Because my magazine is spending thousands of dollars to send me to Denver for a week, I think I should be making more of an effort to convince them that my presence is a brilliant investment, but actually, CAP just released a major report outlining what a progressive foreign policy towards China would look like and I think people should spend some time today focusing on that. The Middle East has sort of overwhelmed all other foreign policy issues over the past few years, but with the Iraqi government now demanding we pull out by 2011 and Bush basically agreeing to that, that state of affairs will quickly ease and other issues will take preeminence. One of the biggest will be how to handle China. Threading the needle towards a coherent and sane policy will be hard for a variety of reasons: Neocons ache for confrontation because China is allegedly Communist and they a) miss the Cold War and b) have an ideological objection to the rise of other powers and c) imagine themselves anti-authoritarians in the Orwell tradition, though not the part of the Orwell tradition where Orwell fights in the wars he believes important. Labor liberals feel themselves in tension with China because of the sheer quantity of low wage labor the country pushes into the global marketplace, and though they're their confrontation is basically over tougher trade deals rather than naval dominance, the net effect of implying that China is an enemy will broadly be the same. So you're going to have a de facto left-right alliance trying to pursue different styles of confrontation with China and the outcome of that could be extremely dangerous. As CAP says, a good relationship with China is a "global imperative," and progressives should be thinking now about how to deal with the issue later.
