By Wang Lei

After the US secured its dominant position in the world through two world wars, the following administrations have all made it their top strategic goal to maintain the hegemony position by eliminating threats from any realistic or potential rival.

These so-called threats have to be eliminated for two reasons. First, they endanger America’s position of strength and must be rooted up to make sure no country can surpass it, not even anywhere close. Second, they endanger the so-called American values and must be removed to keep the hegemonic order based on those values running.

To that end, hyping up various “threats” and manufacturing “imaginary enemies” has become an old trick played by American politicians to get domestic public support and rope in allies abroad.

The US is making up enemies to maintain its hegemony. After WWII, believing that the Soviet Union posed a threat to its position of strength and values, Washington, with George Frost Kennan’s long telegram as a starter, portrayed it as an enemy wildly pursuing expansionism, and launched a global front against it, drawing the line based on American ideology and interests.

After the end of the Cold War, the US, ecstatic about the “end of history”, attempted to create and cement a new world order where it was the only superpower, in which it rampantly spread American-style democracy, cracked down upon anyone who went against its will, and never hesitated to apply such coercive means as an economic sanction, international isolation, and military assault.

With the rise of many emerging countries in recent years, the US has turned its eyes on China and Russia. The US National Security Strategy issued in December 2017 during Trump’s term and the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance released by the Biden administration in March this year both label the two countries as arch-rivals.

The US is making up enemies to hijack its allies. Worried about the EU’s increasingly independent foreign policy over recent years, the US has tried to tie the union to its chariot through NATO by constantly exaggerating the military threats from Russia and demanding it increase the defense spending to lighten the burden on America’s shoulder and finance NATO’s military operations. As to China, the US has wantonly imposed trade and technological sanctions on it in total disregard of international law and basic norms governing international relations and forced its allies and other countries to take sides.

The US is making up enemies to deflect domestic trouble. The US political circle has found itself overwhelmed with a fast-widening poor-rich gap, frequent occurrences of racial discrimination, and malfunction of democracy over recent years, which, combined with the rampaging COVID-19 pandemic, has taken a deadly toll on America’s international image. Confronted with this reality, some American politicians, instead of devoting themselves to working out a solution, have doubled up on propagandizing the so-called “China threat”. They have not only smeared China with unwarranted disinformation but also advocated a “new Cold War” against it, all to deflect the domestic trouble and unite the opposing parties at home on the common ground of hating and fighting China.

History and reality have witnessed the American “routine” of dealing with the “enemies” it has fabricated for itself. The first is smearing and demonizing. Many American politicians are good at using the “democracy vs. authoritarianism” pitch to put themselves on a false moral high ground. They are also good at using “think tanks” and NGOs to release seemingly impartial but actually biased statements and reports, going so far as to pay them off to concoct and spread lies blatantly.

The second is sanction and pressuring. The unilateral sanctions imposed by Washington on Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria have aggravated the humanitarian crisis in those countries.

The third is a change of regime. In Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, the US has supported and waged “color revolutions” from place to place, and a military attack is always an option on the table. Its worsened belligerence in recent years has subjected countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to enduring and tremendous trauma of war, taking away the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and leaving tens of millions homeless.

It’s plain as day that the US, with the paranoid obsession with American values and egoistic pursuit for domination, by all means, has become the prime scourge of the current world. To maintain its hegemony, it either creates or flames up trouble or acts arbitrarily on the conceit of itself being the “beacon of democracy”, only to bring persistent turmoil and chaos to other countries. A growing number of people have come to realize that it is the US, the country that is making an enemy out of any country that doesn’t follow its will or lead, that is the real enemy to peace and stability. Its Cold War mentality and hegemonistic behaviors that run counter to the trend of the times are bound to meet with rising objections and opposition.

(The author is from the Institute of World Political Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR).)