MONDAY, AUGUST 3 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
X
i Jinping this year handed the
United States a golden opportu-
nity to rally countries against
China’s high-tech totalitarian-
ism, ruthless mercantilism and bullying
of foreign critics. The result could have
been a serious setback to Beijing’s global
ambitions and, perhaps, the weakening
of Xi’s hard-line nationalist regime.
Predictably, however, President Trump
is blowing it. In the past month, his
administration has put on a textbook
demonstration of how not to win over
global opinion, enlist allies and take mea-
sures that might have an impact in
B eijing.
The U.S. chance was clear: It began
with the growing global resentment of
China’s enabling of the coronavirus.
Asian governments were alarmed by an
escalation of Chinese belligerence in the
South China Sea; European leaders have
fumed over the “wolf warrior” diplomacy
of Chinese ambassadors. India saw 20 of
its soldiers killed by Chinese troops in the
most serious border skirmish in decades.
To be sure, Trump and the administra-
tion’s anti-Beijing faction tried to take
advantage. Since June, Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo has coordinated four major
speeches by senior administration offi-
cials making a case against China, accom-
panied by a flurry of U.S. punitive mea-
sures, including the closing of the Chi-
nese consulate in Houston.
So far, however, the administration
offensive has manifestly failed to win
international support — and for good
reason. Let’s start with the rhetoric.
Pompeo and his crew could have focused
on Xi, who during nearly eight years in
power has crushed his domestic civil
society, committed epic crimes against
Muslims in the west and escalated Chi-
na’s foreign aggressions. Instead, they
peddle a picture of China’s government as
a Communist monolith bent on world
domination — and the 40-year history of
Western engagement with it as a disas-
trous mistake.
The speeches delivered by Pompeo,
national security adviser Robert
C. O’Brien, Attorney General William
P. Barr and FBI Director Christopher
A. Wray are laden with early-Cold War
red-scare rhetoric. “America, under Presi-
dent Trump’s leadership, has finally awo-
ken to the threat the Communist Party’s
actions... pose to our very way of life,”
O’Brien declared in the first of the speech-
es. Xi, he said, “sees himself as Joseph
Stalin’s successor.” “If there’s one thing I
learned” from the Cold War, said Pompeo,
it’s that “communists almost always lie.”
Stalin employed genocide in creating a
socialist command economy in the Soviet
Union. Xi presides over one of the most
dynamic capitalist economies, home to
373 billionaires. The Chinese leader is a
dedicated autocrat and ardent national-
ist, but few China experts describe him as
a communist ideologue. No matter: “In
China,” claimed O’Brien, communist
“ideas remain as fundamental... as the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights do to
us as Americans.”
Describing communism as China’s de-
fining feature is fundamental to Pompeo’s
most extreme argument, which is that the
West’s error was not its response to the
emergence of Xi’s hard-line regime but its
opening to China in 1972. Twisting histo-
ry, Pompeo claimed that the goal of U.S.
diplomatic and economic relations with
Beijing was to turn it into a democracy —
and that it’s time to recognize the effort
failed. “President Nixon once said he
feared he has created a ‘Frankenstein’ by
opening the world to the CCP,” Pompeo
said, referring to the Chinese Communist
Party, “and here we are.”
Many in the West now agree that the Xi
regime is a menace. But few will accept
Pompeo’s thesis that China’s integration
into the global economy should be regret-
ted, much less reversed. This is rhetoric
designed to win over red-state Republi-
cans in an election year, not audiences in
Europe or key Asian states, such as “Com-
munist” Vietnam. No wonder German
Chancellor Angela Merkel, Japanese
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and even
Indian leader Narendra Modi have care-
fully distanced themselves from the
Trumpians’ new Cold War. Merkel has
resisted U.S. pressure to boycott Chinese
telecommunications champion Huawei;
Abe declined to join the U.S. denunciation
of Xi’s crackdown on Hong Kong. Modi
responded to the border clash by upgrad-
ing military relations with... Australia.
In truth, Trump has made it all but
impossible for these nations to join in the
“new alliance of democracies” that
Pompeo proposes. Trump just withdrew
12,000 of the 34,500 U.S. troops stationed
in Germany, while falsely claiming that
Merkel ’s government was “delinquent” in
paying its “fees” to NATO. He is threaten-
ing to pull U.S. forces out of Japan and
South Korea unless they dramatically
increase their subsidies. He is threaten-
ing tariff wars against all three countries,
while banking on his trade deal with Xi to
boost Midwestern farm exports before
the election.
