Opinion | Joe Biden promotes liberal values, but could learn a lesson or two from Imperial China

The US foreign policy establishment’s embrace of a ‘clash of civilisations’ narrative encourages guilt by association, a legal fiction abandoned in China 2,000 years ago

The China Initiative, administered by the US Department of Justice, undermines the rule of law and fosters a permissive atmosphere for racial profiling

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US President Joe Biden is considered a liberal on matters of race but his foreign policy echoes much of Donald Trump’s rhetoric on China. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 5:00pm, 24 Jul 2021Updated: 5:00pm, 24 Jul 2021

US President Joe Biden assumed office promising a departure from Donald Trump’s disruptive foreign policy, but his administration has embraced the same zero-sum rhetoric where China is concerned. That approach could bifurcate the globe politically and technologically along racial lines, yet the project has instead been promoted as a contest of values.

This rhetoric did not begin with Trump. It was adopted by the Washington elite during the 1990s following the publication of Samuel Huntington’s theory of a “Clash of Civilisations”, pitting the West against the rest.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Huntington argued liberal values were unique to the West. Although untrained in Asian languages or history, he declared that with few exceptions the Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian traditions, as he characterised them, would never accept liberal values. This, he argued, would inevitably lead to a clash of civilisations.

Huntington was careful to use religious labels for his “civilisations”. Otherwise, anyone could have seen he was in fact talking about race.

Experts writing in Foreign Affairs wasted no time exposing the theory’s shortcomings, such as its simplistic and self-serving accounts of non-Western traditions. There were plenty of supporters, though, including China hawks in the foreign policy establishment.

White nationalists also favour Huntington-style rhetoric, justifying attacks on racial minorities as a defence of “Western civilisation”. This is a perfectly logical extension of Huntington’s argument. The puzzling part is why a man like Biden would embrace it.

The US president is known as a liberal on matters of race, yet Team Biden has adopted Trump’s China policy. One of its core programmes, the so-called China Initiative run by the Department of Justice (DoJ), has been plagued by charges of racial profiling.