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Geopolitical imagination and the US war on drugs against China

ABSTRACT The war on drugs has been an essential component of US territorial politics since the Second World War. This paper examines the US discursive war on drugs against China in the context of changing US–China relations. It focuses on two schemes. Scheme I is that in the 1950s state actors in the United States portrayed Communist China as a source country; and Scheme II is that the fentanyl-related opioid crisis exploding in 2017 in the United States was allegedly attributed to China. In linking illicit drugs and national security, this paper finds that the US war on drugs entails a blending of securitization and territorialization: illicit drugs as a security challenge and source countries as others. Through this blending, US policy-makers and media sources can weave together a discourse of an existential threat, making the war on drugs an imperative to defend US national security. This paper argues that the war on drugs is rendered discursive, allowing the United States to impose its view and place pressure on China for geopolitical interest. Geopolitical imagination epitomizes the operation of Great Power politics, or specifically, one geopolitical strategy through which the United States lays down and enforces the rules of the game for other countries.