The case for U.S.-led regime change in China is based on a fallacy

Max Boot’s new piece refutes the Reagan myth, calls it “dangerous and unrealistic” to justify a New Cold War with China policy on an incorrect reading of history

China watchers should read Max Boot’s new piece in Foreign Affairs, “ Reagan Didn’t Win the Cold War How a Myth About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Leads Republicans Astray on China.”  

That title is likely to trigger people who came of political age in the 1980s (like me, see below) one way or another. But the most important line of the piece is this:

“Washington should not imagine that it can transform China. Only the Chinese people can do that.”

Yes, exactly that.

Boot refutes a core justification of two of the prominent (overlapping) themes in today’s China discourse: “Win the competition with China” and “defeat the CCP.” By showing that the notion that Reagan “won” the Cold War is wrong, he undermines the argument that a Reagan game plan is a template for how to ‘win’ a New Cold War with China.

“But Reagan did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union. To imagine otherwise is to create dangerous and unrealistic expectations for what U.S. policy toward China can achieve today.”

The most succinct representation of the “win” framework” is the Foreign Affairs piece by Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher, literally titled “No Substitute for Victory,” which explicitly asserts that the U.S. is in a New Cold War with China. Boot notes that they specifically cite Reagan’s “win” to argue that “the United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it.”

Boot is right to wonder, “it is hard to know what ‘defeating China’ even means” while noting it is easier “to imagine that unrelentingly hard-line policies [that] could raise the risk of a nuclear war.” It’s not as if there aren’t analysts out there trying to enunciate this, such as Michael Sobolik’s Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy For American Dominance, which envisions a muscular forcing of U.S. unipolarity. But in general rhetoric far exceeds detail.

Whether explicit or not, the “win” argument tends to lead to a case for regime change, the idea that the U.S. should pursue a policy to oust the CCP from power in China. To be clear, I am no fan of the CCP (and they are no fan of me). If I could wave a magic wand and make the CCP go away, I would. 

But I don’t have such a magic wand. And neither do you. And neither does the United States, despite the wishcasting of the Regime Change fanboys.

There are many reality-based reasons why regime change in China as a U.S. policy goal is a bad idea. But most fundamental is the fact that it’s not our call to make. Boot is absolutely correct: “Only the Chinese people can do that.”

The Regime Change idea is an undetachable component of New Cold Warrior thinking, which is grounded in the ‘Reagan-won-the-Cold-War’ fallacy that Boot exposes. As I wrote, the Regime Change approach is a lazy one. Why bother putting in the hard work of crafting a China policy  policy approach based on today’s conditions and complexities, when you can just cut and paste a fantasy feel-good narrative into current talking points?

The central aspect of the Reagan fallacy, as Boot shows, is the pretense that that fall of the Soviet Union was an American project. This thinking excludes the role of Gorbachev in particular and the Soviet people in general, in shaping their own destiny. Because they ground their China policy in this Reagan myth, the Regime Changers make the same fundamental mistake: they deny agency to the people of China.

Core to the Regime Change idea is the belief that change in China is also an American project. Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump Administration, and written by a cohort of New Cold Warriors, is very explicit in this aim: “The PRC’s aggression can only be curbed through external pressure” (p. 180). And it justifies this position in the notion that the Chinese, people, due to their history and culture, are incapable of forming a “normative nation.” Well, that’s racist.

I think it is wrong to deny the people of China agency, both on moral and policy grounds. 

A policy that asserts that it’s America’s job to determine how the people of China should govern themselves will only strengthen Chinese nationalism, empower the CCP’s case for one-party rule, and make it that much harder for the people of China to make change when circumstances warrant. Boot exposes the fantasy of externally-forced change and shows how change actually happened in the Soviet Union.

U.S. policymakers should be saying every day that it is wrong for the CCP to deny the people of China their fundamental human rights and ability to question and change their government. Because that is what the CCP-controlled PRC government is obligated to do under international law. We can empower the people of China to assert their rights. We can hold PRC leaders accountable for denying them. The U.S. has an interest in the future of China, obviously. But their future is not for us to determine.

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Notes on Boot’s analysis

As a non-credentialed student of Soviet and Cold War history (I studied IR and Soviet history in college during perestroika and was a junior foreign policy analyst in college when the USSR collapsed), I agree with Boot’s assessment that it was Gorbachev not Reagan that was the primary agent of change.

The U.S. didn’t win the Cold War; the USSR lost it first. The massive arms race bankrupted the Soviets before it did the Americans.

It is true that the structural deficiencies and inflexibilities of the communist economic and political systems played a big role in the USSR’s demise. And the Chernobyl disaster was a big catalyst. But that was particular to them, not and not a general rule of communism (how to explain the survival of governments in China, Vietnam and Cuba?).

I’ve always bothered me when Reagan hagiographers praise his prediction that the demise of communism (to the “ash heap of history”) was inevitable. If so, why spend trillions of dollars to nearly bankrupt ourselves in the process? Also, it’s a contradiction to claim that the fall of communism was inevitable and then praise Reagan for being the one to end communism (in the USSR).

Moreover, those who credit Reagan with ending the Cold War are undercut by Reagan himself. In his famous speech in Berlin, Reagan didn’t say: “I am going to tear down this wall.” What he said was: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” And that’s, more or less, what happened. As Reagan foresaw, the Cold War ended because of Gorbachev, after all.