Moran, Marshall, Hawley should drop the schoolboy bluster over US-China diplomacy | Opinion

How bad would an American war with China be? Pretty bad.

“The Pentagon Is Freaking Out About a Potential War With China,” Politico announced earlier this month. Why? Because exercises show there’s a good chance that the U.S. could lose. American forces would use up all their long-range missiles in a few days, a number of planes would be destroyed on the ground and many thousands of lives would be lost.

From an American standpoint, even a victory against China would still be costly.

And a loss? Well, that brings up scenarios too horrible to contemplate — nuclear war, even.

So it’s a good thing that Secretary of State Antony Blinken went to Beijing to talk to China’s top leaders last weekend. The point: Stabilize relations, which have been extra tense since the spy balloon hubbub back in February.

Diplomacy is better than fighting, after all. And it’s utterly bewildering that elected Republicans from Kansas and Missouri criticized Blinken and the Biden administration for making the trip.

“No consequences for the spy balloon,” wrote Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. “No consequences for spy station in Cuba. No consequences for stealing our jobs. China calls the shots in the Biden Admin.”

“Sec. Blinken’s trip to China for the Big Guy to ‘ease tensions’ is an embarrassment,” added Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas. “Since when did America go to her bullies to ask them to play nice? Peace through STRENGTH.”

Even mild-mannered Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas weighed in. “We cannot go hat-in-hand to China,” he wrote — though, in true Jerry Moran fashion, he also concluded that America and China should “find places we can cooperate.”

Unfortunately for all of us, a new Cold War between the U.S. and China might already be under way. China is a rising power (and a tyrannical one at that) eager to throw its weight around a little bit. America is the established power, eager to remain dominant. The American people are right to cast a cautious, wary eye toward the Pacific Ocean.

But all-caps declarations of “peace through STRENGTH” and mocking the White House for simply talking to Chinese leaders are simply silly — schoolboy posturing that attempts to look tough at the expense of acting wisely.

Dialogue and diplomacy are not rewards that the United States bestows on rival nations, after all. They’re tools in any well-stocked foreign policy toolbox, designed both to advance American interests and to keep our people safe.

Talking to China might not prevent a war. But not talking to China will make that war much more likely.

So it’s worth considering again what that war would look like. The New York Times described another set of war games. In that imagined conflict, America was battered by Chinese cyberattacks, bringing down power systems and communications around the country. Officials from another think tank estimated that the United States economy would contract by up to 10%. (During the Great Recession, that number was 2.6%.)

“What almost never changes,” the paper reported, “is it’s a bloody mess and both sides take some terrible losses.”

In a real war, those losses wouldn’t be contained to a computer simulation. Those would be your sons and daughters, your brothers and sisters, your husbands and wives, who would die.

Talking isn’t fighting. It’s better than fighting, because almost no one ever gets killed over a conference table. Despite the hysterical overreactions by Hawley and Marshall, talking isn’t surrendering, either. Nothing of importance is or was conceded by Blinken meeting face-to-face with Chinese leaders.

Maybe war with China is inevitable.

I don’t think so. I hope not. But it would be tremendously stupid to let a war happen because American leaders were too proud or performatively tough to talk with their counterparts across the ocean. Talking is good. I wish our elected Republicans understood that.