Strategic Paradigms by Ehsan Ahrari

America’s most potent weapon is not its military, but its democratic culture.  If anyone has any doubts about that reality, he/she should read the most recent essay penned by President Hu Jintao of China.

“China’s President Pushes Back Against Western Culture” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/world/asia/chinas-president-pushes-back-against-western-culture.html?ref=global-home&pagewanted=print

In that essay, Hu writes: “We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration.”  In order to understand China’s fear of democracy, one has to understand the highly regimented nature of China’s rise since 1978.  That type of regimentation cannot be produced in democratic countries, which are notorious about debating an issue to death, about coalition formation on issues of “high politics,” and then passing bills on that issue.  Even then, debates never end  about the pros and cons regarding those policies.  No one has even heard that type of ad infinitum debating on any issue in totalitarian polities.  Debates on policies do take place, but only within their inner sanctums and only among the elites.  That type of regimentation immensely helped China’s emergence as a superpower of the future.

When Professor Joseph Nye wrote his seminal work on “soft power,” I wonder whether he was thinking how soft power is capable of playing a crucial in neutralizing culture conflict, which remains as a major source of tension between the West and the “rest.”  (Incidentally, one can write volumes about cultural conflict between the West and the world of Islam).  Mao Zedong knew that well when he discussed “antagonistic” and “non-antagonistic” contradictions.  Antagonistic contradictions may become the basis of prolonged conflict between cultures that either perceive them as superior to others or cultures that envision that other cultures attempting to dominate and transform the very essence of them.  That thought seems to be driving the thinking of President Hu in the afore-cited essay.  At a time when the U.S. and the Chinese are thinking about the modalities of future competition between the two countries, we need to pay a lot of attention to Hu’s point of winning the “culture war,” which he thinks the West (aka the United States) is waging against China.