The time for mincing words is over: China has become a threat to world peace. Ten years ago it was still reasonable to hope for reform. Five years ago it was still possible to argue that greater engagement might help moderate Beijing’s behavior. But after Xi Jinping changed China’s constitution in 2018 to remove term limits, further centralize power, and enshrine “Xi Jinping Thought” in the very preamble, it became clear that things were going to get worse before they got better. Many Western intellectuals lauded Xi as the anti-Trump in 2017. No one will speak up for him today.

But the new cold war on China can’t be won from Washington. The world seems to want the United States to waive its fairy wand and neutralize Chinese aggression without disrupting global trade and investment flows — or even causing ripples at United Nations agencies like the World Health Organization. That’s just not possible. The United States can’t rid the South China Sea of over-aggressive Chinese fishing boats any more than it could have saved Poland from German aggression in 1939.

The first countries to stand up to China must be its neighbors. That’s the real lesson of 1939. At the beginning of World War Two, natural Western allies like Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands all declared their neutrality in the vain hope of avoiding Nazi aggression. Other Western neutrals like Switzerland and Sweden even cooperated with the Nazi war effort to save their own skins. Had they all stood solidly with Britain and France, it is unlikely that Germany would ever have been able to make much headway in Western Europe.