Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is a reported contender for the post of U.S. ambassador to China, and the political brawler who shepherded Obamacare through Congress as White House chief of staff could receive some counterintuitive Republican support.
“There’s a famous story about he sent a rival political operative a dead fish wrapped in newspaper,” Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, replied during a Reagan Institute event when asked if Emanuel had the skills for such a job. “So, I think he certainly is tough enough and can be foul-mouthed enough to confront Chinese Communists — if that’s a priority for him.”
Cotton’s open-mindedness served to underscore his distaste for the Chinese Communist Party, in keeping with his newly unveiled plan to win an “economic long war” against the regime that he deems “a new evil empire.” Yet, the limits of his enthusiasm for Emanuel foreshadow Cotton’s likely disputes with President Biden in the lead-up to a potential presidential bid in 2024.
“If that’s who Joe Biden nominates, obviously, I’ll speak with them and examine his record on the question. I don’t know much about where Rahm Emanuel stands on China,” Cotton said Thursday. “In the end, though, what really matters is Joe Biden. … So, the real open question here is what Joe Biden will do over the next four years. In the past, I gotta say, he’s not been very strong on China at all.”
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In voicing his openness to the man known as “Rahmbo” taking the key Biden administration post, Cotton was leaving the door open to helping the notoriously profane Emanuel take his often-colorful language to Beijing. The former Chicago mayor and White House aide has dropped four-letter words on U.S. presidents and top allies, including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Then a Clinton White House aide, he told the U.K. leader, “Don’t [expletive] this up,” when he was about to appear alongside former President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Emanuel also sent one pollster who submitted numbers he did not like a dead fish.
Cotton spared Biden from very direct criticism in the pages of his report, though the line of future attack was not hidden entirely.
As he warned that Beijing’s censorship of the U.S. movie industry was “not simply a reactionary measure to ensure regime security, but a part of China’s grander ambitions for global ideological competition,” Cotton observed that “a joint venture between DreamWorks and a Chinese firm” received “indirect [U.S.] government support.” The footnote anchors that claim in a 2019 story about Biden “helping studios get their movies into China.”
The Arkansas Republican was more explicit in his opening remarks, when he took a jab at the toast Biden offered during a lunch with then-Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping at the State Department in 2012.
“Today, such an event would be a grave scandal,” Cotton said. “The will and need to confront Communist China is growing. Now is the time for action.”
Cotton, acknowledging Biden’s course was consistent with “great bipartisan failures” that become apparent in hindsight, favors a plan of “targeted decoupling” to diminish U.S. economic exposure to China. While he has no objection to importing “cheap plastic toys” from China, the hospital mask shortage in the early days of the pandemic last year exposed the risks of overdependence on Beijing, which now even dominates the market for key components of the Pentagon’s vaunted F-35 stealth fighter jet.
“A nation that cannot heal itself, care for its sick, or keep its aircraft in the sky is not secure and will not remain a superpower,” the senator said.
Such a “targeted decoupling” will meet with “significant domestic resistance” from U.S. and Western companies that have capitalized on Chinese market access in recent decades.
“The lure of China’s subsidized production capabilities and large and increasingly prosperous market has created a powerful coalition with great political influence,” he said. “The China Lobby recoils at any claim that America’s prosperity and security — indeed, our very survival as a free nation — takes precedence over its bottom line.”
The Biden administration’s response to such opposition could shape Cotton’s counterattack, if the president retains his allegiance to the old Washington consensus about Beijing.
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“He ran point for the Obama administration on its relationship with Xi Jinping. It obviously turned out very poorly,” Cotton said. “So, I’ll be watching very closely, but in the early days, I still have my concerns.”
