Interesting dynamic - the US needs to portray China as a threat in order to convince a wary public that the significant funds required to field a military capable of meeting that threat are necessary - large defense budgets must be validated by linked threats justifying those budgets - and, what's more, these threats must be easily graspable by the public, a public that is overwhelming made up of people who have never read anything having to do with military history or logistics, strategic thinking or the often confounding permutations of foreign policy impacting a superpower that also happens to be sole defender of the Western tradition, democratic freedoms and open markets. Sure, 9/11 and Islamic extremism kept the public interested for awhile in the intrinsic value of a powerful American military, but with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being seen as 'failures', and the perception rising out of these failures being that Muslim polities are beyond fixing, a perception strongly reinforced by the [utterly predictable] negative turn the Arab Spring took culminating in the mega fuck up that is Syria - well, the public is increasingly less willing to accept the perils of Islam as justification for bloated defense budgets. Which leaves us with China - and yet still many want to talk about the 'peaceful rise of China' and wax rhapsodic on how there's no reason our relations with them need be adversarial - indeed, many in the liberal elite talk about China with a pronounced envy much as the enlightened elite of the 30's often talked about communist Russia and Nazi Germany as political systems not just on par with American democracy, but superior to it.
Needless to say, this paradox is not lost on China's inner sanctum of strategic wizards - for them, not just Obama himself as a uniquely weak and unqualified leader when it comes to foreign policy, but also the naive ideological presumptions of the intellectual milieu he is a product of and that seems in many regards to be ascendant in America, are golden opportunities crying out for abuse.
Needless to say, this paradox is not lost on China's inner sanctum of strategic wizards - for them, not just Obama himself as a uniquely weak and unqualified leader when it comes to foreign policy, but also the naive ideological presumptions of the intellectual milieu he is a product of and that seems in many regards to be ascendant in America, are golden opportunities crying out for abuse.
