Date: 03/5/2021
Author: Mr. X
When President John F. Kennedy was trying to reduce global tensions and find common ground with the Soviet Union, he said “we are all mortal.” Death is the curse we all share. No ideology can explain it away, no political triumph can postpone it. It comes for all of us and because of that, we can all empathize with each other – in theory anyway.
The pandemic was a global challenge and one could imagine a scenario where the nations of the world emerge more united after fighting it together. However, that’s not the world we live in.
Many people blame former president Donald Trump for this. After all, ’45 pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization, insisted on calling COVID-19 the “China virus,” championed America First, and essentially tried to blame the entire thing on the CCP. Yet with Joe Biden in office, the strategic environment hasn’t changed much. President Biden isn’t acting all that differently when it comes to China. He can’t. The United States may be more energetic in trying to strengthen European alliances or support global institutions, but the basic problem that President Trump recognized remains. China and the United States are engaged in economic and geopolitical competition and this is a zero-sum game.
Some Republicans will probably try to paint President Biden as “soft on China,” but there’s little evidence of this so far. President Biden recently signed an executive order that mandated American control over the supply chain for semiconductors. One might even call it an “America First” economic measure. The Chinese government recently responded with its own statement from its yearly legislative conference. The CCP will “regard scientific and technological self-reliance as a strategic support for national development,” according to Premier Xi Jinping.
It’s highly significant that China now regards building up its domestic market and becoming self-sufficient as an economic goal equivalent in importance to growth. One of the main arguments against those who have predicted the collapse of the dollar was that other powers would have no interest in seeing the world’s reserve currency go down. After all, if Americans couldn’t pay for Chinese goods, the Chinese economy would stop growing and the ruling party would face greater challenges to its legitimacy. China had no interest in seeing the dollar displaced any more than Americans did.
That may no longer be true. China is clearly taking steps for global economic leadership when it comes to currency. Its efforts to develop a digital yuan are far in advance of America’s efforts for a digital dollar. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently said that developing a digital currency is a priority, but this isn’t something that can be done overnight. The Chinese have been testing it for years and it is very hard to see America overtaking the CCP.
China also has a de-facto alliance with Russia and is conducting joint military exercises with the world’s largest country. Of course, long-term, China and Russia have wildly diverging interests. It wouldn’t take much to drive them apart, just like President Nixon was able to do with the Soviet Union and the Maoist regime. However, American media coverage has convinced many that Russia is an inherent enemy, essentially driving it into the arms of China. Domestic politics would make it very difficult for any American leader to develop an effective partnership with Putin without being accused of being a Russian agent or (more accurately) overlooking deliberate Russian efforts to destabilize the West.
Confronting China and Russia together would seem less daunting if the European-American relationship was still strong. It’s not. Many in Europe are rethinking the Atlantic alliance. Again, it’s easy to blame former President Trump for this. Europeans hated Donald Trump more than they hated George W. Bush. Yet President Trump was ultimately calling for increased military commitment to NATO from European countries, not jettisoning the alliance.
Instead, what seems to be happening is a shift towards the EU standing on its own two feet. The Frontex border control agency is slowly becoming what is essentially the first united European paramilitary force. French President Emmanuel Macron, probably the most visionary French leader since de Gaulle, has repeatedly spoken about the importance of European strategic independence. Especially with the United Kingdom out of the EU, Europe no longer feels tied down to the Anglosphere. Countries like Germany have an economic interest in obtaining natural gas from Russia, despite Washington’s protests.
Some European countries, notably Italy and Hungary, have also expressed openness to Chinese investment. This may unsettle some EU officials, but the only way they could prevent it is by being more accommodating to those nations that have often defied Brussels. That may mean developing a more restrictionist approach on issues like immigration, where Western Europe has tried to foist unpopular policies on Poland, Hungary, and other Eastern European countries. A more centralized EU will probably be more socially conservative. To hold together, European leaders would need to develop a Continental identity that is something greater than just being a giant market zone.
In 2001, just before the September 11 attacks, Brian Blouet published Geopolitics and Globalization in the Twentieth Century. He traced the rise and decline of geopolitical thinking. By 2001, the idea that countries should pursue autarchy by securing vast spaces and natural resources seemed outdated, if not barbaric. Instead, globalization seemed to be ascendant. “It would be a global recession that would lead to geopolitics rising from the deathbed,” he argued. “Countries would follow each other into protectionism and the move towards self-sufficiency would start again.” He also predicted that the drive for self-sufficiency would also rekindle “the desire to obtain additional territory that contained resources.”
