By Shashi P.B.B. Malla
The United States and China, the world’s only two super-powers [Russia is at most a quasi-great power, mostly because it has the world’s largest land mass, and is a nuclear power], are selectively but rapidly ‘de-coupling’ from each other. Does this mean that the two behemoths are inescapably sliding into unending enmity – a New Cold .
Tensions on multiple fronts are mounting day by day between the two countries, so that analysts of International Relations [IR] now talk of a ‘New Cold War’. There are, of course, historical differences to the old ‘Cold War’ which erupted between war-time allies immediately after the Second World War, between the U.S. and its allies, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union-led world Communist states (including China), on the other.
However, there is little doubt that both powers are entering very dangerous territory.
Tit-for-Tat on the Diplomatic Front
The U.S. Consulate General in Chengdu was closed on Monday after Chinese demands, signaling the end of diplomatic/consular operations in the capital of Sichuan province for the foreseeable future.
This marks another low point in US-China relations after the US government ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas on Friday. The tit-for-tat leaves the two countries with an equal, but diminished presence. Both countries now maintain four consulates and an embassy on each other’s soil.
The government-allied Chinese newspaper The Global Times lamented the fraying of ties: “Right now, it is no longer a matter of whether China-US ties are in freefall, but whether the line of defence on world peace is broken through by Washington…The world must not be hijacked by a group of political madmen” (Foreign Policy, July 27).
U.S. Perspective
US President Donald J. Trump, now fighting for his dear life for his second term in office, has made his global anti-China policy his main foreign policy election platform [on the domestic front, it is: ‘law & order’]. He has been pushing other countries to reject Chinese-aided projects [vide BRI/Belt & Road Initiative], which he claims are attached with strings and debt-ridden. He has also prevailed on others not to entertain technological cooperation, or even to withdraw from already signed deals like the U.K. from telecommunications titan Huawei. In this connection, the standpoints adopted by Germany and the European Union will be vital.
On the geo-political front, he has sided unreservedly with Beijing’s antagonists in the dispute-rife East China Sea [Taiwan, Japan] and the South China Sea [Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Philippines].
Trump has made China a major election campaign issue – including the origin of the coronavirus – as he heads into the November 3 election. However, this dynamic and all-important bilateral relationship remains largely bipartisan. If the Democrat Joe Biden wins, it will change in tone, but not in substance. Even now, he relentlessly accuses Trump of not being resolute enough. However, we can expect a more rational approach and a definite de-escalation of tensions from the dizzy heights of near-possible violent conflict.
The New York Times succinctly summed up the current situation: “Step by step, blow by blow, the United States and China are dismantling decades of political, economic and social engagement, setting the stage for a new era of confrontation, shaped by the views of the most hawkish voices on both sides” (July 27).
Not only that, the diehard hawks in the Trump administration, in a diabolical, scorched-earth policy “are also trying to engineer irreversible changes” (NYT), that would be most damaging to America’s long-term national security interests.
Expert ‘Neo-Realist’ U.S. Opinion
Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard [China is slated to overtake the US economically in the coming decades] were engaged in a long-term competition over “incompatible strategic visions”, including China’s perceived attempt to dominate Asia [leading to the much-hyped ‘Chinese Century’].
The Chinese leadership sees Trump as a “weak and error-prone leader” and utilized the “disastrous” US response to the corona virus pandemic as a golden opportunity to press its advantage.
Walt was of the opinion that the US-China confrontation resembled the previous US-Soviet ‘Cold War’ in certain respects, but was not yet as dangerous as that earlier rivalry.
“One key difference is that the two states are still closely connected economically [which was never the case with the former Soviet Union], although that relationship is now also under considerable strain.”
Acute Danger of Slipping into a ‘Hot War’
In a recent radio interview, US Secretary of State [SoS] Mike Pompeo, in fact, underscored the old Cold War comparison. He has been unrelentlingly warning the world about Beijing’s hegemonic intentions and taking his post-war colleague John Foster Dulles’ hardline stand: ‘If you are not with us, you are against us.’
Frederick Kempe, president of the Atlantic Council think tank, wrote that Beijing has become increasingly belligerent amid the coronavirus pandemic: “Under cover of coronavirus fog, China has stepped up its repression of ethnic Muslim minorities [Uighurs in Xinjiang], tightened its grip over Hong Kong, , increased its pressure on Taiwan [which it considers a breakaway province], stepped up its tensions in the South China Sea, escalated attacks on Australia for seeking a coronavirus investigation, heightened pressure on Canada for detaining a Huawei executive, unleashed fatal force on the border of India and ratcheted up its propaganda against the United States [Al Jazeera].
Dissenting U.S. Opinion
On the other hand, Oriana Skylar Mastro, an assistant professor at Georgetown University and resident scholar at the think tank American Enterprise Institute, said it was dangerous to speak of a Cold War with China.
The situation with China is nothing like the [old] Cold War [1945-1990] she observed: “On the positive side, we have extensive engagement. On the negative side, there is a real possibility of a hot war between the two sides to a degree that never existed with the Soviet Union.” [However, they did come very dangerously close to a nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis].
