Posted by There has been a flurry of high level meetings between major Western leaders in the past few weeks: First up was the G7 meeting in the U.K. on June 11-13 followed by the NATO summit on June 14 and the US-EU summit on June 15; both in Brussels. Then of course, there was the much anticipated Biden-Putin meeting on June 16 in Geneva.
Let’s start with the G7. A casual glance at the G7 group photo shows nine people standing there instead of seven – two are representatives of the European Union. Actually three other countries were invited to attend, India, South Korea and Australia as Russia was booted in 2014 following its takeover of the Crimea. The addition of these three other countries is important as they, along with the United States and Japan, form the so-called Quadrilateral Security Dialect or “Quad” (although South Korea is technically not part of the Quad it is a vital part of America’s alliances in Asia). As an aside, the absence of South Korea from the Quad is clearly at the behest of Japan which initiated the informal grouping in 2007 and illustrates the poor relations between America’s two most important allies in East Asia – not a great foundation for America’s nascent anti-China alliance. I mean, even NATO has managed to keep Turkey in the alliance for so many years despite that country’s continued problems and issues with neighboring Greece and the EU in general simply because it is very vital for NATO to have Turkey aligned with it against Russia.
Obviously, the addition of these three countries is a clear political signal to China that America’s pivot to Asia (which really means pivot to China) that started under Obama is the single most crucial element of current US foreign policy. To bring them in under the auspices of a G7 meeting is also an attempt by America to bring the entire weight of its network of global allies onto the same page as Biden continues his predecessor’s combative anti-China policies. Biden’s tete-a-tete with Putin in Geneva can be seen as a continuation of this policy as he attempts to put a wedge between Russia and China whose relationship has only grown closer the more the Western powers ratchet up pressure and sanctions on both of them. As President Biden himself put it, “I predict to you, your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded, autocracy or democracy. Because that is what is at stake… They [China} have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world. That’s not going to happen on my watch.”
The Canadian Brainwashing Corporation, bias can clearly be seen in its top story on the summits which reads, “The West is moving to isolate China — and Canada could reap the rewards.”
A Chinese government spokesperson was quick to dismiss the G7 meeting that began the week as meaningless. “The days when global decisions were dictated by a small group of countries are long gone,” said a spokesperson at China’s London embassy.
But therein lies the problem for the CCP: the group of countries that opposes Chinese hegemony is not small — and it’s growing.
First, the G7 summit produced an imperfect but still significant consensus between North American, European, Japanese, Indian, Australian and South Korean governments on the need to counter China as one.
NATO essentially rewrote its doctrine to make China a strategic rival and work to stop the spread of CCP-style totalitarianism.
Even more importantly, NATO pledged to reach out to form new alliances in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where China has been making inroads with cash-strapped governments this century.
So in the eyes of the CBC, there is broad consensus that the G7, NATO and the Quad are unified in their goal of containing China. That is, everyone except Trudeau who, when asked by the CBC, “Is the goal that as long as China is an authoritarian one-party state, that it not become the world’s top power?” “No,” he replied. “The goal of the G7 has always been the success not just of our countries and our economies, but the success of the global economy.”
So CBC’s Evan Dyer (another pseudo-intellectual journalist I have never heard of) and the author of this piece of crap analysis and article goes on to conclude, “Most other democratic leaders, however, appeared fully on board with the U.S. goal of ensuring that democratic nations do not cede global dominance to China.” So if you’re a Canadian and you get your news only from the CBC, you probably got the idea that all the other G7 leaders are 100% on the same page as America when it comes to China – except for Trudeau.
But this is what the BBC has to say on the same summit in an article titled, “G7 summit: Has this been a meeting that mattered?” “And the seven countries found it hard to agree a strong position on China. What diplomats might describe as a “full range of views” was in evidence – in other words, they found it really hard to agree.”
