China in as early as 1995. In 2000 a group of neocons published an important volume
outlining their visions on American foreign and defence policy, Present Dangers. In its
‘Mounting threat’ par, the first chapter was on China (Munro 2000). Princeton
University professor Aaron Friedberg, one of the founding members of PNAC,
explained that ‘as long as China is ruled by Communist autocrats, it can never truly be a
friend or a trusted partner of the United States’. He went on:
To the contrary, with the Soviet Union gone from the scene, China is obviously the state
most likely to mount a serious, longterm challenge to American power. Whether our
current leadership [i.e., Clinton] realizes it or not, the United States and China are already
engaged in a struggle for mastery in Asia (Friedberg 1999: 33).
Similarly, Paul Wolfowitz (later to become the Deputy Secretary of Defense) called
China a ‘strategic competitor’, a concept which subsequently became the initial
platform of George W. Bush’s China policy. Wolfowitz stated during the 2000
presidential campaign that China was ‘becoming… the major strategic competitor and
potential threat to the United States and its allies in the first half of the next century’
(cited in Talbott
2003: 7).
Such deep loathing of a Communist China is not the only manifestation of the neocons’
strong moral stance. It is coupled with an almost missionary eagerness to support an
independent Taiwan, which they see as ‘a vibrant and genuine democracy’ (Munro
2000: 51). After all, for the neocons, supporting democracy and opposing dictatorship
are the two sides of the same moral coin. For example, in the late 1990s, John Bolton,
then senior vice-president of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI),
urged the U.S. to fully normalise relationship with Taiwan. Echoing the neocons’
advocacy of injecting moral purpose into U.S. global dominance, Bolton argued that
formal recognition of Taiwan would be just ‘the kind of demonstration of US leadership
that the region needs’ (McDonald 2005: 19). In the same vein, Ross H. Munro (2000:
51) argued that for the United States, ‘we cannot abandon Taiwan without abandoning
our core principles’.
Furthermore, in the 1990s many neocons were busily involved in many major
congressional commissions investigating China security and military policy, such as the
Cox commission on Chinese espionage, the Rumsfeld-Deutch commission on ballistic-
missile threats, and the Rumsfeld commission on security in space. While their policy
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Convention