Excerpt from my article “Global (Dis) Order: A Bipolar+ Order in the Making”–analyzing geopolitics and the new geopolitical orders, observing the U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and in relation to Russia and China–originally published at World Mediation Organization in 2020 https://worldmediation.org/global-disorder-a-bipolar-world-in-the-making/
The geopolitical constellation not only has changed in the Middle East and North Africa but also in South Asia and Indo-Pacific. The new geopolitical order, comprising U.S., China, North Korea, India, and Pakistan, is determined by three factors: China’s economic and military rise and its efforts to expand commercial and diplomatic influence throughout Eurasia; India’s rise and its endeavors to work with South and Southeast Asia; and the U.S. attempts to recalibrate its grand strategy addressing new power dynamics across the arc of Asia from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean (Council on Foreign Relations, 2016). This new balance of power could be both a source of conflict and of hope for greater cooperation among regional powers and between them and the U.S., too (Id.). Ian Bremmer and Cliff Kupchan from Eurasia Group are pessimistic, though. Divergences and the current tensions between U.S. and China, they say, will lead to a “more explicit clash over national security issues, influence, and values:” both parties will use economic means to achieve political goals on the global scene (2020). Similarly, Stromseth (2019) and Bolton (2020) predict a new confrontation—accelerated as a result of a novel coronavirus pandemic and the U.S. suspicious that China delayed, fabricated, and distorted information on the virus Sars-Cov-2, contributing to the spread of the COVID-19 disease globally. America’s economic and geopolitical relations with China, will, according to Bolton, determine the shape of international relations in the twenty-first century: China is competing for global dominance, even though President Xi Jinping denied his country is racing to dominate the world, replacing the U.S. or posing a risk of international conflict, while assuring that China respects U.S. sovereignty and interests in Asia (2020: 263-273). By contrast, Flint and Xiaotong do not see any immediate threat as Beijing has not—at the moment—shown any intentions to become a hegemonic power, dramatically reorganizing global politics and economics or geopolitical structure, nor to disrupt norms and rules of the capitalist world economy (2019: 296-297). Rather China, as these authors hold, seeks to maintain its global political and economic structure that would ensure its domestic stability and its maximization of economic growth (Id., 296).
Presently, China is concentrated on economic and security issues (Goldhammer, 2016). Southeast Asia and Indo-Pacific are centerpieces of its foreign policy (Council on Foreign Relations, 2016). Economically, Beijing has made strides to increase its influence and assertiveness by struggling with Europeans for control of the global market on digital machine tools (Germany) and becoming a major investor in the nuclear power plant (Britain) (Goldhammer, 2016). In addition, through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a multi-continent and multi-ocean infrastructure project underpinning economic goals and increased diplomatic presence and overseas security commitments, China has significantly improved its position taking advantage of the current global economic growth and the decline of U.S. hegemonic position (Id.). Incepted in 2013 and referred to as the New Silk Road, the BRI is one of the most ambitious infrastructural plans ever conceived by China that would stretch from East Asia to Europe, simultaneously, it is an unsettling enterprise for the U.S., which has struggled to offer a competing vision to prevent China’s economic and political influence globally (Chatzky and McBride, 2020). Further, the U.S.—China race in Southeast Asia, is, according to Stromseth, fueled by Trump’s administration Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP): the strategy takes aim to China’s regional hegemony of spheres of influence, criticizing Beijing for leveraging predatory economics to coerce other nations to choose between free and repressive visions of world order in the Indo-Pacific, respectively choose between China or the United States (2019). The problem, as Goldhammer maintains, is that China—utilizing economic strength—is willing to protect its chain supply even by defying, if necessary, the established international norms like in case of the controversies over islands that stand athwart the important shipping routes in the South China Sea (2016). (In an imaginary situation, the military installations on the Spratlys island, a disputed archipelago in the South China Sea, which based on Secretary Mattis’ standpoint, were part of China’s bigger plan, would mean: Shanghai would replace New York City as the center of world finance by 2030. Taiwan would be reincorporated as part of China. And the only way for China to do that would be with intimidation or force). (Woodward, 2020: 121). Bolton provides a long list of China’s violations of international rules, successfully pursuing a mercantilist policy in a supposedly free-trade body: China stole intellectual property, forced technology transfers from, and discriminated against, foreign investors and businesses, engaged in corrupt practices and debt diplomacy through investments (the BRI) and continued to manage its domestic economy in statist, authoritarian way (2020: 264-265). “America was the target of this structural aspect of China’s policy as well as Europe, Japan and virtually all industrial democracies.” Moreover, China sought politico-military benefits from its economic activity by using privately-owned companies—otherwise tools of China’s military and intelligence service, as well as engaged in aggressive cyber warfare that targeted foreign private investors (Id., 265). This means that China must be deterred!
