"Russia Today" website December 15 article, original title: Why are American politicians afraid of Chinese garlic?

Recently, US Senator Scott was ridiculed by netizens for saying that garlic imports from China were a "national security threat." This may sound funny, but it is a common occurrence, with US politicians making similar claims - no matter how ridiculous - about anything coming from China.

To understand why America is the way it is, one must recognize that fear is fundamentally the medium through which American politics works. Since the Cold War, weaponizing fear has been the United States' primary tool to legitimize its foreign policy goals and strengthen unity.

The first notable manifestation was the era of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. American officials have learned to weaponize irrational fears and exaggerate and exploit them, forcing loyalty to the state by concocting wild conspiracy theories about infiltration and subversion.

In this sense, the weaponization of fear is also used to sanction aggressive policies and gain support by scaring the public. The most notorious modern example was the false claim that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq.

With China now the priority of U.S. foreign policy, Washington is again using its paranoia to discredit everything that arrives from China. Washington's dissatisfaction with China is related to economics and trade, so US politicians use the "national security threat" rhetoric to stoke fears about all kinds of Chinese products.

Whatever the specific allegations, such fear-mongering is ultimately intended to force a target product out of the US market and then persuade Allies to do the same. This is most evident in the treatment of Huawei's involvement in building 5G networks in the West. Without any substantial evidence, Huawei has been accused of being a security risk.

In the midst of all this, calling garlic a "national security threat" is, of course, met with derision, and exposes the limits of this hysteria-inducing tactic. Scott's real motive is clearly an attempt to protect American producers by keeping out Chinese agricultural products. To some extent, every American administration has done this. But Scott's nonsense shows how bigots in American politics are deliberately opportunistic and rarely based on facts.