We Have Met the Enemy and He Isn’t Us
Can Americans stop fighting each other long enough to appreciate the threat from China?
By Rahm Emanuel
Illustration: Martin KozlowskiThe latest illustration of the division and dysfunction in our politics—images of the National Guard occupying our nation’s capital—has justifiably infuriated my fellow Democrats.
But the military’s deployment in Washington shouldn’t be understood merely as the latest MAGA cut against American democracy.
It reflects a new zeal among partisan activists for “occupying” adversarial domestic institutions—the “deep state” for some, Wall Street for others.
Occupation wasn’t always so important to reformers—but now it’s close to an obsession.
The question today: Can China be the external threat that restores internal cohesion to our politics?
Politics hasn’t always been like this.
For most of the 20th century, America took strength from its diversity of character and thought.
Nazism spurred a nation of immigrants to unite in erecting an “arsenal of democracy.”
The “evil empire,” as Ronald Reagan described the Soviet Union, compelled Americans of all stripes to defend the principle of freedom.
Sept. 11 should have united Americans, but the years that followed saw a fraying of our common purpose.
Our challenge today is to rediscover that purpose by leaning into our strengths.
Far be it from me to point fingers, but we shouldn’t fail to acknowledge how the George W. Bush years saw Americans steer into a series of self-inflicted disasters.
The “war on terror” morphed into an Iraq quagmire so disastrous that even the GOP now disparages its legacy.
The government responded to the 2008 financial crisis by bailing out banks and insurance companies while working families lost their homes.
By the end of the decade, Americans on the left and right both blamed domestic institutions—the federal government or the big banks—for their lot in life.
Absent a common foe, activists in both blue and red America believed the path to salvation ran through “occupying” their adversary’s temple.
That shift came at a grave cost.
By 2011, the country was beset by two movements defined almost exclusively by anger and resentment.
Occupy Wall Street’s antipathy to capitalism fixed the sentiment now driving Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York mayor.
The tea party simultaneously metastasized into the MAGA movement and the riots of Jan. 6, 2021.
With real violence in the offing, politics are worse than they have been in decades.
To be sure, protesting in a park is a far cry from vandalizing the seat of democracy and killing police officers.
But while different in scope and scale, the underlying desire to “occupy” institutions controlled by domestic adversaries stems in each case from the same core fear.
The American dream—the belief that working hard and playing by the rules offers everyone a clear path to a middle-class perch—has become a nightmare.
Too many Americans struggle to keep their heads above water.
They’re right to be angry—and they’re justified in wanting relief.
In some Shakespearean sense, China’s long shadow has appeared at exactly the right moment.
But Xi Jinping is much more than a foil poised to unite Americans who would otherwise remain defined by their blue and red affinities.
The China threat is both real and potent.
The U.S. has never before been asked to face down a country that has three times our population, is fueled by an advanced economy, and is capable, as its leaders intend, of replacing us atop the global hierarchy.
Failing a broad reorientation, the question won’t be “Who lost China?” but “Who lost to China?”
Yet Washington has yet to mobilize in full against a real threat.
The problem is that, rather than leaning into America’s strengths—our top-flight research institutions, our ability to attract the most promising talent from around the world, the depth of our financial markets, the dynamism of our private sector, and our enduring respect for the rule of law—Trumponomics is seeking to shift our approach to a cheap, knock-off version of Beijing’s state-directed model.
The evidence is everywhere.
The administration intends to take a stake in Intel, to nationalize Lockheed Martin, to receive golden shares of Nippon Steel, to claim a piece of the action from Nvidia and AMD, and to claim royalties from research patents.
The voices who would typically speak up for what makes America unique and exceptional have been cowed and intimidated into silence.
As a result, the mainstream discourse has been left to those who want to occupy the institutions inhabited by their political adversaries.
Because our politics has taken the character of “The Hunger Games,” China has been able to race ahead without raising the appropriate alarms.
In other words, by losing our perspective, we’ve fallen into a strategic trap.
To be fair, that’s not an accident.
The Chinese have long believed that they could use this dynamic to defeat us.
In the wake of 2008, Mr. Xi made three determinations.
First, that Beijing should view America less as a strategic competitor than a strategic adversary.
Second, that the shine had come off the American system after the financial crisis.
Third, that American society was too divided to act with common purposes in the face of a geopolitical challenge.
Today Mr. Xi understands that President Trump’s division and chaos is working to China’s advantage.
That should be our wake-up call.
To prevail in the years and decades to come, we will need to avoid the temptation to mimic our adversaries—and we will need to protect and nurture the qualities that have long made us “the shining city on a hill.”
As Bill Clinton frequently reminds audiences, it’s never smart to bet against the American people over the long run.
The path to a second American century will flow through a rediscovered confidence in American exceptionalism.
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