Likewise, CNN opined in this article, “Biden pushes China threat at G7 and NATO, but European leaders tread carefully.” “But the Europeans are also still squeamish about getting dragged by the US into a showdown. US officials said Italy and Germany were uneasy with potential communique language that China might view as provocative. Stressing “balance,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that “China is our rival in many questions but also our partner in many aspects.” Emmanuel Macron said the G7 wanted to work with Beijing on climate, trade, development and other issues despite disagreements. “I will be very clear: The G7 is not a club hostile to China,” the French President said.”
In other words, despite what the CBC propaganda would have us believe, most of the other G7 leaders, including Trudeau, are correct in believing that the relationship with China is a complex and difficult one that has numerous shades of grey to it. I mean China is actually Japan’s largest trade partner, not the United States while Italy is the only G7 country that has signed on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. To be fair, it could be just the analysis and bias of Evan Dyer is at fault (although that is the headline article that CBC chose to push to the top of its newsfeeds) as a different article by Murray Brewster at the CBC more accurately pointed out, “On the issue of China, other than taking a hard line on respect for human rights, the language was decidedly and unexpectedly cool, given the rhetoric before and during the gathering in the English seaside community of Carbis Bay. There is a reference to giving the developing world a safe, affordable infrastructure alternative to Chinese financing but it does not appear as strong as the United States might have wanted.”
While Americans are so divided and partisan on so many topics, one thing that both Republicans and Democrats can agree on is their need to stay number one and that means they have to bash China. The problem is that the goal of keeping America number one is probably not the same goal of most the other Western countries (apart from perhaps the U.K. and Australia which tend to parrot America more closely). And they are correct to be cautious in following America headlong into a new cold war.
The last cold war between America and the U.S.S.R. could be seen through the lens of Ronald Reagan as an existential struggle. I mean, Khrushchev was famous for his rant, “About the capitalist states, it doesn’t depend on you whether or not we exist. If you don’t like us, don’t accept our invitations, and don’t invite us to come to see you. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!” At the same time, the economic links between the West and the Eastern Bloc were basically close to zero. According to Wikipedia, “Soviet foreign trade played only a minor role in the Soviet economy. In 1985, for example, exports and imports each accounted for only 4 percent of the Soviet gross national product. The Soviet Union maintained this low level because it could draw upon a large energy and raw material base, and because it historically had pursued a policy of self-sufficiency. Other foreign economic activity included economic aid programs, which primarily benefited the less developed Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) countries of Cuba, Mongolia, and Vietnam. The Soviet Union conducted the bulk of its foreign economic activities with communist countries, particularly those of Eastern Europe. In 1988 Soviet trade with socialist countries amounted to 62 percent of total Soviet foreign trade. Between 1965 and 1988, trade with the Third World made up a steady 10 to 15 percent of the Soviet Union’s foreign trade.
You essentially had two nuclear armed super powers fighting propaganda and proxy wars throughout the rest of the world from Cuba and Latin America to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia including outright wars and invasions in places like Afghanistan, Korea and Vietnam. But the interconnections between these two blocs, especially economically, was basically zero.
Now lets look at the world on a bilateral basis comparing the USA and China.
What this map tells you is that over the past 40 years starting from Deng Xiaoping’s modest opening of China and its economy to the outside world in 1979, China’s economic growth and its engagement with the rest of the world has grown exponentially. As one can see from the 2018 map, most of the world, including large parts of Europe, actually trade more with China than they do with the United States. Even large parts of South America, long considered America’s backyard, trade more with China that America. By all reckoning, China even gained ground in 2020 despite an overall decline in world trade in 2019 due to Covid-19 as it remained mostly open during much of the year while the US and Europe took major economic hits due to large scale closures and lockdowns to combat the pandemic. In other words, unlike the USSR, China is heavily integrated into the world economy and many countries actually do more business with the PRC than they do with America. In fact, one can also make the same point about America itself whose largest trading partner, in the past, used to be Canada but its trade with China today is now by far larger.
