Washington's China: The National Security World, the Cold War, and the Origins of Globalism

Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond

by James Peck

This book addresses a central question about the Cold War that has never been adequately resolved. Why did the United States go to such lengths not merely to "contain" the People's Republic of China but to isolate it from all diplomatic, cultural, and economic ties to other nations? Why, in other words, was American policy more hostile to China than to the Soviet Union, at least until President Nixon visited China in 1972?The answer, as set out here, lies in the fear of China's emergence as a power capable of challenging the new Asian order the United States sought to shape in the wake of World War II. To meet this threat, American policymakers fashioned an ideology that was not simply or exclusively anticommunist, but one that aimed at creating an integrated, cooperative world capitalism under U.S. leadership―an ideology, in short, designed to outlive the Cold War.In building his argument, James Peck draws on a wide variety of little-known documents from the archives of the National Security Council and the CIA. He shows how American ofcials initially viewed China as a "puppet" of the Soviet Union, then as "independent junior partner" in a Sino-Soviet bloc, andnally as "revolutionary model" and sponsor of social upheaval in the Third World. Each of these constructs revealed more about U.S. perceptions and strategic priorities than about actual shifts in Chinese thought and conduct. All were based on the assumption that China posed a direct threat not just to specic U.S. interests and objectives abroad but to the larger vision of a new global order dominated by American economic and military power. Although the nature of "Washington's China" may have changed over the years, Peck contends that the ideology behind it remains unchanged, even today.

Genres: China, History, Politics, American, United States, Asia, American History

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was great at documenting and displaying the effects of ideology dominating policy. It details Washington's foreign policy towards China from WW2 up through the Johnson administration, which consisted of varying degrees of isolation and containment due to an ideological American globalist perspective.

This review of memos, statements, white papers, and other internal documents of Washington's administrations and institutions of the times displays what could be seen as arrogance or indoctrination in creating and maintaining an American image of China to serve American global interests. An image that rejects the agency of people in their own land. Per the book, the PRC was first seen as a puppet of the USSR, then a junior partner with the USSR, and finally a revolutionary on their own, apart and somewhat against the USSR, all within a ~20 year period. Due to these perspectives, policies of varying degrees of isolation and containment were pursued that sought to undermine and weaken mainland China, in hopes to encourage some type of overthrow or realignment within American interests. One of the most visible expressions of this policy was the propping up of Taiwan, an exiled government that lost the Chinese Civil War but continued to exist and represent all of China on the global stage, at least up through 1971, due to American support.

The US-China relationship/conflict is just as relevant today (2017), with former President Obama's rejected TPP seen as an attempt to (surprise!) contain China as well as President Trump's phone call with Taiwan's president, a type of recognition of Taiwan the US had previously backed away from.

I would have liked to have seen a continuation of Peck's analysis into the Nixon administration. Also, though the focus of the book is on Washington's perspective on China, shedding more light on specific PRC and ROC actions and declarations would have helped clarify the overall picture a bit more. Not so much as to justify or rebut assertions but to provide a clearer picture of the period for those of us not too deeply acquainted with this chapter of history.

Anyway, great book, recommend it to anyone with any interest in history or global politics.

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Washington's China is a good book that goes through the National Security Council (N.S.C.) documents and shows how time and time again the U.S. government couldn't face the fact that China was acting independently of Russia during most of the Cold War. At first, the U.S. government thought China was a puppet of Russia's and then later a junior partner. In both instances, the U.S. was wrong. And also the U.S. N.S.C. just, frankly, wasn't well-read in Chinese history, and not enough to know that China had its own ambitions in Asia.

[Bernardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Washington’s China

“Washington’s China: The National Security World, the Cold War, and the Origins of Globalism,” by James Peck, is a central book in my PhD dissertation, on which I’m currently working. Peck, a historian and foreign-policy analyst who is also an expert on China, is better known amongst academic and activist circles for his groundbreaking “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights.”

In “Washington’s China,” Peck draws on a wealth of secret intelligence documents pertaining to U.S. policy toward China in the 1950s and 1960s to shed light on the “national security world” (NSW), which he characterizes as “pivotal for the emerging U.S. global role, and the global role reinforced the pivotal role of the NSW” (p. 19). He identified “four consistent long-term global goals” of the NSW stemming from these documents: the attainment of global military preeminence; the creation of and domination over the new international order centered on U.S. economic and political supremacy; and the weakening in the short-term and defeating in the long-term of any sort of mass-based nationalisms or attempts at revolutionary transformation of societies (p. 10). Peck points out “the ideological ferocity of the national security bureaucracy at the center of American foreign policy” which consisted of a “profoundly ideological formulation that is part and parcel of Washington’s thinking and strategizing about the world” and “saw a world where American power was the central reality and where all aspects of American life that could be reorganized to achieve this end were to be brought into play for decades to come” (pp. 10-11).

I found out about this book by chance, while reading a conversation between Noam Chomsky and evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers (Discussion with Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers, Salon Seed, September 6, 2006). When I read it, I was still trying to figure out how to frame my own research. Chomsky’s comments about the book, which was yet to come out at the time, caught my attention:
“It’s about the imagery of China that was constructed in Washington. [Peck] went through the National Security Council literature, background literature and so on, and he does both an analysis of content and a psychological analysis. […] What he says is that there are elaborate techniques of self-deception to try to build a framework in which we can justify things like, say, invading or overthrowing the government of Guatemala, on the basis of some new objective. And it’s done by making everything simple. You have to make it clearer than the truth. And as this picture gets created internally and built up by each group of National Security staffers, it becomes like a real fundamentalist religion, showing extraordinary self-deceit. And then you end up with the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds.”

Peck’s book provides intellectual tools that allow the reader to make sense of seemingly disparate and idiosyncratic actions of the U.S. institutional foreign policy and intelligence apparatus and show that in fact they have been consistent throughout the past decades, and rather successfully too. Although in terms of the publicly claimed objectives the U.S. may have failed, as many authors believe, Peck’s analytical framework leads to a different conclusion. In terms of those “four consistent long-term global goals” laid out in the post-war National Security World planning documents, the U.S. has succeeded. This framework also contradicts the mainstream media horse-race coverage that misleadingly portrays significant variation from one administration to the next, by putting emphasis on the permanent bureaucracy that outlasts any specific government. It is fundamental reading for anyone interested in U.S. foreign policy, international politics and anti-imperialist activism. Its original perspective brings a useful prism through which one can understand what has been driving U.S. foreign policy ever since the end of World War II to this day.

[a*s*h]

recommended by noam chomsky