If that election brings about a new
U.S. administration under Joe Biden, a
first order of foreign policy business will
be a China reset. Only the fixing will need
to be done not so much with Beijing, but
with the would-be alliance against it that
Trump has done his best to sabotage.
Twitter: @jacksondiehl
JACKSON DIEHL
A wasted
chance to
stand up to
Beijing
P
resident Trump’s daily barbarities
— Postpone the election! Protect
the white suburbs! Take hydroxy-
chloroquine! — impose a high
cost. They require instant and under-
standably furious responses that quickly
consume the entire political
c onversation.
Exhaustion with all this is helping for-
mer vice president Joe Biden. His most
important if unspoken promise is a spell
of glorious tranquility. Nonetheless, we
need to put aside the dreadful, distracting
din long enough to grapple with the deep-
er currents running through our country.
The fecklessness of Senate Republi-
cans and their inability to negotiate seri-
ously on a new economic rescue package
that economists of nearly all stripes say
we need is not primarily a failure of
personal virtue. It reflects a disconnect
between what most of them believe and
what the moment requires.
And the rise of a more vocal left, includ-
ing the victory of unabashed socialists in
big-city Democratic primaries, signals a
backlash against ideological constraints
that prevent an honest reckoning with a
great many questions.
They include: Why do so many people
lack health insurance? Why are housing
costs out of control in our great metropol-
itan areas? Why is college unaffordable?
Why is the pay for workers we call “essen-
tial” so low? Why is so much wealth
concentrated in the hands of a small
number of financiers and a small group of
tech companies?
What do these developments have in
common?
It’s a h abit of intellectuals (and news-
paper columnists) to highlight the impor-
tance of ideas in politics. “Ideas Have
Consequences,” the title of Richard
M. Weaver’s 1948 conservative classic, is a
line much beloved by those whose job it is
to traffic in them.
Much less noticed is a different truth:
Events have consequences for ideas.
The survival of big belief systems is not
guaranteed by able cadres of philoso-
phers and theorists who dutifully beat
back objections. Most of us, even when we
don’t admit it, are rough-and-ready prag-
matists. We judge ideas by whether they
work. And ideas that once won wide
assent fall by the wayside when they lead
to plainly undesirable outcomes.
The collapse of the Soviet Union is an
instructive case. The fall was preceded by
a loss of faith in the doctrine that under-
girded the system by the very people who
ran it. Aleksandr Yakovlev — known as the
“godfather of glasnost,” the term for the
opening up of closed intellectual spaces
under Mikhail Gorbachev’s presidency —
chose one word to capture the mood of
frustration: “Enough!”
“We cannot live like this any longer,” he
once said. “Everything must be done in a
new way. We must reconsider our con-
cepts, our approaches, our views of the
past and our future.”
Such also was the mood that gave rise
to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New
Deal. In his 1965 book, “The Poverty of
Abundance: Hoover, the Nation, the De-
pression,” the historian Albert U. Romas-
co wrote that President Herbert Hoover’s
failure to contain the economic wreckage
of the Great Depression opened the way
for the very forms of big government he
disdained.
“He had labored to create a psychologi-
cal climate of opinion conducive to public
confidence,” Romasco wrote of Hoover.
“Instead, he succeeded in fostering a nec-
essary precondition for the legislative
outburst of the New Deal years: the pub-
lic’s conviction that the job of recovery
would require the forceful use of federal
power.”
And here we are again. Trump’s cries to
“open up the economy” were a failed
exercise in creating “public confidence.”
Instead, he fostered the spread of covid-- His refusal to mobilize federal resourc-
es to fight the pandemic in a robust and
consistent way have left behind a catas-
trophe for both the economy and public
health.
In the meantime, Republicans in the
Senate, like Hoover before them, cannot
fully bring themselves to accept how large
an intervention Washington needs to
make to prevent a l ong, grueling econom-
ic slide. Thus their dithering.
Meanwhile, Biden and his advisers are
busy studying up on the New Deal not
because they are, as Trump would have it,
“puppets” of the left, but because our
circumstances echo Roosevelt’s time. Get-
ting out of the mess we’re in requires more
government action than conservative ide-
ology admits. And as in the 1920s, in-
equality and economic concentration
leave us with pent-up problems that must
finally be confronted. Sounds like a time
for a New New Deal.
In a t ellingly titled 2018 essay, “The
New Old Democrats,” top Biden policy
adviser Jake Sullivan wrote: “Democrats
should not blush too much, or pay too
much heed, when political commentators
arch their eyebrows about the party mov-
ing left. The center of gr avity itself is
moving, and this is a good thing.”