Looked at from this point of view, it is not surprising that so many G7 countries, especially Japan, are trying to walk a tightrope in the current struggle between the world’s two superpowers. While they are, on the surface, still allied and aligned with the United States, they are also loathe to jump into the middle of the fray and antagonize either side.
Today, much of the propaganda in Western media likes to lambast China as being provocative and threatening to its neighbors and itself. The Chinese Communist Party is an autocratic dictatorship with no regard for human rights and freedoms is the common mantra. New anti-China issues pop up like dandelions on a spring day. The traditional canards of Tibet and Taiwan have been bolstered by new threats including the Hong Kong riots (oh sorry, I mean peaceful pro-democracy protests), and the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Continued tension over territorial claims in the South China Sea and the all out physical brawl between Indian and Chinese troops over disputed border territory last year rounds out this list.
But when you look at it more objectively, all of this is still either internal issues within China (such as Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong… and arguably Taiwan as well) or territorial disputes China has with its neighbors. These are mostly not new issues either, they have been around for a long time and basically have not been resolved. The last real war that China fought was in 1979 with Vietnam and that was a short lived incursion (it lasted less than a month) meant to show that China would not be contained by the Soviet-Vietnamese mutual defense treaty signed just months earlier. Despite all the Western media hype about China’s aggressive military expansion and territorial aspirations, in reality nothing has really changed other than the narrative that is being spun. China has not bombed, invaded or run around trying to subvert or enable regime change in other countries overtly or covertly. America on the other hand, when it bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 killing three and injuring 27, technically committed an act of war. Oh yeah, I forgot that it was an “accident” as the CIA targeted the wrong building (maybe the giant “Chinese Embassy” plaque by the door and giant red flag on the flying outside wasn’t obvious enough for the spooks at Langley) which President Clinton later apologized for. How can a reasonable person argue against the accuracy and reliability of US intelligence sources? I mean its not like when they said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as the pretext for the invasion of Iraq but then found nothing. So maybe I can be excused when I read that American intelligence services have “credible” information that Covid-19 was leaked from a Wuhan lab and that three researchers there “mysteriously” went to hospital in October 2019.
But I digress. The real reason I bring up this whole topic is that since 1980, China has attacked, bombed or invaded no one. The list for the United States on the other hand goes like this:
I don’t even know if that is a complete list as Biden already bombed Syria after only a month in office. It certainly doesn’t account for any black ops or covert CIA attempts to destabilize or support regime changes. Then there is the perennial canard of the Chinese military buildup that the United States must match like this article in Foreign Affairs, “America Is Not Ready for a War With China“. I don’t know if these people actually believe what they are writing or they are just shills for the military-industrial complex to keep America spending trillions on it war machine rather than on civilian infrastructure, health care and social programs but the reality is absolutely nobody comes close to spending as much as the US on its military.
Stripping out the politics and the self-aggrandizing statements of being the “policeman of the world” and “defender of freedom and democracy”, if you were an alien from outer space and just saw these simple facts – an America that spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined and who routinely invades or bombs anyone it chooses to around the world; who would you conclude is the aggressive militaristic regime?
Sure China is not perfect nor is the government that runs it but neither am I so enthralled about a democracy which Alexis DeTocqueville accurately described as a tyranny of the majority. Moreover for the American model of democracy, which basically keeps two parties in power, I find it hard to convincingly argue that it is demonstrably superior form of government both morally or in operational efficiency to a benign autocracy. Maybe there should be a new term for America other than democracy (although for some strange reason many Americans I talk to prefer the term Constitutional Republic which really isn’t the same thing). I will coin it here first – Duocracy – a system of government where two parties take turns ruling. In fact, the last US president who wasn’t from those two parties was Millard Fillmore who was affiliated as a Whig (don’t ask me, the first 75 years of American history was a mess). Since the American Civil War, the USA has essentially been run by either the Democrats or the Republicans. There are currently only 2 independent Senators out of 98 and zero in the House of Representatives. Duocracy it is then.
