Racist garbage from a State Department official

The pro-Trump website Washington Examiner has a story featuring some racist garbage from Kiron Skinner, director of policy planning at the State Department:

State Department preparing for clash of civilizations with China

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s team is developing a strategy for China based on the idea of “a fight with a really different civilization” for the first time in American history.

“This is a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology and the United States hasn’t had that before,” Kiron Skinner, the director of policy planning at the State Department, said Monday evening at a security forum in Washington, D.C.

Skinner is leading an effort to develop a concept of U.S.-China relations on the scale of what she called “Letter X” — the unsigned essay by George Kennan, who assessed “the sources of Soviet conduct” in 1947 and outlined the containment strategy that guided American strategists for the rest of the Cold War. China poses a unique challenge, she said, because the regime in Beijing isn’t a child of Western philosophy and history.

“The Soviet Union and that competition, in a way it was a fight within the Western family,” Skinner said, noting Karl Marx’s indebtedness to Western political ideas. “It’s the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.”

A comment on Twitter from self-professed conservative (but not of the Trump kind) economic strategist Patrick Chovanec:

I’m not sure that this is helpful, at all.

There are plenty of reasons to object to China’s direction and actions under the CCP. Or to stand up for U.S. interests vs Chinese interests. But to see an inevitable clash with the Chinese because they are fundamentally “different” is a betrayal of our own values.

It’s a return to the days of invoking the “Yellow Peril” and the worst ways of characterizing our fight with Japan in WW2.

It also abandons those Chinese who courageously and at great peril stand on behalf of the universal values we claim to champion.