Yes. It’s moving because thoroughly
nonideolog ical voters are saying
“Enough!” They are rejecting old ideas
not just because they’re tired and wrong,
but also because we can’t live like this any
longer.
Twitter: @EJDionne
E.J. DIONNE JR.The growing
need for
a New New
Deal
BY ROBERT C. O’BRIENR
onald Reagan is looking
down on us with a knowing
smile. Like Reagan, President
Trump strives for good rela-
tions with all nations, including Rus-
sia. But no nation, including Russia,
should doubt the president’s commit-
ment to defending the United States
and our allies.
President Trump has demonstrat-
ed to Russia that he means what he
says about putting “America First.” If
recently reported allegations of Rus-
sian malign activity toward Ameri-
cans in Afghanistan prove true, Rus-
sia knows from experience that it will
pay a price — even if that price never
becomes public.
Two weeks ago, President Trump
imposed additional sanctions against
Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin,
who owns both the Internet Research
Agency, a t roll farm that spread disin-
formation around the 2016 election,
and the Wagner Group, whose merce-
naries are deployed in Syria, Ukraine
and Libya.
The president also announced new
guidance to deter companies from
assisting Russia with its Nord Stream
2 and TurkStream pipelines. Both
projects would make our European
partners more dependent on Russian
energy, giving Moscow dangerous
economic leverage over Europe.
These steps are unfortunately nec-
essary given Russian actions that
threaten the United States and its
allies. This includes interfering in
Western democratic elections in 2016
and 2017; propping up brutal regimes
in Syria and Venezuela; engaging in
cyberattacks on America and its al-
lies; violating important arms trea-
ties; and attempting to kill Sergei
Skripal, a British subject, with a mili-
tary-grade nerve agent.
In response to this conduct, the
Trump administration imposed sanc-
tions on hundreds of Russian entities.
These targets include key Russian
oligarchs and their companies, senior
Russian government officials and a
state-owned Russian weapons trad-ing company.
President Trump has also sanc-
tioned two branches of Rosneft, a
Russian state-owned oil company, for
operating in Venezuela in support of
the illegitimate Maduro regime.
On the cyber front, the administra-
tion charged three Russians for the
2014 Yahoo hack, including two of fi-
cers of the Russian Federal Security
Service. It also banned the use of
Kaspersky Lab software on govern-
ment computers in light of the com-
pany’s ties to Russian intelligence.
In 2018, the United States publi-
cized Russian military involvement in
the worldwide NotPetya cyberattack
and sanctioned five Russian entities
and three individuals for their roles in
the incident. In 2020, the United
States publicly attributed cyber -
attacks against the republic of Geor-
gia to Russian military intelligence
(GRU) and released a cybersecurity
advisory against GRU malware.
In light of the Skripal attack and
other intelligence operations, Presi-
dent Trump cracked down on Russian
intelligence operations in the United
States. In September 2017, the admin-
istr ation closed the Russian Consul-
ate in San Francisco, a consular annex
in New York and a chancery annex in
Washington. In April 2018, the United
States shut down the Russian Consul-
ate in Seattle and expelled 60 Russian
intelligence officers from the country.
When Russia violated two arms
control treaty agreements, President
Trump withdrew from them. The
United States exited the Intermediate
Nuclear Forces Treaty in August 2019
and announced our withdrawal from
the Open Skies Treaty in May. In doing
so, President Trump made clear we
will not remain in treaties violated by
the other side.
The president is also investing in
U.S. capabilities at a l evel never be-
fore seen. His administration provid-
ed states with nearly $800 million in
election assistance. It also established
federal councils to increase coordina-
tion among government and private-
sector providers of voting and regis-
tration systems.To deter Russian aggression and
defend our NATO allies, President
Trump has provided billions in addi-
tional funding for the European De-
terrence Initiative. And to assist
Ukraine, the administration sent crit-
ical self-defense weapons, including
the long-sought-after Javelin anti-
tank missiles.
President Trump knows that peace
comes through strength. Accordingly,
his administration has embarked
upo n a historic rebuilding of the U.S.
military. That includes the largest
military pay raise in a decade and the
establishment of the U.S. Space Force,
the first new military branch since the
1940s, among other priorities.
In June, the United States com-
menced talks with Russia on the New
START accord. The United States is
cautiously optimistic that we can
reach an agreement with Moscow and
China on a framework for arms con-
trol that seeks to limit all nuclear
weapons in a verifiable manner. Pres-
ident Trump and President Vladimir
Putin had a cordial call July 23 during
which both leaders pledged their best
efforts to extend New START and
make it even better.
