TOMGRAM
Honestly, as 2021 ended, if I had predicted a Russian invasion of and unrelenting globalized war in Ukraine in 2022 and, in 2023, an explosion in the Middle East, beginning with a horrific Hamas incursion into Israel followed by the utter devastation of Gaza (while the Greater Middle East teetered at the edge of worse), you might have thought of me as the Mad Hatter of that winter season.
But of course, that’s just where we find ourselves as this year ends. The question remains: Could there be worse on a planet that may itself prove to be in the ultimate crisis, thanks to our inability to stop using fossil fuels? I mention all of this because today TomDispatch regular Michael Klare brings up yet another possibility that might seem beyond the bounds right now: the potential for an actual war (even a nuclear one) between the United States and China. Absurd, right? I mean, the two great powers left on Earth — one rising (assuming anything can truly rise on this planet anymore), the other falling — facing off on the battlefield? Wouldn’t that be a tale from hell in 2024?
And I must admit that the very thought holds a deep sadness for me, since I’ve long felt a curious warmth for China that I can trace deep into my own life. Admittedly, the closest I ever came to that country was Japan, which wasn’t exactly close. Still, to put it bluntly, China saved my life. I’m thinking here of the China that stretches back into the most ancient realms of history, a civilization and a literature that were remarkable and about which, growing up, I hadn’t learned a damn thing. (In my childhood, China was the place in downtown New York City where you went to get dinner… oh wait, that was Chinatown!) But in 1962, this Jewish kid from that city found himself, at the insistence of his parents and against his own wishes, a freshman at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, just after that then-WASPy redoubt had removed its Jewish quotas.
What saved me was stumbling into the introductory Chinese history course taught by a husband-and-wife team, Arthur and Mary Wright. (She was — a sign of those times — the only female tenured professor at Yale then.) She taught the more modern part of the course and I found myself riveted. She would later let me into a graduate seminar of hers, and her assistant, Jonathan Spence, would oversee my undergraduate thesis on Mao Zedong’s “long march.” I would then go on to Harvard graduate school in Chinese history (while returning to New Haven a summer later to help Spence write his still-superb book To Change China: Western Advisors in China).
A year or two after that, the antiwar moment of the Vietnam era swept me away and out of graduate school (but that’s another story!).
So, I must admit, as this year ends and my 23rd year at TomDispatch begins, in a world where, given the ongoing horrors in Ukraine and Gaza (not to speak of the overheating of the planet), carnage seems to be our everyday reality, it saddens me to think that my country and China might find themselves at each other’s throats. I truly hope otherwise but feel that Klare’s superb piece couldn’t be a more sadly appropriate way to end 2023 at this site. Tom
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