Rahm Emanuel’s Next Chapter

Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff and congressman, stunned Chicago’s political scene in 2018 when he declined to seek reelection to a third term as mayor, under the cloud of controversy surrounding his handling of the 2014 police shooting of a teenager. At the time of that announcement, he told reporters that he would open his “next chapter.”

After a relatively quiet start to his stint as U.S. ambassador to Japan, he has taken to that new chapter with force.

As ambassador, he’s at the center of the Biden administration’s effort to build out a latticework of alliances that can withstand and counter Chinese pressure. That push includes the recent completion of a pact between the U.S., Japan, and South Korea that saw the latter two nations agree to move past their historical animosities.

Emanuel isn’t just playing a role behind the scenes, though; he’s been publicly critical of Beijing. From his seat in Tokyo, Emanuel is quickly making himself one of Beijing’s top antagonists — the White House’s attack dog in the Indo-Pacific.

Take this post from last week, when he hit the Chinese leadership over the apparent purges that are rolling across the Chinese government’s highest levels:

Pointing to the disappearances of China’s foreign minister and top commanders from the People’s Liberation Army’s rocket force, he compared the situation to the classic Agatha Christie novel And Then There Were None.

His tweet from exactly one week ago has proved prescient. It also mentioned that defense minister Li Shangfu hadn’t been seen in public for two weeks. This evening, the Financial Times reported that the Biden administration believes that Li also has been purged.

Emanuel has played a significant role in countering Chinese Communist Party propaganda surrounding Japan’s release of treated nuclear wastewater from its facility in Fukushima prefecture, which was damaged in the March 2011 earthquake.

As Chinese propaganda organs pushed out articles alleging that the wastewater is contaminating seafood in the region — international experts have endorsed Japan’s plan and concluded that it is safe — Emanuel undertook an all-out PR campaign to promote Japanese seafood and Fukushima produce.

He traveled to the area in late August, chowing down on fish and tempura over lunch and then picking up pickled cucumbers, peaches, pears, and grapes from a farmers’ market. In meetings with congressional delegations that visited Japan during the recess, he huddled with top GOP lawmakers such as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Representative Elise Stefanik, the chair of the House GOP conference — and in posts to Twitter afterward made sure to highlight that Stefanik’s delegation bought Fukushima produce and that he enjoyed a “Fukushima inspired lunch” with McCarthy.

Economic coercion and Chinese aggression in the South China Sea seem to weigh heavily on him, judging from his Twitter posts and a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal.

In that interview, he described how his time in the Obama administration — and the dishonesty he saw Xi Jinping exhibit — helped to shift his perspective on China and how that informs his view of the Biden administration’s current drive for rapprochement.

I’m for a dialogue, but I’m also not for being, as my father would say, a schmuck. And he said it with this term of endearment. I mean, what I mean by this is Xi stood in the rose garden and said, “We will never militarize the South China Sea.” The wheels of his plane were not up in the belly of the plane when they were doing exactly that.

Emanuel also went on to hit Beijing’s persistent theft of American intellectual property, saying: “Now you can sit there and say, ‘Well, we’d like to have a great relationship,’ but if they’re going to keep the Communist Party, and specifically under Xi, use lying and cheating as a modus operandi of the state and its legitimacy, then you would be a fool to go into that discussion negotiation not cognizant of what they’re doing.”

The fact that he’s a political appointee — and a major player in his own right — seems to mean that he’s able to take certain liberties that other officials simply don’t. Consider the blunt way in which he told the WSJ that he’d like Xi to continue China’s current trajectory:

My view is keep doing what you’re doing. You’re the one with 30% unemployment among youth, not us. You got 10 years of housing with nobody in it. You got people that are getting fleeced by the big developers and the banks. You got municipalities in China that makes Chicago look like a AAA-rated bond. Keep at it. There is nothing the United States is doing to you that measures what you’ve done to yourself.

Emanuel has had his share of blunders, too, such as when he waded into a contentious debate surrounding Japanese legislation on LGBT issues, triggering some pushback from lawmakers in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. But he’s bringing tough talk to Washington’s approach to countering China’s malign behavior, when other officials in the administration are pulling their punches.