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The United States, writes Max Boot in the , has “exaggerated fears about Chinese power.” Boot compares U.S. Air Force Gen. Michael A. Minihan — whose memo revealed Chinese President Xi Jinping’s October 2022 “war council” and who has expressed fear that China may invade Taiwan by 2025 — to the “unhinged generals” in the movie Dr. Strangelove. Minihan and others, Boot says, are suffering from an “anti-Chinese paranoia” that reminds Boot of the early Cold War years when, apparently, we suffered from anti-Soviet paranoia. That anti-Soviet mindset, writes Boot, led to “anti-Red witch hunts at home and to ill-fated, costly military inventions such as the one in Vietnam” and “almost led, during the Cuban missile crisis, to nuclear Armageddon.” Who is calling whom “unhinged”?
Boot’s early Cold War “history” suffers from revisionism plus. The Soviets, he writes, were “never as strong or as reckless as so many imagined.” So, Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal, George F. Kennan, Paul Nitze, John J. McCloy, W. Averell Harriman, John Foster Dulles, and James Burnham were all wrong about the Soviets and Stalin. The Soviet attempts to take over northern Iran, to starve West Berlin into submission by a land blockade, to supply the Chinese Communists in their civil war, and to fund communist parties throughout Western Europe and in the United States were, apparently, not as great of a threat as those “wise men” believed. And what Boot calls “anti-Red witch hunts” revealed extensive communist infiltration of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.
