FEW THINGS CONCENTRATE THE MIND quite like enmity. Realisation that an enemy is at the gates is a peerless means of stirring a nation from a restful sleep or snapping it out of complacency. That is one of the darker, animal truths of statecraft. Threats focus our attention and impel action. Understanding what, and who, we are against helps us to define what, and who, we are for.
As the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt put it, “The specific political distinction that is the basis for all political activity and impulses is the distinction between friend and enemy.” This distinction is not “metaphorical” or “symbolic” but, rather, “concrete”. The primacy of enmity as a political lubricant was one of the great insights of Schmitt. Like another clever extremist, Lenin, he peered into the heart of modern politics. But remember that Plato himself divided politics into friends and enemies. This is a very old way of thinking.
And thank goodness for it. Over the past few years, policymakers in the United States and beyond have finally — arguably two decades too late — been compelled to confront the reality of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The Trump administration was the catalyst for this, but in Biden’s America there is an emerging, though still inchoate, bipartisan consensus. Politicians have increasingly come to think of the PRC as an “enemy” and in a “concrete” sense to boot. The strategic rivalry between the US and the PRC, submerged for years beneath an ocean of trade, investment, debt, and warm words, has very quickly emerged into the open.
It is now the dominant geopolitical reality of our time. After a long period in which many in Washington D.C. and allied capitals were hesitant to even acknowledge competition with Beijing, much
