A new analysis in The Hill argues that the United States has sharply curtailed the academic exchanges, business presence, and research engagement that once gave American policymakers genuine insight into Chinese society, economics, and intent — and that the resulting knowledge gap is now a strategic liability.
The pattern has precedent. In the 1950s, McCarthyite purges drove out the State Department's China hands — the diplomats and scholars who actually read, spoke, and traveled in Asia. Their absence meant Washington went into Korea and Vietnam nearly blind to how Beijing calculated risk and commitment. The cost was measured in lives and decades.
Self-imposed ignorance is not strength policy; it is fear policy dressed in the language of security. A republic that cannot see its rivals clearly cannot govern itself wisely in relation to them.