The Geopolitics of Anti-Asian Violence: Cold War Contradictions In the Era of "Building Back Better"

On March 17, 2021, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken addressed a security conference in Seoul, Republic of Korea as part of his first tour of Asia as the nation's top diplomat. Clad in a black surgical mask and speaking from behind a COVID plexiglass screen, Blinken used the occasion to address a tragic story unfolding halfway across the globe. The day before, a twenty-one-year-old white American man had opened fire at three separate massage parlors in the Atlanta metropolitan area, killing eight people, including six Asian women. The murders, which the shooter claimed were motivated by "sexual temptation," became the crest of a national conversation about anti-Asian racism and misogyny that had swelled for the past year amidst the racialization of the COVID-19 pandemic as the so-called "China virus."¹

While Blinken's trip was tasked with recommitting to the US-ROK alliance, the military and security apparatus at the center of US occupation of the Korean peninsula, he took a moment to join the chorus of US officials denouncing the act. Noting that four of the victims were of Korean descent, Blinken offered his condolences to the Korean community, stating that he was "horrified by this violence, which has no place in America, or anywhere."² Promising to "stand with the Korean community," Blinken's remarks wedded the language of domestic anti-racism and US global leadership. In this formulation, the US-ROK Alliance—what the State Department deems the "linchpin of peace, security, and prosperity" in the region—stands not as a form of military occupation or imperial clientelism, but one of righteous defense from regional bogeyman such as the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).³ The endemic violence of US militarism—from sexual exploitation in military "camptowns" to the extralegal status of US servicemen—is rendered a mere footnote to a program of liberal internationalism which claims to preside over what the US military euphemistically terms a "Free and Open Indo-Pacific."⁴

Blinken's easy distinction between the singular act of the Atlanta shootings and the routinized violence of US imperialism speaks to the contradictions at the heart of the Biden administration's aspiration to restore both racial liberalism and global US power.⁵ Since the campaign trail, platitudes about restoring global US leadership have made up the core of the Biden administration's foreign policy platform. Defining his approach to world governance in Foreign Affairs in spring of 2020, then-candidate Biden insisted that "America must lead again"—a corrective to Trump's alleged abandonment of US allies and the emboldening of its adversaries, China and Russia first and foremost.⁶ In dated Cold War language befitting his longevity in Washington, Biden argued that restoring the nation's place in the world would require tapping the same spirit that "took us to victory in two world wars and brought down the Iron Curtain." At the same time, Biden pitched his presidency as a means to reinstate the era of racial liberalism in order to "restore the soul of the nation" from the crude racism of the Trump era.⁷

Asian /Americans have been cast to perform the work of legitimation under the intersecting projects of racial liberalism and US hegemony—from the symbolic inclusion of Asian /Americans into the US national body to the incorporation of allied Asian states into a US-led orbit of militarized peace.⁸ On the one hand, Asian /Americans have become a performative symbol of a reascendant racial liberalism. In his first week in office, Biden issued a symbolic executive memorandum "condemning and combating" racism and intolerance against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.⁹ The incantation to "Stop Asian Hate" has become coterminous with the rehabilitation of American liberalism itself, as signs adorning the windows of small businesses and suburban lawns signaled liberal America's commitment to racial tolerance. These calls to Stop Asian Hate echo Blinken's hollow condolences insofar as they cordon off...