Dear Vanity Fair's Senior Staff Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates,
We are writing because your recent work has reminded us what courageous journalism can do. In your Vanity Fair essays, including your critique of Kamala Harris's silence on Gaza, you challenged readers to confront difficult questions that have chronically gone unexamined by mainstream media.
There is another defining story demanding that same fearless scrutiny.
The accelerating U.S. campaign against China is one of the most consequential stories of our time, and yet it continues to be misrepresented in the media.
As journalists, historians, and the public have repeatedly shown, wars do not begin with the first missile. Instead, they begin with narratives that manufacture fear, normalize militarization, and convince ordinary people to believe in the existence of an enemy. The U.S. drive to war on China depends on the story that China is our enemy. Powerful institutions have spent years reinforcing that narrative. That process has ultimately eroded our ability to see China clearly, as well as our capacity for peace.
We strongly encourage you to investigate the accelerating drive toward war with China and the profound consequences it is already having on people, the planet, and the future of the world. The "China threat" has become one of the most powerful organizing narratives in American politics, shaping military strategy, industrial policy, scientific research, media coverage, and public opinion. The narrative is used and abused by policy officials to pass bills and accomplish specific agendas. And the human, environmental, and economic costs go continuously unreported.
These questions deserve the kind of moral clarity and historical perspective that have defined your work.
Among them:
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The militarization of the Pacific. The United States has dramatically expanded its military posture across the Pacific through new base agreements, expanded access to military facilities in the Philippines, Australia, Japan, and other allied countries, larger troop deployments, and some of the largest military exercises in history, including RIMPAC. Tens of thousands of troops, dozens of warships, submarines, and aircraft now train for potential conflict in a region that is home to more than half of humanity. These preparations increase the risk of accidents, military escalation, and catastrophic conflict between nuclear powers while placing Pacific communities on the front lines. The people most affected by this buildup—those living near bases and training grounds—are rarely centered in the story.
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A record military budget at the public's expense. “Competition” with China has become one of the principal justifications for what is set to become a roughly $1.5 trillion annual U.S. war budget. Members of Congress from both major parties increasingly invoke China to justify new weapons systems, expanded military production, and long-term force expansion. Every dollar directed toward preparing for war is a dollar not invested in affordable housing, universal healthcare, public education, climate solutions, public transit, or addressing poverty.
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Environmental destruction. The U.S. military is among the world's largest institutional consumers of fossil fuels, while military bases and training sites across the Pacific have left enduring environmental damage, including PFAS contamination, fuel spills, unexploded ordnance, and hazardous chemical releases. Communities in Okinawa, Guam, Hawaiʻi, South Korea, and elsewhere have long raised concerns about pollution, ecosystem destruction, and the health consequences of hosting an expanding military presence. As climate change intensifies storms, rising seas, and extreme heat throughout the Pacific, further militarization consumes enormous resources while compounding environmental harm in one of the regions most vulnerable to the climate crisis.
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The rise of Sinophobia and the erosion of civil liberties. Political rhetoric portraying China as an existential enemy has fueled a broader climate of fear and suspicion toward people of Chinese descent, contributing to discrimination, hate incidents, and racial profiling. Anti-Asian hate surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many advocates warn that escalating anti-China rhetoric risks reinforcing these prejudices. This climate has also reached universities and research institutions, where scientists and students have faced heightened scrutiny, visa restrictions, restrictions on academic collaboration, and investigations that have upended careers even when no wrongdoing was found. Programs such as the China Initiative left lasting damage within the scientific community, while newer policies continue to hurt international exchange. Cases involving Chinese and Chinese American scholars—including University of Michigan researcher Danhao Wang, whose death followed intense federal scrutiny according to those close to him—show the profound human costs of the U.S. drive to war on China.
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A biased media ecosystem. As the U.S. devotes billions of dollars to its war on China, public debate increasingly takes place within a framework that assumes war is both necessary and inevitable. Stories highlighting military threats often receive sustained attention, while the structural incentives behind escalating rivalry, the interests that profit from it, and the opportunities for diplomacy and cooperation receive comparatively little examination. This imbalance shapes not only public opinion but the range of policies considered politically possible.
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A world pulled away from cooperation. Humanity faces shared challenges that no nation can solve alone: climate change, pandemics, biodiversity loss, nuclear proliferation, food insecurity, and the governance of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. Yet a new Cold War redirects immense financial, political, scientific, and diplomatic resources toward militarization rather than international cooperation. The deterioration of U.S.-China relations affects not only the two countries but the entire world, reducing opportunities for collaborative solutions to the defining challenges of our time.
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The loss of understanding. As China is increasingly framed primarily as a military threat, Americans are losing the opportunity to understand one of the world's oldest civilizations and one of the most consequential societies of the twenty-first century. Coverage centered almost exclusively on geopolitical competition leaves little room to examine China's history, culture, politics, or the experiences of its 1.4 billion people. It also obscures developments that deserve serious journalistic attention: China's world-leading buildout of high-speed rail and renewable energy, major advances in electric vehicles and artificial intelligence, its role in global infrastructure and poverty reduction, and policy experiments that are reshaping debates about economic development around the world. Journalism should help us understand the world in all its complexity. When China is reduced to an “enemy”, Americans are left with fear rather than understanding, making it far easier to justify war.
Your writing has consistently illuminated the structures of power that many institutions prefer not to examine. This is one of those moments. The stories being told about China today will shape public opinion for years to come, and they will determine whether future generations inherit a world defined by peace and cooperation or by war and destruction.
Many journalists have examined America's wars only after they began. We hope you will help investigate the narratives making the next one possible.
Thank you for your courage and your commitment to telling the stories that matter.
Toward peace and truth,