The U.S. left’s inability to understand China as a proven ally for nations struggling under the boot of U.S. empire is a massive strategic failure. Instead, U.S. progressives invoke “both sides” false equivalencies that equate a real and hegemonic U.S. global power structure with the vague, potential specter of “Chinese imperialism.” Under such an argument, Chinese economic lifelines provided to Iran, Venezuela, and other nations cut out of global markets by U.S. sanctions are simply an opportunistic power play, one which would replace these nations’ subjugation under Western imperial power under a new, ostensibly equally brutal, Chinese power. The fact that such facile elisions have found a foothold amongst the U.S. left has proven to be a critical weakness in its ability to mount more than a purely reactive response to present U.S. aggression. Certainly, skeptics will argue that China benefits from its economic ties to vulnerable victims of U.S. aggression, but that ignores both the obvious facts that mutual benefit is the foundation of all international relations, and that China has been consistently targeted with U.S. secondary sanctions, propaganda, and fear mongering for its audacity to challenge U.S. policy in the Middle East, Latin America and beyond. The U.S. left’s failure to challenge—and indeed its tendency to repeat—antagonistic rhetoric against China is fundamentally contradictory to its stated solidarity with nations such as Iran, Bolivia, and Venezuela.

Notions that China is seeking to “unfairly” benefit from brutal U.S. sanctions on nations like Iran miss the fact that the U.S. is escalating its own kind of hybrid warfare against China to punish China for daring to “violate” U.S. sanctions. Indeed, the U.S. has repeatedly en-masse sanctioned Chinese companies and banks, both private and state-owned, for providing trade and aid to Iranian entities. Indeed, the so-called U.S.-China “trade war,” despite receiving little attention from the left, is part and parcel of U.S. attempts to undermine China’s ability to provide assistance to Iran and other targets of U.S. hybrid warfare. With its explicit goals of undermining Chinese state economic control, privatizing key industries, and forcing China to remove restrictions on foreign capital and company ownership, the trade war threatens to destabilize China’s role as an economic lifeline for Iran, Venezuela, and the rest of the Global South. The finance, oil, and mining industries—key targets for privatization under trade war negotiations—are crucial to China’s ability to purchase Iranian oil and assist Latin American countries in providing alternatives to Western capital investment from their mining and natural resources industries. Without full state control over its finance, oil, and mining industries, China may lose control of these industries to Western companies and could ultimately lose the ability to act swiftly and leverage those industries to defy U.S. sanctions on oil and mining industries of Global South nations like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Iran. As U.S. media celebrate China’s slowing economy and the material harm the trade war is causing Chinese people while salivating over the prospect of U.S. financial dominance over Chinese markets, it is becoming clear that a likely goal of the U.S. is to use the trade war not only to “open” China’s state-owned domestic industries to Western investment, but also to undermine its leadership of the only geopolitical bloc that poses a real challenge to U.S. global hegemony.

What’s more, the U.S. has used feigned concerns over human rights abuses as a trojan horse for its regime of sanctions against supposed “rogue states.” Seemingly progressive bills such as the Hong Kong Freedom and Democracy Act, which received near-unanimous bipartisan support in the U.S. House and Senate, include provisions that would mandate Hong Kong abide by U.S. sanctions against Iran and North Korea, while giving cover to further sanction Chinese individuals and firms and ban Chinese actors from entering the U.S. The sole opposition in the House came from Thomas Massie (R-KY), who stated his consistent opposition to sanctions which “[meddle] in the internal affairs of foreign countries” and “invites those governments to meddle in our affairs.” Supported widely by proclaimed progressive and leftist groups in the U.S., the legislation provides a textbook example of how the U.S. uses the language of democracy and human rights abroad as cover for retaliation against geopolitical rivals and to further its own human rights abuses through punishing sanctions.

It is important to note that this economic warfare has been coupled with the quiet escalation of the Obama era “pivot to Asia,” which sought to contain China’s rising influence through military and economic policy. The head of the Pentagon has called China his new “top priority,” and in January 2020, the U.S. Army announced two new regional task forces that would combat the “strategic threat” of China through a focus on “non-conventional warfare” to create an “asymmetrical advantage” for the U.S. in the event of military conflict. The Department of Defense had previously designated the Pacific as its “priority theater,” and conducts routine military drills in Japan and South Korea while selling $2 billion in arms to Taiwan in 2019 alone. This escalation of U.S. military power in Asia under the rationale of “containing China” makes clear that opposing U.S. antagonism towards China is paramount for future hopes of peace and demilitarization in Asia and the Pacific.

In order to mount a serious challenge to American empire, the U.S. anti-war movement must understand the terms of engagement: economic terrorism through sanctions and political isolation and destabilization have become the primary modes of U.S. imperialism. Often obscured by overt acts of military violence, U.S. hybrid warfare waged against not only Iran but Venezuela, Bolivia, North Korea, and China is the primary contradiction facing the global struggle against imperialism. For too long, U.S. critics of American empire have evaded the derisively termed “China question” in favor of false equivalences and the repetition of U.S. state talking points. But behind the Cold War rhetoric, China has proven itself as a strategic ally for countless nations with which U.S. leftists claim solidarity. Whether the U.S. anti-war movement will rise to oppose increasing aggression against China designed to undermine its ability to support Iran, Bolivia, North Korea, and all victims of U.S. imperialism remains to be seen.

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