Abstract

After underestimating the challenge of China to the US/Western-hewn international economic and institutional order for many years – especially since the start of the Xi Jinping era – the  tendency in recent months has been for the American political class and commentariat to swing toward exaggeration of the challenge.  In the process, many have mangled and, in some respects, even inverted the operative meanings of the words “ideology” and “nationalism”.  In their newly aroused collective state of mind, some Americans – not to exclude the current Secretary of State – are once again unwittingly theologising US strategy in line with a secularised template derived in part from Calvinist eschatology, thus repeating the pattern of the John Foster Dulles era of US policy.

About the Speaker

Adam Garfinkle is on a year-long engagement at RSIS as Distinguished Visiting Fellow.  Aside from being Founding Editor of The American Interest, he has served as Editor of The National Interest, as Principal Speechwriter to the US Secretary of State while attached to the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department, was chief writer of the Hart-Rudman Commission reports, and has taught at several institutions of higher education including SAIS/Johns Hopkins. His PhD in International Relations is from the University of Pennsylvania.