Sept. 21, 2026, 5:03 a.m. ET
By Robert D. Kaplan
Mr. Kaplan is a writer and an analyst of U.S. military and foreign affairs.
Before Iran, before Iraq, before Afghanistan there is no country that America has gotten as wrong as China. If this is mystifying, it is only because historical memories are short. America struggled through the previous fiascos. Getting it wrong again would be catastrophic. This is why it is crucial that President Trump strike the right balance in his summit this week with China’s leader, Xi Jinping.
During World War II, the United States backed China’s Chiang Kai-shek against the Japanese fascists who had invaded in the 1930s. The Roosevelt administration assumed that China under Chiang’s Nationalists would constitute one of the Big Four powers after World War II, along with the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union. When the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong swept to victory in the 1946-1949 civil war, Washington was shocked that a movement it had barely acknowledged had toppled the beloved Chiang. It was also enraged that the Soviet Union and China were now both in Communist hands. Someone had to be held to account.
Thus was born the “who lost China?” debate, a critical element of the Red Scare of the 1950s. The State Department officials held to account were precisely the ones who during World War II had been warning, to no avail, that the Communists were likely to militarily triumph. Rather than being celebrated for their clairvoyance, these officials were denounced as traitors whose weak support for the Nationalists had led to Chiang’s fall. The idea that the State Department could have prevented a Communist takeover across a landscape of 550 million people — 37 times the population of South Vietnam during our war there — gravely misjudged the limits of American power.
The Foreign Service officers themselves weren’t innocent. Though accurate about Mao’s chances, they misunderstood the nature of his rule. They conceived of Mao’s Communists as benign compared with Chiang’s Nationalists. Based in the Nationalist wartime capital of Chongqing, they knew intimately Chiang’s authoritarian tendencies. They made only short visits to the Communist base camp in Yan’an, visits that were stage-managed by Mao and his propagandist Zhou Enlai. Impressed by the order and discipline of Yan’an, they were blind to Mao’s totalitarianism, which would eventually result in the murder and starvation of as many as 70 million Chinese.” . . . . .
David Lindsay Jr: Very good essay by Robert Kaplan. My only quibble is over is criticism of Biden for clarifying that we would protect our ally Taiwon. It might have been less vague that our formal position, but clarity it what was and is needed, even according to Kaplan later in his own essay.