Episode 269: How the United States’ Arrogance, Ignorance and Greed Fueled China’s Rise with Jim Fanell and Brad Thayer

After achieving victory in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, US political leadership, starting with the Clinton Administration, has made a continuing string of strategic blunders that have brought the United States to the point where - after building China up for decades - we face an enemy determined to become the new global hegemon and that now possesses equal economic, military and diplomatic resources.

To learn how this came about, in this episode Bill talks with  James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer, Ph.D, authors of 

Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure.

 

Jim Fanell, a retired U.S. Navy captain and the former Director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, is now a Government Fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. 

Brad Thayer is an expert in Chinese grand strategies and the history of Chinese and Western strategic thought; and a former visiting fellow at Magdalen College, University of Oxford.

“How did China go from an underdeveloped country in 1990 with about 0.6 of 1% of world gross domestic product to over 20% of world GDP today?” asks Brad.

“The answer in large part is that the United States aided and abetted the rise of the Chinese Communist Party and kept it in power. That has never happened before in international politics where one state, the dominant state, has funded the rise of an enemy.”

U.S. foreign policy toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been dominated by the so-called “Engagement School” since the end of the Cold War. They believed that U.S. political and economic engagement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would transform the PRC into a “responsible stakeholder” in the Western economic system and, ideally a democracy. Of course, none of that happened.

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