Former Chicago mayor and Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has an op-ed in theWall Street Journalencouraging Americans to put aside their differences, stop hating each other, and focus on hating China instead. As a piece of anti-China propaganda, it’s a remarkable document, because of how little evidence it presents that China is actually a threat to the United States. Instead, Emanuel is quite open about encouraging animosity toward China only because it would serve domestic political purposes (namely, tamping down the left-wing and right-wing political movements he dislikes). 

The thesis of the piece is well-captured by the accompanying illustration, which is straight out of the annals of grotesque Yellow Peril propaganda. It features Walt Kelly’s cartoon opossum Pogo pointing to a monstrous Chinese dragon complete with horns and long Fu Manchu mustache. The Americans on the blue team and the Americans on the red team are both pointing fingers at each other, each claiming to speak for the U.S., while oblivious to “the enemy”: the marauding dragon coming for the city. 

No, Emanuel’s actual op-ed isn’t any more subtle than this. The piece is entitled “We Have Met the Enemy and He Isn’t Us,” the correct “enemy” of course being China. Emanuel laments that Americans are so riled up. Whereas we used to have a politics of politeness and respect, in the last decades “the country was beset by two movements defined almost exclusively by anger and resentment. Occupy Wall Street’s antipathy to capitalism fixed the sentiment now driving Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York mayor. The tea party simultaneously metastasized into the MAGA movement and the riots of Jan. 6, 2021.” I will avoid commenting too much on the classic centrist trope of conflating left-wing and right-wing politics as both manifestations of “anger.” (In the left’s case, it is anger that the rent is too high and people can’t afford to raise their kids, while in the right’s case, it is anger at Haitians over fake stories about pet-eating, but Emanuel doesn’t see much of a difference between the democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders and the authoritarian nationalism of Donald Trump.) 

Instead, I want to focus on the bizarre but illuminating question this analysis leads Emanuel to, namely: “Can China be the external threat that restores internal cohesion to our politics?” Emanuel says that this is the absolute perfect time for a campaign of xenophobia and warmongering against China: 

In some Shakespearean sense, China’s long shadow has appeared at exactly the right moment. But Xi Jinping is much more than a foil poised to unite Americans who would otherwise remain defined by their blue and red affinities. The China threat is both real and potent. The U.S. has never before been asked to face down a country that has three times our population, is fueled by an advanced economy, and is capable, as its leaders intend, of replacing us atop the global hierarchy. Failing a broad reorientation, the question won’t be “Who lost China?” but “Who lost to China?” Yet Washington has yet to mobilize in full against a real threat.

Emanuel looks back fondly at times like World War II, when “Nazism spurred a nation of immigrants to unite in erecting an ‘arsenal of democracy,’” and the 1980s, where “the ‘evil empire,’ as Ronald Reagan described the Soviet Union, compelled Americans of all stripes to defend the principle of freedom.” But today, in the absence of anticommunist hysteria, we lack a national purpose. We can get it back if we tackle “the China threat” together.

Here’s what’s astonishing about Emanuel’s op-ed, though: at no point does he explain how China threatens America. What, exactly, is the China threat? What are they going to do to us? They’re not actually a big red dragon with a long mustache destroying our city. So what are they going to do? Even though Emanuel says the threat is “both real and potent,” he doesn’t say what’s actually going to happen here if we don’t “mobilize in full,” except that China is going to “replace us atop the global hierarchy.” 

There you have the basic presumption underlying a great deal of U.S. foreign policy discourse, which is that the United States has some kind of inherent right to be the dominant global superpower forever (even if it has a much smaller population than some other countries), and any threat to our dominance over others is existential and must be stopped at all costs. As Noam Chomsky explained in 2021, 

There’s constant talk about what’s called the China threat. You even read it in sober, reasonable—usually reasonable—journals, about the terrible China threat. Well, what is—and we have to move expeditiously to contain and limit the China threat. What exactly is the China threat? Actually, that question is rarely raised here. It is discussed in Australia, the country that’s right in the claws of the dragon. So, recently, the distinguished statesman, former Prime Minister Paul Keating, did have an essay in the Australian press about the China threat. He finally concluded, realistically, that the China threat is China’s existence. The U.S. will not tolerate the existence of a state that cannot be intimidated the way Europe can be, that does not follow U.S. orders the way Europe does, but pursues its own course. That’s the threat.

Emanuel seems to confirm Chomsky’s analysis. There’s no actual threat to the American people here. There’s just a threat to the relative global economic power of American elites. But most of us have nothing to fear from China, and China itself is constantly pleading with the U.S. not to engage in this kind of Cold War rhetoric. The Chinese government has warned over and over again that this kind of zero-sum thinking leads to unnecessary conflict. But a new Cold War is precisely what Rahm Emanuel is advocating! Nowhere in his op-ed does he talk about humanizing, empathizing with, or cooperating with China. They are a convenient bogeyman, a cartoon red dragon, to be feared and fought. 

The dangers of this kind of thinking cannot be overstated. Chomsky and I warned in the Myth of American Idealism that the very survival of humanity depends on the U.S. managing to coexist peacefully with China rather than end up in a state of war with a nuclear-armed power. This kind of rhetoric about China as an enemy is ubiquitous on the right, but Emanuel is showing that it’s no better among many centrist Democrats, who don’t seem to have any understanding of the long-term risks of nuclear conflict or the suicidal stupidity of turning our top overseas trading partner into an enemy. (Emanuel also repeats the annoying habit of some Democrats of attacking Trump from the right on China, saying that Trump’s efforts to compete with China are emulating Beijing’s “state-directed” economic model rather than encouraging the “dynamism of the private sector,” in a strange effort to brand the Democrats as more capitalist than Trump.) 

Rahm Emanuel might run for president in 2028, and while I would hope his abrasive personality and the ignominious end to his tenure as Chicago mayor will make him deeply unpopular, right now the field is wide open. If it’s not Emanuel, we may still get one of these pro-corporate warmongers as the Democratic candidate. This would be a tragedy, because these people are in many ways not meaningfully different from Donald Trump on foreign policy. Emanuel’s ignorant statements about Occupy Wall Street and Zohran Mamdani show that he has no understanding of the importance of addressing inequality, and his op-ed shows he is planning a brazen effort to manufacture a fake enemy in order to deflect popular anger away from where it should be directed, which is straight at the American ruling class that he represents.