War & Peace Quote by Peter Mandelson

There is a diplomat's trapdoor hidden in Mandelson's mild phrasing: the line sounds like common sense, but it is really a warning about how foreign policy manufactures its own outcomes. "Treat" is the operative verb. It suggests habit, posture, and performative signalling as much as concrete action. In that frame, "enemy" is less a description of China than a role the West can cast it in - and then act surprised when the script holds.

The intent is pragmatic, not sentimental. Mandelson is arguing against reflexive antagonism: tariffs as theatre, military posturing as identity, rhetoric as domestic politics. His subtext is that great powers become what they're managed as. If you ring-fence China from institutions, assume bad faith in every negotiation, and speak in absolutes, you reduce the space for compromise and increase the incentives for Beijing to harden its own line. The phrase "likely to become" is doing political work too: it avoids the charge of naivete ("China is harmless") while still indicting hawkish certainty as self-fulfilling.

Context matters because Mandelson is a New Labour-era operator: comfortable with globalization, markets, and managed engagement. That worldview treats interdependence as leverage, not weakness. Read against the backdrop of rising anxiety about China's power, the quote functions as a rebuke to moralistic framing that turns strategy into crusade. It's also a message to domestic audiences: your language isn't just commentary; it sets the temperature of policy. Once you start calling someone an enemy, you start needing them to act like one.