The United States is a revisionist power. The aff’s narrative justification’s of a revisionist China

Ultimately, the counter-narratives that exist have not yet significantly challenged the discipline’s dominant conceptual narratives. Ordering narratives of morality and progress have created a binary of positive/benevolent and negative/threatening, brands of international revisionist motivations and behaviours towards an imagined status quo. Positive and/or benevolent revisionism is within the rules, taken for granted and rarely labelled as such. It is typified by the ‘normative power’ of the EU and a similar (though, as indicated above, less extreme) comparative lack of interest in a revisionist US. As in-house revisionism by the principally Western architects of the system, such revisionism’s purpose is narrated as benign and aimed at fine-tuning an inherently progressive order from which, while not flawless, the world is understood to profit and advance. Negative/threatening revisionism is considered disruptive not merely to a stable system but to the progress and advancement that system is designed to bring. Negative revisionism means instability, regression and a real or potential reversal of gains. Attached to actors like China, it is deemed worthy of interrogation, generating the need for debate about world peace (Buzan 2010) and the survival of the international system (Ikenberry 2008). Neither has resistance prevented conceptual narratives of revisionism and the status quo from disseminating into wider public (especially governmental) narratives. The Trump administration labels China (and Russia) a ‘revisionist power’ in both its 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) (White House 2017a) and its 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) (Department of Defense 2018). This label is justified on the basis that China aims ‘to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests … displace the US in the Indo-Pacific region and reorder the region in its favour’ (White House 2017a, 25). When the NDS speaks of ‘a resilient, but weakening, post-WWII international order’ undermined by China and Russia, it points to potential global regression and a dismantling of ‘the longstanding rules-based international order’ (Department of Defense 2018, 1–2, emphasis in original; see Breuer and Johnston 2019). ‘In short, they are contesting our geopolitical advantages and trying to change the international order in their favour’ (White House 2017a, 27). To support its claims of China as nefariously revisionist with designs to reshape the global landscape, the NSS cites China’s attempts to export its state-centric economic model and enhance its military capabilities, and its use of data and surveillance. Yet, throughout the same document, comparably ‘revisionist’ motivations and behaviours are presented as essential elements of a benevolent US policy programme. The theme of ‘advancing American influence’ recurs. To do this, it is argued, the US should ‘play a catalytic role in promoting private-sector-led economic growth’, build and deploy ‘the most effective military in the world’ and ‘continuously pursue strategic intelligence’. The American aim of ‘advancing religious freedom’ is also promoted (White House 2017a, 4, 3, 32, 41). To reiterate an earlier point, narratives are prescriptive, bringing understandings of how the world should be as an inextricable component of the policy-making process, their ‘truths’ and logic enabling certain practices while precluding others. ‘Narratives do not cause action. Instead, they … authorize, enable, and justify specific practices and policies … Over time, the narratives and the practices they authorize come to be taken as natural, granted, and the only conceivable ones.’ Importantly, narratives also resonate more, with greater potential to become dominant or commonsensical, when they can latch on to pre-existing narratives (Autesserre 2012, 207). The aim here, then, is not to draw a causal link between conceptual or ordering narratives, on the one hand, and public/government narratives or foreign policy decisions on the other. It is to show where the narrativized worldviews of the Trump administration connect, or ‘latch on’, to those of the scholarly IR literature, and to examine the political practices they enable. In 2017, US National Security Advisor HR McMaster argued that revisionist powers like China seek to ‘subvert the global order that undergirds our common … economic prosperity’ (White House 2017b). At least in part on the basis of this type of understanding of negative revisionism, or subversion, towards a system that has brought wealth and prosperity, from July 2018 Washington began applying wide-ranging tariffs on Chinese imports (The Economist 2018). These public narratives worked also to preclude a continuation of what the NSS refers to as Washington’s post-Cold-War ‘strategic complacency’ in global affairs. ‘Given the new features of the geopolitical environment the United States must renew key capabilities to address the challenges we face’ (White House 2017a, 26, 28). In March 2018 the US Congress approved Trump’s military spending bill which proposed a US$61 billion increase to the national defense budget (Myre 2018). US Pacific Command was also rebranded the Indo-Pacific Command, to better encapsulate the view not only that China’s ‘rise’ brings the need for material support from key partners such as India, but also that the US–India partnership is one of ‘responsible stewards’ of international ‘peace and stability’ (Ministry of External Affairs 2017; see also Turner 2016). Whatever one’s normative position on US/Western liberalism versus Chinese state-centrism, the tensions within the 2017 NSS around China as an explicitly negatively revisionist actor and the US as implicitly positively revisionist demonstrate the ‘successful’ operations of public narratives. Comparable behaviours in one actor can be morally promoted in the name of upholding the status quo and ensuring global progress, while in others can be portrayed as immoral and regressive. These apparent contradictions are reconciled by the overarching power of largely unquestioned ordering, or meta-, narratives in which the sources of (Western) order and potential (non-Western) chaos are already ‘known’. China’s ambitions to expand its capabilities and influence, moreover, constitute negative revisionism not simply because they emanate from the non-West, but because China’s so-called state-driven project runs counter to beliefs in democratic-capitalist American ideals. China is thus not ‘converging’ as expected; the perceived threat from authoritarianism is referenced heavily throughout both the NSS and NDS. While the US is cast as a benevolent guide for China’s inclusion in the post-war liberal international order, it is China that is frustrating these attempts: ‘For decades, U.S. policy was rooted in the belief that support for China’s rise and for its integration into the post-war international order would liberalize China. Contrary to our hopes, China expanded its power at the expense of the sovereignty of others’ (White House 2017a, 25).