You will have seen it play out on the news so often as to become cliché. A bereaved person embarks on a crusade against whichever disease, crime or public safety hazard claimed their loved one. A campaign is set up. Donations roll in. What motivates their efforts is a sincere desire to spare others from the same grief. But so does a deep psychic need to claw back control. Having been done to and acted upon by a capricious world, the feeling of agency, however brief, soothes them.
Nations too have losses to process. Whether or not China ever surpasses it, the US has been bereaved of its 1990s unipolarity. It copes with the trauma by dwelling on what could have been done about it. If only China had not been waved into the World Trade Organization 20 Decembers ago. If only successive White Houses had not been so credulous in their dealings with Beijing. The recriminations go back to 1949, when, as some Republicans still fancy, the US “lost” China to communism.
On the surface, this self-reproach looks courageous and honest. In fact, it is the easy way out. The alternative is to admit that the much larger and older country was bound for world eminence (again) once it began to open up under Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s. The west might have postponed its arrival at the top table, at some cost. Preventing it outright was never in its power.