Mastro insisted that using a Cold War lens leads to ineffective responses, including Washington incorrectly seeing Beijing as an ideological threat. She claimed China had many options to alleviate US concerns, such as pulling back weapons systems in the South China Sea. [However, China has already converted many of the islands, shoals and atolls there to fully armed bastions, and it would be unrealistic to hope/expect China to dismantle them].
Hardening of Positions
In a major shift, US businesses stung by what they perceive as a rampant theft of intellectual property are not currently calling for de-escalation in the so-called trade war.
David Stilwell, the leading State Department official for East Asia, said he learned as a US defence attache in Beijing that China responded to “demonstrable and tangible action”.
The US has pressurized China over its clampdown in Hong Kong and mass incarceration of Uighur Muslims, each time triggering retaliatory measures by Beijing.
SoS Mike Pompeo has declared the Communist Party of China (CPC) to be the number one threat to international peace and security, greater than even international terrorism!
Expert Chinese opinion
Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, pointed out that both sides were aware that China could/would no longer be able to carry out the negotiated bilateral trade agreement in full. He expected relations to deteriorate even further.
“The old Cold War was a very fierce confrontation and competition between two great powers, driven by ideology and strategy.”
In the case of the US and China, the two powers are selectively but rapidly “de-coupling’ from each other, he stated. Considering this process, “China and the US have begun to enter a new Cold War.”
Historical Antecedents
George Kennan, the US charge’d’affaires in Moscow at the end of WWII noted in his memoires how quickly perceptions in international relations can change.
The US diplomat widely seen as the intellectual author of the cold war [he was also the founding father of the auxiliary doctrine of containment], recalled that if he had sent his famous ‘Long Telegram’ in 1946 six months earlier, his message would probably have been received at the state Department with incomprehension. Six months later and it would have sounded redundant and stating the obvious [The Guardian, July 22]. It is, therefore, all a question of timing!
In contemplating the possibility of ‘Cold War 2.0’, it must also be remembered that the previous one may have ended in Europe, but the U.S. did not triumph in the Cold War in Asia. Korea was divided by a stalemate. Vietnam was a humiliating failure. Consequently, it was “To find a way out of that debacle that Nixon and Kissinger turned to Beijing and inaugurated a new era of Sino-American relations. America’s ability to tilt the balance against the Soviet Union was linked to its success in playing the Chinese off against the Soviets” (Adam Tooze: “Whose Century”, London Review of Books, July 30).
The only way out of the current impasse seems to be the resurrection of the principles of “peaceful co-existence” and their rigorous observance by the conflict parties.
According to the western political viewpoint, those who had argued that a more economically liberal China would ultimately metamorphose into a more politically liberal China fear they have found themselves on the wrong side of history: “From the air space over Taiwan to the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, the frozen Himalayas on the border with India and the reefs surrounding the Xisha/Paracel islands in the South China Sea, Chinese assertiveness is prompting a reassessment” (Patrick Wintour in The Guardian).
The ’New Great Game’ & the ‘New Cold War’
In the meantime, a ‘New Great Game’ is unfolding in the shadow of the intense US-China rivalry at the apex of the Arabian Sea.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Great Game was played out between Imperial Britain and Russia/Soviet Union in the tussle to preserve and expand Britain’s strategic interests in South Asia and to deny Russia access to the warm water ports of the Indian Ocean.,
In the 21st Century edition of the Great Game, India is attempting to gain a foothold in Iran’s Chabahar port on the Arabian Sea. The port project and the planned rail link to Afghanistan, would open up lower-cost seaborne trading channels for India, and then land routes into Central Asia, while completely avoiding the landlocked routes blocked by arch rivals Pakistan and China.
However, India’s foothold in Chabahar would simultaneously be a proxy for greater U.S. access to Central Asia/Eurasia – the main area for Xi’s BRI. According to Pakistani and Chinese perceptions, there must, therefore, be physical blockage to India’s access to Afghanistan and Central Asia.
But the reaction cannot be so straightforward. India can pose a grave danger to the much grander China-Pakistan BRI stakes and the all-important Economic Corridor from the Karakorum mountains to the Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea. India also has the option of playing the Taiwan and Tibet cards!
Between the Eagle & the Dragon
Consequently, while a new Cold War is brewing, the U.S. is demanding that its friends and allies not only admit to previous naivety, but join its anti-China alliance. This will definitely be an uphill task.
Many countries are trying to hedge, but the scope for neutrality or non-alignment is narrowing rapidly.
Pakistan is firmly in the Chinese rival power bloc.
India is in an ambivalent position. It already has a mortal enemy on its western flank. Can it afford to provoke a superior adversary in every respect to its north? It is trying to retain its so-called “strategic autonomy”. Its aim to navigate a position promoted by former National Security Adviser Shiv Shankar Menon on being closer to both China and the United States than they are to each other, would require a colossal diplomatic feat – tantamount to squaring the circle!
The fact remains that the economic connections across the world are now so dense that the price of commercial and technological decoupling that the US is demanding is not only too high but impossible. The US is insisting that many countries – like Japan, South Korea, Singapore – willingly perform hara-kiri.
The astute prime minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong has warned: “China is far from a Potemkin village or the tottering command economy that defined the Soviet Union in its final years. Any confrontation between the great powers is unlikely to end, as the Cold War did, in one country’s peaceful collapse” (The Guardian).
The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com
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