Washington, D.C. – the capital of conventional wisdom, ruled by groupthink and herd mentality.
Its latest fad is "we need to get tough on China."
If you uttered those words five years ago, the Beltway geniuses would call you a kook if they even deigned to respond. Today, those same geniuses are muttering some variation on the theme.
But are they serious? Do they really mean it? Not to pop anyone's balloon, but the denizens of D.C. are famous for saying one thing and doing another.
So it should come as no surprise that most of the "tough on China" Johnny-come-lately's are as fake as the counterfeit goods that come from that nation.
In the spirit of consumer protection for consumers of politics, here is a handy guide to help you distinguish the China realist from the China apologists, the real goods versus the fakes.
The Biden campaign now seeks to present the candidate as the man to take on China – pay no attention to his "China is our friend" pronouncements stretching back decades and as recent as last year.
A campaign ad charges President Trump has been insufficiently tough on Beijing, saying, "Trump lost a trade war that he started."
That's the tell.
Excuse me, the CCP started this trade war, not President Trump.
And this is not a one-off slip of the tongue on Biden's part, something he is famous for. It's a premise of their China policy. You find the same formulation, "Trump's go-it-alone trade war," repeated on the campaign website and in all their ads and pronouncements.
The truth is CCP launched the trade war 40 years ago when Biden voted to give China most favored nation trade status. It escalated the war 20 years ago when Joe brought it into the World Trade Organization.
The Biden camp's failure to recognize whose trade war this really is shows they're not serious.
To understand what a Biden administration China policy would really be, all you have to do is listen to Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the mother ship of the globalist foreign-policy establishment. Haass and his clones would be running the foreign-policy shop for the senescent Biden.
In an op-ed he phoned in to the Washington Post, Haas slammed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's speech in which the secretary detailed the Chinese Communist Party's threat to America's independence, economy and values.
Haas only grudgingly acknowledges the Chinese Communist Party has "human rights failures" and "flexes it muscles in the South China Sea," preferring to direct his ire at our own government.
He dismisses the administration's call for a coordinated response to the CCP's challenge by saying "it is not within our power" to transform China.
Yet two paragraphs later, Haass declares, "What the United States can and should try to do is shape China's choices, to bring about a China that acts with a degree of restraint at home and abroad."
Huh? Which is it, Richard the First – we can't transform China – or Richard the Second – we can shape China's policies?
Worse than making a distinction without a difference, Haass makes no distinction where there is one.
The dean of the foreign-policy establishment told Twitter: "@SecPompeo doesn't speak of China but of the 'Chinese Communist Party,' as if there is a China apart from the Party."
Yes, Richard, there is one, though no doubt CCP General Secretary Xi is pleased the man who hopes to advise a president cannot tell the difference between a Marxist Leninist party and 1.5 billion Chinese people, with the former subjecting the latter to forced abortions, imprisonment and organ harvesting.
As for what will "bring about a China that acts with a degree of restraint at home and abroad," Haass offers empty words and the policies – "work with China," "work with allies and partners," integrate our economy with China's – that got us into the situation we're in now.
Don't believe the label. Washington's newly minted China realists are fakes.
They would continue our reliance on China, bleed our country of jobs and sacrifice American independence to the gods of globalism.
That's for real.
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