Another area of potential coopera-
tion with Russia is counterterrorism.
Both Russia and the United States
have had their homelands attacked by
violent extremists. U.S. officials will
likely engage with their Russian intel-
ligence and law enforcement counter-
parts on such matters in the coming
months.
No president since Reagan has
shown such resolve to Moscow. Like
Reagan, President Trump seeks an-
other path with Russia — one in
which Russia refrains from aggres-
sion abroad and becomes a friendly
partner to the United States and
Europe. In such a world, sanctions on
Russia would be unnecessary, and
trade between our countries would
flourish. Russians, Americans and the
world would all benefit from such a
relationship.The writer is the national security adviser
to President Tr ump.Trump has shown Russia
his r esolve to defend the U.S.
SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet in Osaka, Japan, on June 28, 2019.would not do is make the world a safer
place. Paradoxically, it might make it
harder for governments to monitor and
regulate the top firms. There would be
more firms to watch, and smaller firms
with fewer resources might actually be-
come more vulnerable to attack.
To be fair, let’s note that no country has
yet suffered a mass cyberattack from a
nation or a rogue group that targeted its
basic information infrastructure, with
the possible exception of Ukraine, at-
tacked by Russia in 2014. Some cyber
experts minimize the possibility. It
strikes them as melodramatic alarmism.
Perhaps they are right.
This is worth repeating: Despite many
breaches, none has yet risen to the level of
a concerted assault designed to bring
daily life to a halt. But the experts could
also be wrong. It may be that a mass
attack on the United States or some other
major target is just a matter of time. What
would such an attack look like and feel
like? We now have a crude standard of
comparison: the coronavirus pandemic
and the subsequent shutdown of major
parts of the economy and society.
The consequences of a massive cyber-
attack could make the disruptions caused
by the pandemic seem like child’s play.
There might be simultaneous assaults on
the nation’s power, communication, fi-
nancial and transportation networks.
People would stumble about in a cyber
fog with public and private communica-I
t’s the technology, s tupid!
Congress hauled the leaders of
Amazon, Apple, Facebook and
Google up on Capitol Hill the other
day, digitally of course. They stand ac-
cused of all manner of abuse of power, but
mainly (1) using their immense market
presence to squeeze competitors and (2)
tapping their vast databases to shape
Americans’ political, cultural and eco-
nomic behavior.
The presumption, shared by Congress
and much of the public, which has a
long-standing suspicion of power and
bigness, is that dealing with the antitrust
issues is tantamount to confronting the
threats posed by the Internet. But it isn’t.
The real threat is the possibility of a mass
cyberattack on the nation’s information
infrastructure. The Internet is funda-
mentally a national security problem,
which is different from saying it has too
much market power.
When I wrote above that “it’s t he tech-
nology, stupid,” I wasn’t trying to be cute.
What I meant is that the chief culprit is
the nature of the technology itself, not the
market power of the top Internet firms.
For argument’s sake, let’s assume that
Congress or the White House decides to
break up Amazon, Apple, Facebook and
Google into three companies each. I am
not saying this is desirable or undesir-
able, but it would surely transform the
structure. (Disclosure: Amazon chief ex-
ecutive Jeff Bezos owns The Post.) What ittions channels, from email to cable TV,
disabled or overwhelmed.
We are fooling ourselves if we think
that breaking up the industry means we
are confronting the true threat of the
Internet. I have written before that we’d
be better off without the Internet — a
suggestion that some regarded as a silly
attempt at humor but, though unrealis-
tic, was an attempt to emphasize the
seriousness of the matter.
My view, then and now, is that all the
wonderful things that the Internet allows
us to do are potentially offset by the
possible costs that it could impose on us.
If the industry deserves harsh criticism —
and it does — it is for playing down or
ignoring the threats posed by this novel
and nerve-racking new technology.
Just what should we be doing now to
protect ourselves? The choices aren’t
good. Switch more and more cyber-traffic
to private ne tworks? Build some sort of
cyber-wall to filter out more unwanted
traf fic? All the possibilities come with
high costs and many practical problems.
But none is likely until we acknowl-
edge the true nature of our problem.
Congress seems a long way from doing
that. The congressional appearance of
the Big Tech executives gave some indica-
tion of the gap. Most Democratic mem-
bers and some Republicans were having
too much fun beating up Big Tech. It’s a
traditional role, but it’s now outdated. We
need to catch up with reality.ROBERT J. SAMUELSONThe true threat of the Internet