U.S. “confrontation game” disobeys justice

The China-US ties are facing the most serious challenges since the two countries established diplomatic relations, which has caused widespread concern in the international community.

This situation came from some U.S. politicians’ wrong strategic comprehension on China’s development, as well as their efforts to build a “tough” image for domestic politics by adopting a seemingly “aggressive” diplomacy.

While the COVID-19 epidemic is steadily worsening in America, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is intent upon creating and spreading political viruses, as well as dressing China up as a rival, even an enemy of the U.S., in a bid to shoulder his so-called “responsibility” of “protecting” American interests. Such a hegemonic and evil political scheme will never be tolerated by justice.

It should be noted that the U.S. will neither defeat the pandemic nor get rid of its long-standing social issues by interfering in the affairs of other countries as a “global sheriff” and advocating adversarial diplomacy.

The poor pandemic response by the U.S. government, the miseries happening to U.S. citizens, as well as the frequent occurrence of the deep-seated racial problems are all domestic governance issues that the White House must address.

However, the ridiculous and arbitrary practices by some U.S. politicians have astonished the world. Rather than taking efforts to find solutions to the problems and protect the health and well-being of the American people, they have been engaged in picking faults and blame games.

When the U.S. is facing huge risks in its people’s lives and its social and economic development, these American officials are doing nothing but scapegoating others for their own misconducts, which only made them clowns.

As a matter of fact, the surging governance deficit of the U.S. has drawn reflection of the U.S. society.

After the Cold War, the U.S. has waged many wars against other countries and thus put itself into infinite self-consuming. Domestically, it is haunted with excessive expansion, racial conflicts, social differentiation and political polarization.

“When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly,” said a recent article published on The Atlantic. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years, the article continued.

Some U.S. politicians are devoting themselves in populism, unilateralism and protectionism, ridiculously believing that these are the remedy to social panic. However, anyone insightful could see that the wrong prescriptions will only make things even worse.

The international landscape is undergoing profound changes and the epidemic has made such changes more distinct.

In a world full of instabilities and uncertainties, what determines the competitiveness of a country is its ability to improve the governance and solve its own problems, not its ability to bully other countries and even destroy the international system.

What the U.S. really needs to think about is how to meet the real demands of the society by developing healthy and benign foreign relations. Only by finding a correct solution can the U.S. manage to alleviate its social conflicts.

Like China, the U.S. needs a peaceful international environment so that it could recover from the damage caused by the Cold War and subsequent foreign military intervention, according to Charles Freeman, an American expert in Chinese studies.

Americans need to focus their wealth and attention on domestic reconstruction and need a sound relation with China to do so, he added.

The “confrontation game” designed by the U.S. will definitely hurt both China and itself, and even the world at large.

Of course, the U.S. has to pay a price for such confrontation, and the consequences include huge consumption of American resources, worsening social conflicts, and the loss of interests of the U.S. public.

Whether to choose win-win cooperation or conflicts and confrontation is a question that tolerates no wrong answer, and shall be responded to based on justice. Any motive of the U.S. politicians that runs counter to justice is doomed to fail.

(Zhong Sheng is a pen name often used by People’s Daily to express its views on foreign policy.)