The China challenge has revived an old and often arid quarrel about the relationship in foreign affairs between ideas and interests. Reconsidering that quarrel in light of the ideas that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) professes and the interests the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pursues provides a fresh understanding of the threats that China poses to freedom.

The extreme form of the debate is generally confined to the domain of political science professors in the field of international relations. On one side stand the so-called realists.

They maintain that the distribution of power within the international system — including the logic of, and the interests inherent in, countries’ particular geopolitical circumstances — drives nation-state conduct. On the other side stand those classified as idealists. They contend that a country’s ideas — government officials’ leading principles and favored doctrines, the people’s customary opinions and perspectives, and the habits of heart and mind of both — provide the key to nation-state conduct. These pure views appear among commentators and policymakers in watered-down form as dominant intellectual tendencies.

The case of the CCP and of the Chinese nation that it despotically governs proves the wisdom of the common-sense view: as with individuals so too with nation-states, ideas and interests are inextricably connected. The ideas to which the CCP is committed — a distinctive blend of dogmatic Marxism-Leninism and extreme Chinese nationalism — undergird the regime’s dictatorial rule at home. These ideas also fuel the party’s ambition to bring under Beijing’s sovereign control formerly free and democratic Hong Kong, still free and democratic Taiwan, and areas of the South China Sea far beyond China’s internationally recognized territorial waters; animate the party’s schemes to lure nations around the world into relations of economic dependence; and drive the CCP’s plan to reshape international organizations so that they conform to the principles of socialism as the party has decreed them.

Last month in an important article in Foreign Affairs, Elbridge Colby and Robert D. Kaplan appeared at times to take exception to the common-sense view. In “The Ideology Delusion,” they offer salutary warnings about the wrong way to connect ideas and interests. Unfortunately, their well-taken points about the excesses of ideologically oriented foreign policy occasionally slide into the extravagant claim that the very attempt to understand state conduct and great-power competition in light of leaders’ and peoples’ ideas about politics and international relations reflects the delusion that ideas are pertinent to foreign affairs.

The high-stakes competition between China and the United States makes clearing up the confusion about ideas and interests a priority. To refine the mix of international cooperation, containment, and deterrence necessary to meet the China challenge, the United States must distinguish the respects in which competition with China is not about ideas and doctrines, and the respects in which it is and cannot help but be.

Colby is a principal at the Marathon Initiative and served as U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development from 2017 to 2018; Kaplan is a prolific and best-selling author on foreign affairs and holds a chair in geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Astute observers and incisive analysts, they affirm, consistent with the “wide agreement forming across the political spectrum,” that “China is an oppressive one-party state, governed by a Marxist-Leninist cadre, whose leader, Xi Jinping, has amassed more personal power than anyone in Beijing since Mao Zedong.” They report Beijing’s “execrable human rights record, which includes, among other brutalities, putting a million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps.” They call attention to the CCP’s incorporation of free-market elements into China’s state-driven economy and to the party’s reliance upon a massive surveillance apparatus. And they soberly warn that by drawing other countries into its authoritarian orbit, China may pose a greater threat to the United States than did the Soviet Union.

“The United States,” the authors summarize, “is indeed in an exceptionally serious competition with China that requires it to take a hard line on many fronts.” Maintaining that hard line, they rightly underscore, involves a moral component: “Washington should never shy away from its unabashed embrace of republican government and respect for human dignity.”

Nevertheless, Colby and Kaplan insist that ideology “does not lie at the root of the matter between the United States and China — even if elements in China’s Marxist-Leninist elite think it does.” What counts, they argue, are China’s geopolitical circumstances. “The very scale of China’s economy, population, and landmass and its consequent power would cause profound concern for U.S. policymakers even if the country were a democracy,” the authors write. “Seeing this competition as primarily ideological will misconstrue its nature — with potentially catastrophic results.”…..CONTINUE AT SITE