What disturbs me most is the current move to vilify China as a distraction from the major domestic issues in the West. It is the oldest geopolitical trick in the book; find a foreign enemy that can unify the people and distract them from the problems at home. My problem with Cold War II is that it is not the same as Cold War I in so many ways. First, China shows no signs of being the expansionary existential military threat bent on world domination and the destruction of its opposition that the Soviet Union clearly was. The USSR occupied and controlled much of Eastern Europe and sent troops and military equipment abroad on top of outright invasion and occupation of neighboring countries as well as promoting regime change and propping up countries that were against the United States. Russia was hell bent on introducing communist revolution everywhere in the world and actually believed that even the West would eventually fall as Khrushchev so clearly stated. China, despite its ongoing border disputes has not resorted to outright military force even though it clearly outclasses most of its neighbors in that area. On the other hand the USA continues to throw its military might everywhere around the world somehow justifying it in grandiose terms as fighting for freedom and democracy when the truth is that the war on terror has resulted in untold death, misery, hardship and displacement of millions of people.
Second, unlike the USSR, China is clearly not just engaged with the rest of the world but is an integral part of the global economy. If it were just us and them as was the case with the West and the USSR, the equation is very simple. However, China is not just engaged in but a major part of the entire global economy and supply chains, so disentangling us from them is a tricky proposition. There is a reason most places in Asia, Africa and Latin America (and even in Europe) will continue to use Huawei 5G technology despite America’s best efforts to get that company banned. They simply make it better and cheaper than anyone else. I don’t even know if there is an American company that can do it as most industry observers seem to point out the Ericsson and Nokia are the two companies that any country that forbids Huawei equipment must turn to. The problem is both of these companies are far more expensive and don’t have the capacity to make enough 5G equipment for the world in the first place which is why Huawei is so dominant. You can extend this logic to so many different industries ranging from mobile phones (yeah, most Africans can’t pay $1000 for a new iphone – which is made in China anyway) to high speed trains. So in a world where China is willing and able to sell manufactured products to the developing world and finance and build infrastructure for them as well, contrary to the Western media propaganda, that is a world where America and a few of its sycophantic partners is the ones that might get isolated from “the rest of the world”.
Third, as I discussed in my earlier article, “Qian Xuesen, Wen Ho Lee, Li Xiao Jiang.” even if you were able to get the entire Western world (ie, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Australia) completely on board with Cold War II, it is not one you can necessarily win. As fervent Cold War II supporter Niall Ferguson said in his interview with the Japan Times, “We are in Cold War II”. “If you start a cold war, you shouldn’t assume it will last 40 years and the U.S. will win. It could last a lot longer. China’s economy is bigger than the Soviet economy ever was, and it may well be that China’s one-party system with its high level of technological sophistication, investment and education, is actually able to win this.”
Unlike the Soviet Union, China is not an economic lightweight. While nominal GDP measured in US Dollars is the typical way of measuring economic size, this measurement has major weaknesses. In terms of real economic output, economists like to use Purchasing Power Parity to try to adjust for vagilities in things like exchange rates. But even in nominal US$ terms, China is already massive and on a PPP basis, it has likely passed the United States in 2020. Yes, I know China has four times the population as the US so on a per capita basis it is still “poor” – but looking at in another way, even if China were only able to eventually grow to half the GDP/capita as the USA, it would be twice as large as the US economy. It is that prospect that American cannot accept, not the fact that China is run by a nominally communist autocracy; although nobody puts it in those terms. I mean, we all knew that the communist party ran China for the past 75 years and it didn’t bother us. So what has changed? The fact that it is about to or already has surpassed the United State in economic size is clearly the trigger.
But let us ignore all the other noise around PPP and nominal exchange rates and just look at manufacturing output.
