Magic mirror in my hand, who is the darkest in the land?

The United States is a kettle of fish totally different from other countries.

But it is one thing to believe the US prides itself on its "founding principles" and another to presume that successive generations of American leaders have "risen to the challenge of protecting and furthering" those "founding principles, and defeating existential threats to our liberties".

Surprisingly, that is exactly what retired Navy Captain James E. Fanell, a former director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the US Pacific Fleet, wants us to swallow hook, line and sinker.

In an open letter to the US president recently, Fanell says, "our generation is challenged to do the same by a virulent and increasingly dangerous threat to human freedoms - the Chinese Communist Party ... through the nation it misrules: the People's Republic of China ... ."

The letter, which has 130 signatories, including veterans and former US military officials, scholars and professors, think tank members, and other China watchers, doesn't stop there. It slides further into the abyss of political and ideological absurdity: "China is not as we wish it to be. In our political system, politics is the norm, and war is the exception. It is explicitly the opposite in the PRC's worldview. Going forward, we must better understand and deal with this dangerous asymmetry."

Really! Is war the exception in the US political system?

Starting from the American-Mexican War of 1846-48, when the US seized the territories of California and Texas, to the Second Opium War (1856-59), when US troops joined the British and French forces to attack China, the US has been constantly engaged in wars.

From the Rio de Janeiro Affair (1894), the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) and the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) in China to the occupation of Nicaragua (1912-32) and Haiti (1915-34), from World War I and the Russian Civil War (1918-20) to World War II to the Korean War (1950-53) to the Lebanon Crisis (1958) to the Bay of Pigs Invasion (1961), and from the Simba Rebellion in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1964) to the Vietnam War (1965-75) to the Communist Insurgency in Thailand (1965-83), the long arm of the US' brute force has left no continent untouched. Not to mention the recent ones in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.

Yet Fanell pleads: "Every effort must be made therefore to institutionalize now the policies and capabilities that can rebalance our economic relations with China, strengthen our alliances with like-minded democracies and ultimately to defeat the PRC's global ambitions to suppress freedom and liberty."

Indeed, Fanell is aware of the irony of the pot calling the kettle black. But since Fanell and his ilk are honorable men, they should either do something diplomatically positive or get off the pot.

It's a pity that the once undisputed world leader, along with those who still swear by its "just and fair" foreign policy, no longer has an ideological pot to ... . No wonder it has made taking potshots at China, blaming it for all the ills in the world, its favorite pastime.

But should ifs and ands were pots and pans there'd be no work for tinkers' hands.

It's time US officials and think tank members stopped using smoke and mirrors and advised Uncle Sam to look itself in the mirror.

The author is a senior writer with China Daily.