Professor Minxin Pei: To counter China, the US must rise above talk of race and a clash of civilisations
Late last month at a security forum in Washington, Kiron Skinner, director of policy planning for the US Department of State, described today’s US-China conflict as “a fight with a really different civilisation and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that before”.
As a trial balloon, this apparent attempt to define the Trump administration’s confrontation with China did not fly. By framing the creeping cold war between the US and China as a clash of civilisations, Skinner – whose position was once held by luminaries such as George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Richard N. Haass, and Anne-Marie Slaughter – was being neither original nor accurate.
