[The Hill] The old joke that doctors bury their mistakes should be amended, because former statesmen sometimes try to do so as well. Claims advanced by Henry Kissinger, the doyen of the U.S. foreign policy community, that the coronavirus is a danger to the liberal international order are correct, especially since the virus has killed tens of thousands around the world.But the specter that is haunting the world order is not the virus that originated in Wuhan. It is the rise of dictatorial China. And it was Kissinger, the former U.S. secretary of State and national security adviser, who contributed mightily to this threat as one of the major creators and advocates of the decades-long U.S. strategy towards China emphasizing cooperation, "bringing China in" to the international order, and fostering its growth so that it could become a "responsible stakeholder."
The expectation was that China would cooperate with the West to preserve the present liberal order of global politics. This approach was a profound mistake: In a historically unprecedented act, the West actively contributed to the creation of its most formidable peer competitor. China hid behind a false promise to abide by Western rules and norms to forestall balancing against it, while it rapidly developed economically and militarily — and was creating a new international order to replace the one that is so rightly valued in the West.
Long before COVID-19, China labored to replace the world order while working inside to achieve it. Despite claims to the contrary, China is not a status quo great power. It is a revolutionary great power that seeks fundamental and permanent changes to the contemporary order in international politics. If it achieves its objectives, it will be the death of the existing liberal order. That indeed will be a new epoch in global politics.
Put directly: The school of thought advanced by Kissinger made this possible. Since the 1990s, political and economic interest in the West actively worked with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to support its growth. If the liberal order is to be saved, it will be by confronting and defeating China’s challenge. Until recently, the confrontation largely has been one-sided. China acted vigorously to undermine the position of the West, while the West’s response was mostly absent, inchoate or actually pernicious to itself.
The West did not respond to the challenge for three reasons. First, the economic interest of Western business communities. China’s rise was aided by its ability to influence Western firms in China, trading access to the People’s Republic of China’s enormous market in return for the firms’ technology and processes. At the same time, China employed the firms’ influence with their domestic governments to ensure support for China — and thus China was on the path to becoming an economic power.
Second, what the Chinese government could not willingly receive from economic cooperation they might steal through the development and employment of advanced cyber capabilities.