In September 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon met in a Chicago studio for the first televised presidential debate. Although they were there to discuss domestic matters, Kennedy argued from the start that the United States was slowly losing its economic lead over the Soviet Union.
He tried to highlight the importance of foreign affairs to ordinary people. Nixon didn’t question the growth of the communist adversary, but he noted that the entire Soviet economy made up only 44% of the U.S. gross national product and that the government was doing everything in its powers to deal with this threat.
Recommended Stories
Kennedy disagreed. “I don’t want to see the day when it’s 60% of ours and 70% and 75% and 80% and 90% of ours,” said Kennedy to the audience, “with all the force and power that it could bring to bear in order to cause our destruction.”
In the end, the dark scenarios that Kennedy feared didn’t come true. The U.S. maintained a significant lead over its communist rival throughout the whole Cold War, and it was economic dominance that allowed the public to defeat the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
Nevertheless, the first presidential debate was conducted almost in a defeatist spirit. The USSR was portrayed as a fast-growing country capable of competing with the U.S. economy in the near future. Both the Republican and Democratic candidates were vigilant and aware of the threat posed by the Soviet Union around the world to liberal democracies and the protection of the rights of the individual against the will of the almighty collective.
Though communism was eventually defeated (at least in Europe) and a new world order led by the U.S. was created around the globe, at the same time, we were witnessing a weakening of U.S. economic power in relation to other geopolitical actors. While people of the U.S. are experiencing today an internal ideological crisis, China is gaining an increasingly strong position abroad, replacing the Soviet Union as the leader of the communist world.
According to the International Monetary Fund’s latest report, China’s GDP is already at $24.16 trillion, whereas the U.S. economy is worth only $20.81 trillion, measured by purchasing power parity.
Whereas Kennedy shockingly predicted that Soviet economic output could in a few years match almost half of that of the U.S., the public is now facing a real communist superpower with an economic potential possibly already equal to 116% of its GDP. And in the coming years, that gap will only continue to grow in favor of China.
This year, a deep recession is expected in all of the advanced economies, but according to the IMF, China’s annual growth will continue at about 2%. As Harvard’s Graham Allison recently pointed out in an article for the National Interest, “Americans must wake up to the ugly fact: China has already passed us in the race to be the No. 1 economy in the world.”
Although the public closely monitored the increase in the strength of its communist rival in 1960, the situation has been completely different in the last two decades. The issue of China’s rapid rise to power also didn’t become a major topic of the 2020 presidential elections.
Even though President Trump tried to wage a “trade war” against Beijing and last year, the U.S. trade deficit really fell for the first time in six years, the overall results of the confrontation are still far from sufficient. Joe Biden, on the other hand, in a 60 Minutes interview called “the biggest threat to America right now” Putin’s Russia, which has a similar nominal GDP to South Korea (or Canada), and claimed that China is just “the biggest competitor.”
Deng Xiaoping’s motto: “Hide your strength and bide your time,” has proven to be indeed farsighted. If the public approach to communist China doesn’t change rapidly, we will witness a global shift in power that could alter the lives of people in the West as fundamentally as they haven’t been changed since 1945 and the end of World War II.
However, we don’t see today any emotional speeches to U.S. citizens about China’s economic dominance on television screens. It’s not the main political issue right now. Perhaps it should be while there is still time.
The next presidential administrations could learn from Kennedy’s 1960 warning: “I want people in Latin America and Africa and Asia to start to look to America; to see how we’re doing things; to wonder what the resident of the United States is doing; and not to look at Khrushchev, or look at the Chinese Communists.”
Martin Horicka is a doctoral student in history at Comenius University in Slovakia.