On the security level, Beijing has made substantial changes by increasing the military presence in the South China Sea, developing weapons that might be challenging for the U.S. Navy in the Western Pacific, constructing the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and increasing foreign direct investment worldwide (Flint and Xiaotong, 2019: 295-296). Furthermore, China has expanded its military capacities, creating one of the world’s top offensive cyber warfare programs, building a blue-water navy for the first time in five hundred years, enhancing its arsenal of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, developing anti-satellite weapons to blind U.S. space-based sensors, designing anti-access and area-denial weapons to push the American navy back from Asia’s coast, and so forth (Bolton, 2020: 265). As Bolton warns, “Watching China transformation over the years, I saw all this as deeply threatening to U.S. strategic interests, and to our friends and allies globally.” (Id.) The Chinese’s growing economic strength combined with military capabilities and political influence, respectively its expansion of military footprint in the western Pacific, according to Ambassador Roy, may soon end the American rule in the region and start a new war between the two (2016: 3).
“To quote from a recent RAND study: […] this would be a war in which the United States would be challenged in the air, on (and under) the water, in space, and across the electromagnetic spectrum. The U.S. forces would be hard-pressed from the start, and they would probably not enjoy sanctuary in regional bases. Also, unlike recent wars, the U.S. military could well sustain significant air and naval losses.” (J. Stapleton Roy, The Changing of Geopolitics of East Asia, Yale Law School, 2016).
Moreover, China, as Bremmer alerts, is moving the world toward a global tech war; it announced a strategy to dominate the world of 5G technology, seeing it as the highway to its geopolitical supremacy—global tech war (Trump’s Biggest Foreign Policy Win So Far, TIME, July 20, 2020). Oh, and one last reminder: the Chinese economy, unlike that of the U.S., successfully recovered from the coronavirus pandemic crisis, recording, based on the country’s National Bureau of Statistics, a 4.9 percent rise in economic growth during the July—September 2020 quarter compared to the same months last year (Keith Bradsher, New York Times, October 20, 2020).
China’s Ambitions: Global, Designed to Intimidate
Russia’s and China’s behavior in world politics is a normal act aimed at furthering their own interests, as well as to enhance their positions within the system—but not to replace it (Ikenberry, 2014: 89). Even if they pretend to change, build their own orders, or even take full responsibility for the current one, Russia and China, as Ikenberry suggests, do not have grand visions of an alternative global economic or political order. “For them, international relations are mainly about the search for commerce and resources, the protection of their sovereignty, and, where possible, regional domination.” (Id., 90) Similar thoughts offer Agnew, too. He does not consider China as a power that would provide totally alternative scripting to the world politics but as one that could give a contribution to the pluralization—away from the recent hegemony of neoliberalism associated with the post-1970s U.S. global role (2010: 570). Bolton (2020), Chhabra (2019), and Gordon and Steinberg (2020) think the opposite. For Chhabra, China poses a threat for democracy and liberal values globally, and in particular, for the U.S. global order, the political identity of America, and its democratic partners (2019).