President Biden and the Chinese government’s dueling statements about self-sufficiency in technology show we may be moving in that direction. China already has claims on Pacific islands. The world’s greatest center of semiconductor manufacturing is Taiwan, which mainland China regards as a “rogue province,” not an independent nation. Chinese economic penetration into Africa, especially South Africa and Zimbabwe, also shows the country’s determination to secure areas which contain the rare earth minerals needed for high-tech manufacturing.
One of the best ways to see how the boundaries are being drawn for international competition is to see who is accepting Chinese or Russian vaccines. When Russia rolled out its Sputnik V vaccine without much testing, many Western experts scoffed. However, Vladimir Putin had the last laugh, as the vaccine appears to work and countries in Eastern Europe and South America are requesting it. Chinese made vaccines have been sent to 45 countries, despite some concerns over safety. Both Russia and China are using the vaccine as a tool of international diplomacy – often seeming to prefer getting it in the hands of grateful foreigners rather than their own people. Of course, you can get away with that kind of thing when you have an authoritarian government.
Meanwhile, the EU has hardly covered itself in glory when it comes to vaccine distribution. People may mock Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, but the United States and the United Kingdom have been far more successful than mainland Europe in vaccination efforts. As one reporter noted, the EU failed to develop “vaccine sovereignty.” This failure might spur European leaders to work towards greater centralization and common efforts.
Of course, Russia can undermine this by cultivating closer ties with nations like Hungary. The Kremlin has also scored a triumph by backing Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko, who was inching towards the West until challenged by a popular movement charging voter fraud. After President Putin pledged support to “Europe’s last dictator,” Belarus is firmly back in the Russian orbit.
However, if in the 20th century’s geopolitical battleground was Eastern Europe, the 21st’s will be Asia. Here, powers such as Japan, Australia, and especially India have no desire to be dominated by a Chinese regional hegemon. Since the George W. Bush administration, India and the United States have moved closer together diplomatically while the relationship between India and China has deteriorated. This culminated in the almost unbelievable accounts of Chinese and Indian troops killing each other in unarmed combat in a disputed Himalayan border area not long ago. It would be dismissed as ludicrous propaganda except both governments confirmed it and there’s video to prove it.
In response to India’s shift towards Washington, China and Pakistan are now working together. There are also significant powers who don’t fit into any particular alliance or coalition, especially Turkey. The Biden Administration has been noticeably cold towards Turkey and is being pushed to hold President Erdogan accountable for human rights violations. Unfortunately, if President Biden pushes too hard, he might push Turkey right into the arms of Russia, which would be a remarkable blunder given the different interests each country has. Still, it’s possible. Turkey managed to help Azerbaijan win a military conflict against Armenia recently, but Russia, Armenia’s traditional protector, didn’t suffer a humiliating loss of face. Besides, different interests haven’t stopped the slowly emerging alliance between China and Russia from solidifying.
The bottom line is that it is the end of “The End of History.” The idea that liberal democracy is the inevitable final stage of historical development faces a significant challenge. Authoritarian yet economically successful regimes like China seem to provide an answer to populations who resist the social and cultural liberalization (or “Americanization”) that often accompanies globalization. A “strong” leader, nationalist or even civilizational values, and the appeal of military glories and territorial conquest may seem more appealing.
Sometimes, people mock Francis Fukuyama for saying that the end of History (capital H) had come with liberal democracy. In his defense, his argument was more complicated. He suggested in The End of History and the Last Man that the real challenge to liberal democracy would not come from the communist left, but from the romantic right. The question was whether liberal democracy could satisfy people who don’t want to be Nietzsche’s “last men,” the “men without chests” who lack identity and pride. Many people want to be something more than mere inputs and consumers in a global economic system. It’s also easy when you haven’t lived through the horrors of an authoritarian system to romanticize previous eras and take peace and prosperity for granted. Perhaps people are simply doomed to seek out conflict and struggle even when it’s self-destructive.
Nonetheless, whatever we think about it, this is where we are. Liberal democratic capitalism, rather than triumphant, seems exhausted. It’s under attack from populist movements of both the left and right. What’s even more troubling is that often the only way you can fight an illiberal system is by becoming more illiberal yourself. In other words, you need an empire to beat an empire. If China truly decides to move on Taiwan or cross another geopolitical red line, it won’t be swayed by economic sanctions.
Industries and companies built upon the premise that America and China will continue to freely trade resources and personnel need to rethink their assumptions. Even with Donald Trump out of the White House, the United States is trying to reduce its dependence on China. As for China, it’s quite openly telling the world that the era of globalization is over, and the age of empires has begun again.
