China Threatens America: The U.S. Is Not A Sovereign State

Xi Jinping Thinks China Is World's Only Sovereign State

• The trend of Chinese ruler Xi Jinping's recent comments warns us that his China does not want to live within the current Westphalian system of nation states or even to adjust it. From every indication, Xi is thinking of overthrowing it altogether.
  
  
• Beijing now thinks it can, with impunity, injure Americans. In the first week of May, the Pentagon said that China, from its base in Djibouti, lasered a C-130 military cargo plane, causing eye injuries to two American pilots.
  
  
• The laser attack in the Horn of Africa, far from any Chinese boundaries, highlights Beijing's unstated position that the U.S. military has no right to operate anywhere and that China is free to do whatever it wants anyplace it chooses. And let us understand the severity of the Chinese act: an attempt to blind pilots is akin to an attempt to bring down their planes, and an attempt to bring down planes is an assertion China has the right to kill.
  
  
  "I hear prominent Americans, disappointed that China has not become a democracy, claiming that China poses a threat to the American way of life," Jimmy Carter wrote on the last day of 2018 in a Washington Post op-ed. That claim, Carter tells us, is a "dangerous notion."
  
  
  There is nothing more dangerous than a notion from the 39th president, even on China. China, despite what he said, threatens not only America's way of life but also the existence of the American republic. Chinese ruler Xi Jinping has, in recent years, been making the extraordinary case that the U.S. is not a sovereign state.
  
  
  The breathtaking position puts China's aggressive actions into a far more ominous context.
  
  
  Carter, and almost all others who comment on Chinese foreign policy, see Beijing competing for influence in the current international order. That existing order, accepted virtually everywhere, is based on the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which recognizes the sovereignty of individual states that are supposed to refrain from interfering in each other's internal affairs. Those states now compete and cooperate in a framework, largely developed after World War II, of treaties, conventions, covenants, and norms.
  
  
  Many Chinese policymakers believe they are entitled to dominate others, especially peoples on their periphery. That concept underpinned the imperial tributary system in which states near and far were supposed to acknowledge Chinese rule. Although there is no "cultural DNA" that forces today's communist leaders to view the world as emperors did long ago, the tributary system nonetheless presents, as Stephen Platt of the University of Massachusetts points out, "a tempting model" of "a nostalgic 'half-idealized, half-mythologized past.' "
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Beijing now thinks it can, with impunity, injure Americans. In the first week of May, the Pentagon said that China, from its base in Djibouti, lasered a C-130 military cargo plane, causing eye injuries to two American pilots.
  
  
  The laser attack in the Horn of Africa, far from any Chinese boundaries, highlights Beijing's unstated position that the U.S. military has no right to operate anywhere and that China is free to do whatever it wants anyplace it chooses. And let us understand the severity of the Chinese act: an attempt to blind pilots is akin to an attempt to bring down their planes and an attempt to bring down planes is an assertion China has the right to kill.
  
  
  China has been called a "trivial state," one which seeks nothing more than "perpetuation of the regime itself and the protection of the county's territorial integrity." This view fundamentally underestimates the nature of the Chinese challenge. China, under Xi Jinping, has become a revolutionary regime that seeks not only to dominate others but also take away their sovereignty.
  
  
  Xi at this moment cannot compel others to accept his audacious vision of a China-centric world, but he has put the world on notice.
  
  
  These events together mean, once again, that Carter has failed to understand a hardline regime. In his op-ed, he warns America against starting "a modern Cold War" with China. Washington, in reality, cannot start anything. There already is a struggle that Xi Jinping has made existential.