Perhaps Niall Ferguson is right and we cannot escape Thucydides Trap and that China, the emerging power, is destined to go to war with the existing great power which is the United States. I hope not because in a world of massive global economic interconnectivity and nuclear weapons, none of these outcomes are particularly compelling or desirable. Lets say Ferguson is right and we go hard on Cold War II. That means the world splinters into two camps like the original Cold War but in this one, much of the rest of the world probably gravitates more to China than it does to the West simply because China’s political model resembles most the rest of the world more than the West does. Moreover, China is and can provide the economic foundations for growth the West cannot despite its sad attempt to emulate China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with the Build Back Better World (B3W) announced after the G7 meeting. On that point, its interesting to note that the B3W (long on rhetoric, short on details and funding) basically tells us that all the West’s criticisms about the BRI was a bunch of bullshit propaganda in the first place. There is really nothing wrong with the BRI both morally and economically – because Biden basically announced the same plan himself. The real reason that America hates and vilifies the BRI is because it is China doing it instead of themselves.
As Niall Ferguson himself points out, “The lesson of the last Cold War is that the U.S. can’t contain China on its own. It needs allies, and it needs to work intelligently with its Asian and European allies, which of course includes Japan.” This points out another problem with America’s current anti-China a.k.a. cold war II model. In the original cold war, America’s allies were mostly completely onboard as we saw with the formation of NATO and America’s mutual defense treaty with Japan. It even managed to get China onboard against Russia following the Sino-Soviet split and normalization of relationships between the two countries following Kissinger’s visit (which incidentally is the foundation for the current issue of Taiwan – but that’s a different topic). In this case, it is clear that the Quad is not even close to being a new NATO and ASEAN is loathe to throw in with America as well given its closer economic links with China. Heck even America itself was more resolute during the cold war and President Reagan had massive support to pursue his agenda against the “evil empire” given he won every state in America except Mondale’s home state of Minnesota (which he barely won by 3800 votes). Contrast that today with massive bipartisan bickering and an increasingly polarized American public and it is hard to see America successfully creating a strong “coalition of the willing” that could successfully isolate China from the rest of the West let alone the entire world. As Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.”
In the worst case scenario, America gets embroiled in a hot war with China over Taiwan (much like they nearly did with the Soviets over Berlin and Cuba) and then we will see if America can actually win a conventional war 8000 miles from its shores against an opponent that is nuclear armed and has far more sophisticated conventional military equipment than anyone America has fought in the past 75 years. China is also closer and can devote all its military resources to that one theatre whereas America’s military is spread across the planet and have long and vulnerable supply lines. As I see it, China has the upper hand in that the reunification with Taiwan actually has huge domestic support because it is seen as defending the homeland while America, like always, will be fighting in a far off land for someone else – just like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Moreover, a loss in a limited conventional war over Taiwan would probably shatter any remaining pretense of American global hegemony in the eyes of the rest of the world and refusing to come to the defense of Taiwan would result in basically the same thing. That is why it is vital for America to reign in Taiwan’s ambitions and restore the status quo of ambiguity as embodied by the “one China principal” that has kept the peace for the past five decades.
So, if China is not threatening to destroy the West or the global institutions that it is so intertwined with already, why are so many of us in the West so eager to go head to head? Well, that is exactly Thucydides Trap, “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” To borrow a phrase from Franklin D. Roosevelt, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” While the G7 and NATO summits seems like the West is ganging up to contain China to the CBC, as the BBC and CNN pointed out, other than a few hardline sycophants like the UK and Australia, the rest of the world is not quite ready to completely sign on for Cold War II. It is my fervent hope that this remains the case and the world can develop together peacefully and cooperatively without all the sabre rattling from the old and decaying hegemon called the United States. Like its predecessor before it, the British Empire, I hope the USA can accept its relative decline from complete global dominance to being a large and important player in a truly multipolar world with grace. The alternative is far too bleak with severe consequences for everyone on the planet to countenance.