“Beijing’s ‘flexible’ authoritarianism abroad, digital tools of surveillance and control, unique brand of authoritarian capitalism, and ‘weaponization’ of interdependence may in fact render China a more formidable threat to democracy and liberal values than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. China’s growth and determined illiberalism mean that open societies around the world must prepare for the current era of democratic stagnation to continue, or even worsen.” (Tarun Chhabra, The China Challenge, Democracy, And U.S. Grand Strategy, The Brookings, 2019)
The underlying cause of U.S.—China conflict lies in their ideologies and systems. Currently engaged in a “trade war,” the problem of the U.S. with China, as Bolton explains, is not a “trade dispute” as many refer to it, but a “conflict of systems” and values. “The ‘structural issues’ with China do not trade tactics but a fundamentally different approach to organizing economic life.” (2020, 272) The calculations of American leaders that China, as it grows economically, would become more liberal, first economically and then politically, resembling more the United States, have been all the way wrong and the greatest failure of U.S. foreign policy since the 1930s, according to Robert C. O’Brien. In his analysis at the Foreign Affairs, O’Brien singles out China’s ideology, the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to expand far beyond Chines borders, as the main threat to democracy and the United States (How China Threatens American Democracy, October 21, 2010). In short: the convergence theory, as former Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, argues, did not work in China’s case. “China grew economically without democratizing. Instead, its government became more ideological and repressive, with military ambitions that are not just regional and defensive, but global and designed to intimidate […]. Let’s face it: Xi has killed the notion of convergence.” (How to Confront An Advancing Threat From China, Foreign Affairs, July 18, 2020) Nadia Schadlow offers a more realistic view: China had no intention of converging with the West. The Chinese Communist Party never intended to play by the West’s rules; it was determined to control markets rather than open them. It was a win-win.” (The End Of American Illusion: Trump And The World As It Is, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2020)
All in all, the Indo-Pacific region is threatening future stability not merely in Asia but around the globe by a modernized India, a North Korea in pursuit of nuclear weapons, and an aggressive and uncooperative China. As Auslin put it, “Whether through economic pressure, political and military intimidation, espionage, or propaganda, Beijing is actively trying to reshape the world to fit its interests, picking and choosing which Western norms it adopts and which it ignores […]. The ‘new China rules’ […] are the greatest strategic challenge of the next generation.” (2020) H.R. McMaster, former Trump’s National Security Adviser, cautions as below: “China seeks to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reaches of its state-driven economic model, and reorder the region in its favor […]. China gathers and exploits data on an unrivaled scale and spreads features of its authoritarian system, including corruption and the use of surveillance.” (Woodward, 2020) Agnew challenges these assumptions, suggesting that China is either just another power in a long succession of great powers, rising to the top of the global hierarchy, or a completely new phenomenon with respect to its singular history associated with imperial past, communist rejection of world capitalism, and cultural particularity (2010: 570). China’s growth, he follows, is rather shaped by a contradictory amalgam of Western-style nationalism and a traditional totalistic conception of world order, which is reactive to, and dependent on current world politics (Id.). To prevent a collision between U.S. and China, Chhabra proposes a grand strategy, comprising the embrace—from America and its allies—of China’s challenge, as well as advancing democracy and liberal values across the world (2019).
…add North Korea to the equation
The U.S. and China relations moved between cooperation and confrontation—with the best cooperation documented during the 2008 economic crisis, starting to become more contentious and risk undermining in the last decade (Schell and Shirk, 2017). Today the U.S. relations with China are at a crossroads. Leaders in Beijing are acting more assertively in Asia, more mercantilist in their economic strategies, and more authoritarian in their domestic politics, while at the same time the long-time tenets of U.S. policy are being reexamined in Washington (Id.). The relationship with China took a downward spiral during the Trump tenure. President has disrupted a longstanding bipartisan consensus on U.S. policy toward China he views as “overly timid and insufficiently robust in responding to its excesses.” (Dollar, Haas, and Bader, 2019) Trump has demonstrated an “attitude without a strategy,” adopting an increasingly zero-sum, unilateralist, protectionist, and nativist America first approach, increasing sanctions and placing tariffs—unclear if they aim to change China behavior in specific areas of concern, “decouple” the American economy from China’s through supply chain diversification or to obstruct China’s rise (Id.). Confronting China threat, as Philip, H. Gordon, and James Steinberg propose, requires a serious strategy, not bellicose rhetoric or a flip-flopping policy as Trump has shown, by publicly flattering Xi and his leadership, especially in managing the coronavirus crisis, just to roll out most recently, portraying China as an implacable and determined totalitarian enemy—whose goal is to destroy the American way of life and impose a Marxist-Leninist ideology in the world (Trump’s Flip-Flops On China Are A Danger To National Security, Foreign Policy, July 29, 2020).
Photo credit: Mint India
