There are, I think, two inter-related explanations for this. The first is that ideology is a form of power and states wield it when they think it helps them advance more mundane geo-strategic interests. To take the U.S.-China example – America’s liberal democratic ideology is still fairly attractive globally, whereas not many people want to live in a single party communist autocracy that jails artists and Nobel Prize winners. Throwing this in China’s face puts them on the defensive in the eyes of global public opinion and, by extension, makes it harder for China to plead its case on other issues of strategic importance. This is why many people who want to take a “harder line” with China over its growing “assertiveness” in Asia usually begin by urging American politicians to call out Beijing’s human rights abuses.

The second explanation is that ideological parries are easy and demagogic. It’s difficult, time consuming and complicated to suss out which states have legitimate claims to various pieces of aquatic territory and then to rally people around those issues. It’s quite easy, by contrast, to call China (or any other state) “evil” and leave it at that. ~Greg Scoblete

Greg was responding to my earlier post on ideology. I agree that ideology is an instrument of state power, and ideology as such wouldn’t exist except for the desire to acquire and exercise power, but this is what still leaves me puzzled. It doesn’t help the U.S. gain much of anything to stoke hostility towards China, and it isn’t clear to me that it is all that useful to the U.S. to try to encourage regime change in China. America won’t benefit from conflict with China, and it won’t benefit from prolonged instability in China and East Asia. If deploying liberal democratic ideology were actually being used to advance some concrete U.S. interest, that would be one thing, but instead it seems to have become an end in itself that requires the U.S. to put its interests at risk for the sake of prior ideological commitment.

It’s true that “not many people want to live in a single party communist autocracy that jails artists and Nobel Prize winners,” but it seems to me that this doesn’t really explain the value of promoting liberal democratic ideology to compete with China for influence. Other nations don’t have to want to live under a Chinese-style system to accept Chinese investment and influence, and they don’t. In practice, democrats around the world are going to be interested in pursuing their respective national interests, and insofar as China supports or does not interfere with those there is nothing about China’s domestic regime that obviously limits the influence it can have. After all, it isn’t as if China’s neighbors would be less alarmed by its moves in the South China Sea if it were a democratic state. It is fundamentally what China does, not its reigning ideology or its internal repression, that makes its neighbors wary of its intentions.

Drawing attention to internal Chinese repression may be gratifying to activists in China and in the U.S., but it’s not obvious that this puts China on the defensive in a constructive way. Many rising democratic powers and developing countries are understandably wary of infringements on their sovereignty, and they are not likely to want to encourage scrutiny into the internal affairs of any other country lest the same scrutiny be directed at them as well. Throwing the record of internal repression in the face of the Chinese, as Greg puts it, will produce a mixed reaction among other states, especially now that U.S. democracy promotion has become so closely associated with military intervention.

Emphasizing Chinese repression may be useful for building domestic support for more confrontational policies, and Greg is right that this is the easy, demagogic aspect of making ideological appeals, but this assumes that more confrontational policies actually serve U.S. interests. This prior embrace of confrontational, hard-line policies as a means to advance U.S. interests is itself an ideological commitment, and one that doesn’t seem to have much grounding in reality. I suppose that solves the puzzle, but it’s not a very satisfying answer. It suggests that the people promoting an ideological struggle with China are quite willing to increase the chances of conflict with China, because they badly misjudge which policies will best serve U.S. and allied interests.