The waft of garlic opportunism in the US

Over the weekend, a story went viral in the mainstream media that US Senator for Florida Rick Scott had demanded garlic imports from China be declared a "national security threat."

The claim, of course, was ridiculed for its absurdity across social media, yet in comparative retrospect, such allegations have in fact become normalized in US political discourse regarding various things from China, even if this was a particularly silly example.

As a matter of fact, almost everything from China is derided under the terminology of being a "national security threat" in the US one way or another. Over the past year we've had a weather balloon (now known as a "spy balloon"), but also as per various reports, cranes, fridges, coffee machines, TikTok, subway cars, students, Confucius Institute classes, amongst numerous other things. There's a fundamental pattern in this discourse, that pattern is that the US opportunistically invokes fear and hysteria in the pursuit of political and economic gain.

Speaking as a Briton, American political culture is all about whipping up as much frenzy, drama and mass hysteria about a given subject, person or country as possible in order to fundamentally discredit it. The viciousness of personal attacks in the United States is unparalleled to anywhere else in the Western world and lacks any kind of dignity or respect.

This has gone as far as rival parties using political power to leverage criminal charges against their respective opponents, or other trumped-up charges of misconduct. The smear campaign is a distinctly American art and it has also poisoned Internet culture and discourse. It thrives on lies, distortions and absurdist exaggerations.

As such, American politicians recognize that on a foreign policy level, they can lock their population into line with their goals by emulating extreme amounts of fear pertaining to a certain country or adversary. This state-led culture of fear inducing coincided with the dramatic centralization of power the US government usurped for itself in the 1930s in order to gain political support to pursue total war against Japan, and moreover then firmly manifested itself through the McCarthyist wave of the 1950s amidst the emergence of the Cold War.

In both instances, US authorities would claim that the given adversary is "infiltrating" the country in often omniscient ways, and thus represents a "threat to US society" amidst every single level, deliberately exaggerating the reality and their capabilities, often again with collateral damage to real people. But this is not just a Cold War-era phenomenon as the very same logic was used in claiming that Saddam Hussein held "weapons of mass destruction" and was going to give them to terrorists to attack the US. Whoever the foreign policy is focused on becomes the "bogeyman" for scare tactics.

And now, it is China's turn. US politicians use fearmongering of China to justify policies targeted at its economic and technological containment, and the most prominent card they play do so is, almost always without evidence, claims that the targeted goods, service, product or technology, is a "national security threat." As shown in the opening paragraph, there is no rationale or logic to whatever it may be, and the mainstream media in turn are guilty of parroting these claims at face value and wrongly report such opportunistic scaremongering as being motivated by legitimate "concerns" or in good faith by politicians. This is obviously not correct, given such claims pertaining to domestic politics, especially from Republicans, would never be accepted so easily.

Of course, the real motivation behind calling "garlic" a threat to the United States is a commercial and agricultural one. American politicians want to undermine Chinese farm products in order to protect their own industries. However, in doing so they don't normally use the terminology of a "national security threat" given this is not believable, but usually they resort to the line that it is a product of "forced labor" or something similar.

As an example, this is how they targeted agricultural products from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, including cotton, tomatoes, sugar, amongst others. American politics is deliberately dramatic and theatrical, and the fundamental logic of how it functions is to deliberately smear and discredit the target in order to supplement one's own political and often commercial gain.

This garlic story is nonsense even by their standards, however that can teach us how unreasonable US politics has become in weaponizing these tactics. The world should be more critical and sceptical of the motivations of American politicians.

(The author, a postgraduate student of Chinese studies at Oxford University, is an English analyst on international relations. The views are his own.)