Why Nikki Haley is targeting China?
CHINA-bashing, it seems, has become the most convenient and effective tool in election campaigns in the West to win. Nikki Haley, former South Carolina Governor and the US Ambassador to the UN, who is vying for the GOP presidential nomination, has initiated a highly vitriolic campaign against China to out-compete her main rival Donald Trump. On February 27, she tweeted, “COVID-19 likely came from a Chinese lab. Cut US aid. Not a cent to Communist China.” This tweet is mind boggling from a person who has represented her country in the UN and now she aspires for the slot of the most powerful person in the world. This reflects either she is too ignorant about the “US debt status” or she deliberately wants to project China as debtor. While tweeting such stuff, she forgot the fact that the situation is altogether opposite: it’s the US who owes billions of dollars to China. Nonetheless, this tweet is part of her on-going series of China bashing.
Last week, in an oped article in the New York Post, Nikki Haley made a smearing attack on China, whom she considers the enemy of the United States. In her article, she declared that if voted to power, she would cut every cent in foreign aid for countries that hate the US. This includes China, Pakistan and other countries as “a strong America doesn’t pay off the bad guys”. “American taxpayers still give money to Communist China for ridiculous environmental programs, despite the obvious threat China poses to Americans,” she wrote in her article. “That’s why I will cut every cent in foreign aid for countries that hate us… We are giving huge amounts of cash to countries that vote against us most of the time. That doesn’t make sense. I’ll stop it.
America can’t buy our friends. We’ll certainly never buy off our enemies,” she further wrote in the last paragraph of her op-ed piece. Similarly, a few days back, speaking at her first rally in Charleston, South Carolina, Nikki displayed her antagonism towards China in a very offensive language. She claimed that under her leadership, “Communist China will end up on the ash heap of history… like the Soviet Union before it.” These are perhaps one of the harshest words used by any of the American leaders in recent history against China. Laced with a thick glaze of disinformation and bigoted mentality, Nikki Haley’s barrage of anti-China rhetoric is reflection of the malaise that has seeped into the American thinking towards China.
Nikki’s tirade against China at this early stage of her Republican nomination campaign reflects a chronic problem with American politics. American foreign policy is too dependent upon the presence of a real or imaginary enemy to engage the voters and distract their attention from the existing problems at home and simmering cultural degeneration. During the Cold War era, the threat from the Soviet Union was utilized to huddle the American allies together against a common enemy – Soviet Union – as well as to keep the American public engrossed in perpetual fear of war.
After the demise of the Soviet Union, the Americans created the new enemy, Islamic Jihad or fundamentalism, to replace the void created by the removal of the Soviet Union. And now, sensing that Islamic Jihad has failed to nurture the required “threat culture” in the United States, the policy makers in Washington are consciously working on creating a new imaginary villain – China – to quench their psychological thirst for an enemy. Like many other US politicians, Nikki is casting her eyes on the other side of the globe, while turning blind to US domestic decay. It appears that she has been deeply influenced by the tactics of Donald Trump, who resorts to such irritating and inflammatory stuff to keep engaging his target audience.
Following the footsteps of her main rival Donald Trump, she has been deliberately playing the China card to attract the voters – a trend that is now fast becoming a vogue in domestic politics of most of the Western countries. We witnessed similar China-bashing by Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak in the UK when both were competing for the top slot of the Tories. Rishi Sunak was particularly insolent in his campaign speeches towards China. Nikki Haley is also playing to the same tune because she thinks it is the most marketable proposition in the United States to win the voters’ support.
Obviously, such a blunt and offensive comment attracted a severe reaction from Beijing – and more airtime to Nikki in the electronic and social media. It appears that she has been deeply influenced by the tactics of Donald Trump, who resorts to such irritating and inflammatory stuff to keep engaging his target audience. Such a pattern in American politics is very harmful for the overall evolution of political culture there. Particularly, at a time when American politics is also gearing up for a shift from octogenarian politicians to a relatively younger cohort of politicians, such an infusion of anti-China will leave a very damaging impact in the longer run. Nikki Haley may not be able to win her bid for the White House, but she is adding more acrimony and bitterness in the American minds through her petty political selfishness.
The deliberate efforts to bracket China as an “evil” will inversely harm the American interests in the global arena. The campaign will not stop here. Once the race for the presidential nominations is heated up, we may witness more episodes of the China hysteria in American politics. Reflective of a planned campaign to create a Cold War atmosphere in America, both sides of political divide in the US are frantically trying to outdo each other in this new kind of electoral wrangling which is being fought on the basis of maligning an imaginary enemy rather than focusing on domestic issues. This new vogue of China-bashing which was actually given new impetus by Donald Trump ever since he kicked off his 2016 presidential campaign, will certainly add more fuel to the already soured Sino-US ties.
