More sensible voices in U.S. caution against Washington's Cold War mentality

BEIJING, July 13 (Xinhua) -- Fifty years after former U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger's secret mission to Beijing to help lay the groundwork for former U.S. President Richard Nixon's ice-breaking China visit, the relationship between the world's top two economies now stands at another critical juncture because of an increasingly agitated Washington.

When then Chinese and U.S. leaders chose to break the barriers and reopen the door for exchanges at the height of the Cold War, they looked farther than their living time and thought with a global vision.

It is worrying to see that in recent years the zero-sum Cold War thinking has begun to prevail in Washington and some U.S. politicians are poisoning China-U.S. relations.

However, while demagogues in Washington are hyping up so-called China threat, more sensible voices are calling on some U.S. politicians to drop their troubling Cold War mentality.

Calling it "distressing and dangerous," U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders noted in a recent article for Foreign Affairs magazine that "a fast-growing consensus is emerging in Washington that views the U.S.-Chinese relationship as a zero-sum economic and military struggle."

"Now, instead of extolling the virtues of free trade and openness toward China, the establishment beats the drums for a new Cold War, casting China as an existential threat to the United States," Sanders said, adding that it is important to challenge this new consensus.

A commentary published by The Washington Post noted in late June that despite existential threats posed by catastrophic climate change and a global pandemic, "Biden's new normal seems ominously leaning to a revival of Cold War politics."

"The powerful military-industrial security interests gain renewed importance," said the opinion, adding that "the costs of going back to the Cold War are immense."

"It also deeply distorts the real security threats we face. As savage weather exacts an ever-greater toll in lives and resources, climate change is no longer a distant threat. No progress can be made without China," the opinion said.

"A renewed Cold War will reinforce the nationalist and militarist factions among all the adversaries. The fearmongering around China has already contributed to the rise of hate crimes against Asian Americans in the United States that will make revitalizing our democracy even more difficult," it added.

In an article titled "The US's greatest danger isn't China. It's much closer to home," former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich called on his fellow Americans "not to demonize China" in a way that will create "a new paranoia" that further bends U.S. priorities, stirs up nativism and xenophobia, and leads to heavier military spendings rather than public investments in education, infrastructure, and basic research.

According to Reich, in the postwar period, America has a track record of blaming others for its own failure in addressing domestic crisis, one notable case of which was in the 1980s, when Japan, a world economic engine, was caught up in the U.S. blame game.

Countless congressional hearings were held on the Japanese "challenge" to America and "a tide of books demonized Japan" were published during that time, he said.

Some of them had claimed that Japan imperiled the American way of life and "ultimately our freedoms," while others had asserted that "Japan's growing power put the United States at risk of falling prey to a hostile Japanese ... world order," Reich noted.

Such a popular yet distorted image of Japan has made the United States overlook its systematic problems in financial, educational and infrastructure sectors, which would ultimately be detrimental to U.S. competitiveness, he noted.

"But throughout America's postwar history, it has been easier to blame others than to blame ourselves," he said.