In April 2019, Kiron Skinner former directorof policy planning at the US State Department described Washingtons new China strategy as built on the understanding that the current clash with Beijing is a fight with a different civilization and a different ideology and the United States hasnt had that before. With China,Skinner proposes thatits the first time that [the United States] will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian. Her comments were widely interpreted as referring to Samuel Huntingtons Clash of Civilizations.

Skinners remarks have been widelycriticisedfor being deeply flawed, as well as historically inaccurate. Earlierideologicalor non-Caucasian competitors named bycriticsinclude Nazi Germany and ImperialJapan. But there is a more recent example of rising power competition involving official public discourse aimed at labelling the opposition others as essentially different and because of that difference requiring of the United States a more confrontational approach: the so-calledJapan Problemof the 1980s and 1990s. It bears striking similarities to the current hardening ofUS discourse on Chinaand the alleged (newfound) certainty that China will not becomemore like the United States.

After the Second World War, Japans rapid transformation from enemy to close US ally and then to economic powerhouse was celebrated. Japan was quickly acknowledged as one of the Western, developed economies of theOECD worldand very much part of the liberal democratic capitalist order championed by the United States.

This changed when the economic relationship between the United States and Japan became a source of competition. From 1982, Japan became the largest deficit trading partner of the United States and in 1985 its biggest creditor. The growing trade deficit and indebtedness on the US side triggered a debate about Japans ability to economically outcompete the United States.

In Washington, explanations emerged that Japan was more different to West in terms of deviating from the principles of free trade and market capitalism than previouslyassumed. New labels such as developmental state and comparative capitalism were created to re-define Japan in relation to existing economic theory.

Japans difference was additionally explained through starkly contrasting depictions of its culture and society.Samuel Huntington, for example, comparing Japan to the United States wrote in 1991 that the one stresses collectivity, consensus, authority, hierarchy, discipline; the other individualism, competition, dissent, egalitarianism, unbridled self-interest One fixes on the long haul and saves and invests; the other focuses on the short term and spends and consumes.

As USpressure applied through tariffs, negotiations, different initiatives and frameworks was not successful in substantially reducing the trade deficit, Japans commitment to the liberal order in general and to the USJapan alliance in particular was questioned. Rising Japan was not only considered a threat to US economic pre-eminence, but it was believed to be promoting a Pax Nipponica, a neo-mercantilist order.

The Japanese economy came to be seen as different, closed and threatening. References to Japanese unfairness, cheating and economic warfare became widespread; a_New York Times_poll in the late 1980s and early 1990s found that the US public considered Japans economy to be agreater threatthan the Soviet Unions military. Japan had replaced the Soviet Union as the exotic Other. The so-calledrevisionistswho became influential during the first Clinton administration argued that Japan was fundamentally different and that dealing with Japan required a more confrontational approach than the rulebook of liberal democratic capitalism would ordinarily allow.

In practice, this results-oriented strategy proved to be unsuccessful. It was quietly buried when the Japanese economy and trade deficit declined substantially in the mid to late 1990s (and as the US deficit declined and attention started shifting to a rising China).

The whole episode marked the most bitter clash between the United States and Japan in the post-war period, with the potential of undermining the conceptual basis of theirrelations. While bigger spillovers affecting thesecurity relationshipwere prevented, hegemonic war between the United States and Japan had been considered a possibility.

In USChina relations today, both the economic and security realms are areas of frictions, which makes the current overall tendency among US government agencies to securitise China even moreproblematic. The USNational Security Strategylabels China a revisionist power. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation director Christopher Wray labelled China as a whole-of-society threat. The right-wing lobby group Committee on the Present Danger has been re-invigorated todefend Western valuesfrom Chinas growing power.

These developments are dangerous due to the risk they pose of instigating a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also for US society aspointed out by Susan Shirk.

In 2019, China not only plays in a different league militarily than Japan did previously, but the United States and China also lack the alliance and security ties that ensured that the kind of mistrust created by USJapan trade disputes in thepastcould be dealt with. With its trade war, the Trump administration is additionally undermining potentially conflict-constrainingeconomic interdependencies.

Given the potential fallout from turning China into the new exotic Other, it is important to remember how the economic threat posed by Japan became an argument within US circles about cultural incompatibility that called for only one approach: confrontation.

Nicola Nymalm is Research Fellow with the Asia and Global Politics and Security programmes at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.