The U.S. State Department’s Office of Policy Planning has just issued a 74-page anti-China, geopolitical screed, “The Elements of the China Challenge,” outlining the policies to be adopted or strengthened in coming years to contain China’s rise — a goal that can only lead to confrontation or all-out war.
The Executive Summary warns, ominously, that “the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has triggered a new era of great-power competition.” It aims “not merely at preeminence within the established world order … but to fundamentally revise the world order, placing the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.) at the center and serving Beijing’s authoritarian goals and hegemonic ambition.” Given the threat the CCP represents to freedom around the world, the document states, it will be the U.S.’s responsibility to “secure freedom,” and to do so, it must “refashion its foreign policy” in light of ten specific tasks the document enumerates.
The document is being compared to the February 1946 memorandum written to the State Department by geopolitician George Kennan, then serving as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, with his recommendations on how to contain the Soviets through regional alliances and undermining the Soviet system, also indicating that the Soviets respond to the threat of force. Recall too that the former head of Policy Planning at State was Kiron Skinner, who made the racist claim in April 2019 that China’s rise was “a fight with a really different civilization,” and “the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.” Although Skinner is no longer at Policy Planning, RT reported that she did initial work on the document before leaving State.
