Quick question: would you order the bombing of an enemy country? One more quick question: would you order the bombing of an enemy country populated not just by your own family members, but also the family members of every one of your colleagues?
To say that the answer to the second question would vary from the first insults obvious. Readers know why.
The obvious seemingly eludes Mike Gallagaher, the former congressman from Wisconsin. Writing from a surely much cozier, post-politics perch at Palantir, Gallagher recently published a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled “Send China’s Harvard Student’s Home.” Gallagher is taking a dangerous stance, one that will hopefully be recognized as such by decisionmakers in government.
That's because Gallagher’s opinion piece fails the basics of foreign policy, basics informed by the brilliance of interconnectedness. When countries are economically tied whereby some of their best customers are in other countries, the odds of war with those other countries logically shrink. The previous assertion isn’t foolproof, but it’s the best barrier to war we have since people are loathe to shoot at their most passionate buyers.
Consider this through the prism of Gallagher’s call to throw out China’s Harvard Students, students Gallagher describes as the “scientific and leadership class of a future adversary.” Gallagher’s argument isn't just dangerous, it's contradictory.
Precisely because the best, brightest, and most connected to Chinese leadership are attending Harvard, the odds of China becoming a “future adversary” are a great deal lower. For one, think of how college attendance in the U.S. might change the views of China’s future leadership class for the better…assuming their views needed changing. As evidenced by their attending college in the U.S., it’s apparent that the sons and daughters of China’s elite don’t view the U.S. as negatively as Gallagher and other hawks imagine they do.
Second, consider where China’s future “scientific and leadership class” is attending college. Gallagher oddly laments that they attend Harvard and Harvard-adjacent schools, and that’s odd simply because nothing could make Americans safer from war of the shooting and bombing kind than hundreds and thousands of China’s most elite students being educated stateside. Talk about a shield from Chinese invasion. See above.
See also the grand success of Tiktok in the U.S., along with a number of other rising corporations that originated in China. For China to aim its weapons at the U.S. would be for China to crush some of the greatest Chinese corporations.
To which Gallagher and other right-of-center China hawks will claim that U.S. universities shouldn’t be educating the “scientific and leadership class” of China, a country they yet again claim is a future adversary. Which is funny when it’s remembered that conservatives claim a mass exodus from Harvard and Harvard-adjacent schools by bright American conservatives who refuse to have their precious minds polluted by all the allegedly “liberal” professors at Harvard.
Ok, so which is it? It’s really neither. Depending on the day, Harvard is a great school when it fits the right’s China paranoia, and it’s an awful school when the same right wants to "get" the left. It brings up a new joke from a non-jokester: When does Harvard become a great school to Harvard-bashing conservatives? When their son or daughter is admitted.
Back to reality, Gallagher knows more than 99.9999% of us that war is a sick thing. Elite Chinese students sprinkled throughout the U.S. makes war between the U.S. and China much less likely. Gallagher owes his country this truth far more than he owes his career the false, but lucrative fruits of Chinese paranoia.
