy. They were similarly expressed in a recent article co-authored by Matt Pottinger, the Asia director on former President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, and Mike Gallagher, a former congressman who until he resigned in April had chaired the select committee on the CCP. They are also on display in many of the select committee’s hearings and findings.
The language employed by the select committee on the CCP and its supporters is routinely extreme and polemical, and rarely fact-based in any balanced manner, consistently portraying the CCP as leveling an array of existential military, political, economic and values-based threats to the U.S., the West and the world in general.