دانلود کتاب خطر رقابت – چگونه رقابت قدرت های بزرگ صلح را تهدید می کند و دموکراسی را تضعیف می کند

I n 2017, mere days before the White House fired him, Steve Bannon, the one-time strategist and campaign manager for Donald Trump, placed an unsolicited call to The American Prospect, a progressive magazine. He was looking to connect with its editor, Robert Kuttner, to discuss U.S.-China relations. Bannon thought Kuttner was an ideal interlocutor—the two like-minded on U.S. policy toward China. “It’s a great honor to finally track you down. I’ve followed your writing for years and I think you and I are in the same boat when it comes to China,” Bannon cheerily announced when Kuttner got on the line. Kuttner had just written a column arguing that China profited from the diplomatic impasse between the United States and North Korea and that China’s economic interests sabotaged the possibility of peace on the Korean peninsula. Bannon concurred. The United States “is at economic war with China,” said Bannon. “One of us [the United States or China] is going to be hegemon in 25 or 30 years,” Bannon argued; “we have to be maniacally focused on that.”1 Bannon’s call came days after white nationalists rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a neo-Nazi rammed his car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer and injuring thirty-five others. Media pundits at the time painted Bannon as irresponsible and deranged—a marginal figure from the far right whose policy proposals on China, like those of many advisers in the Trump administration, relied on and fueled xenophobia. Tina Nguyen, a reporter for Vanity Fair, called Bannon the Trump administration’s “resident ‘alt-right’ ideologue” whose “bizarre” comments during an interview were proof that he was “champing for a trade war with China.”2 Of course, contra what Bannon insisted in his call to Kuttner, Washington was not yet in an “economic war” with China. And it was just as likely that in the 2040s neither China nor the United States would be the global hegemon. Bannon betrayed a distorted sense of reality. But his preoccupation with China, and his sinister view of the country and its government, soon crept across Congress, the presidency, and large swaths of the electorate. Two years later, both Republicans and Democrats warned that China posed “possibly the largest threat to U.S. democratic values in history,” even a threat to “Western civilization.”3 “In a country that’s so divided . . . the thing that pulls it together is China,” mused Bannon in 2019.4 And by the time Joe Biden came to office in 2021, Americans were living in Bannon’s world. His dark, racialized prognostications became something approximating common sense, an assumed reality. Biden did not just embrace Trump’s aggressive stance toward China; in most respects, he took it further. Democrats and Republicans now characterize China as America’s preeminent adversary, “the threat that will define this century.”5 With little contention and much less public debate, the United States has committed itself to a full-throated rivalry with China, relying on the hyperbolized rhetoric first used by the likes of Steve Bannon.