The United States’s hurried withdrawal from Afghanistan revealed the messy space where the discourse about international leadership meets leadership on the ground. Even as many are criticizing the role that various Western fantasies of nation-building/democratization/containment/management have played in the debacle, it’s still unclear what a Western reckoning with these fantasies will look like.
This is in part because the fantasy mill has never stopped churning. In fact, it’s currently ramping up, gaining energy from much meatier fuel: China’s global rise. The last two decades have shifted the landscape in the United States, deepening bipartisan divides and sharpening anxieties about a national decline. Any soul-searching about those stale old fantasies now has to make space for urgent new fantasies about China.
There are few better places to see this in action than in the former Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger’s recent article in Foreign Affairs. It’s a master class in taking a tangled skein of different, contradictory narratives, and weaving them together to appear like a unified story. This is a story about China’s ‘malevolent’ rise, and how it tricked ‘the United States and other free societies.’
At its heart, Pottinger’s account reveals an interesting ambivalence about Western companies. On the one hand, their commercial success and technical innovation are both drivers of Western leadership and its greatest validator (one of the many narratives woven into this piece is that Western innovation is a sign of genius, while Chinese innovation is mostly technology theft.)
And yet, these companies come off as tainted by the very global success that ostensibly makes them great. Their focus on profit ultimately makes them untrustworthy (either craven or naïve about their Chinese economic ties or both.) The clear overlap between this anxiety about major firms’ capitalist promiscuity, and Xi Jinping’s own recent crackdown on domestic Chinese firms, is one of the many obvious points Pottinger studiously avoids.
Pottinger’s piece is an instance of the current U.S. administration’s own preference to frame its rising tensions with China as a struggle between democracies and autocracies. This is a very convenient framing, glossing over all manner of lapses. It also conveniently drags the rest of the world into the us-versus-them project, while never having to consider the priorities of these other countries.
Writing about former President Bill Clinton’s 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical factory outside of Khartoum, the Sudanese columnist Nesrine Malik recently remembered: ‘What was suddenly clear to us then, standing in front of the ruins in a sleepy city that had supposedly become the center of Islamic terrorism overnight, was the real logic of the “war on terror”: our lives were fodder for the production of bold headlines in American newspapers, saluting the strength, swift action and resolve of western leaders. We, on the sharp end of it all, would never be the protagonists.’
Pottinger complains at length about China’s purported threat to American global leadership. But the other countries supposedly being led never get a word in, except for rich U.S. allies like Australia.
Anyone else wishing to raise a more complicated story about China’s impact on development in the Global South, or asking whether one can even count as a ‘free’ society if you’re not a rich society, is out of luck. But are they really surprised? After all, if there’s one lesson to take from Afghanistan, it’s that the Western narrative mill is for protagonists only. The rest of us are extras.
