Book Review: "Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century"

Josh Rogin's new book is an urgent call to acknowledge the cold war between the United States and China

Given everything going on in American domestic politics today, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that there are some very pressing foreign policy issues staring us right in the face. As Josh Rogin documents in his new book, Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century, one of the most pressing is China. His book documents the ways in which the Chinese Communist Party, particularly under the leadership of Xi Jinping, remains engaged in a multifarious set of activities designed to assert its dominance on the international stage. Though Donald Trump is no longer president, the book makes it abundantly clear that the mess he left behind will not be easy for Biden to clean up.

It should surprise exactly no one that Trump took a bad (and untenable) diplomatic situation and made it exponentially worse. It was bad enough that he had no fixed position on China--he wanted to make a deal, but he didn’t want the US to be taken advantage of; he admired President Xi as a friend, even as he was also one of this country’s greatest and most sinister national security threats. Making matters worse was the fact that he surrounded himself with a group of advisers that had radically different ideas about what the relationship should be between the United States and China. While some wanted to pursue aggressive measures to counter China’s efforts to undermine American influence, others (most notably those with connections to Wall Street) wanted to make sure that relations between the nations were kept cordial so that the money would keep flowing. 

As Rogin demonstrates, this chaos worked very much to Beijing’s advantage, since Xi, unlike Trump, actually has a subtle mind that allows him to think of global affairs in a complicated way. To put it bluntly, he played Trump like a fiddle and, unfortunately, there really wasn’t anyone in power who was able or willing to tell Trump the truth of matters (not that he would have listened anyway). Thus it was that Trump was very willing to take a hands-off approach to important human rights concerns--especially the plight of the Tibetans, the Uyghurs, the people of Taiwan, and the people of Kong--though he did at times show himself willing to stand up to China via tariffs. Even there, though, his mixed messaging undercut any efforts to actually address, in a meaningful way, the CCP’s efforts on the international stage. 

Indeed, one of Rogin’s main claims is that China isn’t content to simply keep its nose out of everyone else’s business. Instead, they want every country in the world to have to factor their wishes into their political equations. This in part explains their robust efforts to invest in the infrastructure of various nations around the world (which, of course, ensures that the leaders of said nations feel a measure of indebtedness to the CCP). Some, I’m sure, will argue that this is exactly what the United States has been doing since the end of the Second World War, so why shouldn’t China do the same thing, especially now that it has become a superpower in its own right?

Well, the answer to that is both very simple and very complicated. On the simple side, the plain truth is that China is an authoritarian state that has little to no regard for human rights, nor does it even make a pretense of doing so. Obviously, the United States hardly has clean hands when it comes to human rights abuses, but at the very least we try to live up to our lofty standards, and there’s no question that there is no direct equivalent in the US to what the CCP has been doing to the Uyghurs, who live in a state of perpetual terror and surveillance. On the complicated side, as Rogin documents, we have to acknowledge that the CCP really does want to cut the United States down to size. They don’t want to compete with the US; they want to replace it. 

From my point of view, the most revelatory aspect of this book was its discussion of the many ways in which the CCP has managed to influence all aspects of American culture and society, from the federal government to state capitals, from  academia to business. The connections are often quite byzantine, but Rogin argues that these tendrils of influence are of major national security concern, and it is going to take a lot of work from the various actors involved to begin making an effort to fight back.

I suspect that many average Americans will find Chaos Under Heaven revelatory reading, if only because most Americans, particularly younger ones, can’t be bothered to educate themselves about the nuances of foreign policy. I’ll admit that I’ve never really had a firm opinion on this issue. I’ve been content to let our elected leaders handle as they saw fit. However, this book really forces you to recognize how important a player that China has become on the world stage, as well as how intent it has been on reshaping America’s political culture to suit its own whim, and it also shows how astonishingly successful they’ve been.

Rogin’s book makes abundantly clear that the United States stands at something of a crossroads when it comes to China. Whether or not our elected leaders, and the American people more generally, want to admit as much, the truth is that America and China are locked in a new cold war. The question has become just when this nation’s leaders, and its people, will accept the truth of this matter. Given the enormous impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the globe--and given the CCP’s rather hysterical efforts to keep the truth of its origins concealed from the international community--it certainly seems as if that day of reckoning might be closer than ever before. While the US emerged as the victor in the first Cold War, it’s far from certain, as Rogin points out, that they will win this one.