Making Excuses

It drove me crazy that in the Cold War people made excuses for the USSR and actually argued for moral equivalency between that horrible country under the communists and free America. Now China gets that outrageous treatment.

It's fine to try to see China's view of the world if we use that to resist them. But a word game of reversing the positions of China and America to gain empathy and insight into Chinese motives ignores that reversing the power and strategic situation does not also reverse the enduring facts that China is a brutal communist dictatorship while America is a free, rule-of-law democracy.

Reversing the situation ignores that our allies near China are not compelled to side with America but share democratic values and don't wish to succumb to China's influence (and some friends who don't share democratic values simply don't want to be vassals of China).

Reversing the situation to say that alternate weak America would naturally steal technology to catch up with China ignores that alternate dominant China would be angry at that espionage.

The danger of these efforts to gain empathy is that they quickly devolve into an "equivalency" argument that America has no moral superiority over our dictatorial foe, when in fact the American-led West (which includes a lot of Asian democracies now) is superior and deserves to win the situation we are in now facing China (and would deserve to win the reversed situation, too, for that matter).

"Normal" ambitions by an evil, communist party-run China are no less dangerous for the world--and for the Chinese who live under that dystopian state now.