China's growing power and the "virus".
While North America and Europe were hard hit, China has resisted the international crisis of 2008 by using a rescue plan which combined huge public spending, a low interest rate and consumption subsidies. China’s growth rate reached 9% in 2009 and 10.4% in 2010, dragging in its wake Asia and Latin America out of the crisis. It has also managed to maintain unemployment to a sustainable level. China even overtook Japan, in 2010, as the second-largest economy in the world in terms of GDP and it is closing the gap with the US. On the whole, China’s rise seems unaffected by the subprime crisis. For TRUMP, Nearly four years later, none of these goals have been realized, and it is hard to think of a single aspect of Sino-American relations that has evolved favorably for the United States. The bilateral trade deficit rose during Trump’s first two years and is now around the same size as when Trump took office. In the most recent geopolitical offensive, China ordered the closure of a US consulate in the city of Chengdu, just days after US ordered the closure of a Chinese consulate in Houston. On Monday, the dollar fell to a multi-year low and analysts expect it to weaken further against major currencies. The political leadership in the United States has, for one, accused the Chinese government of bringing about the global pandemic, with its questionable handling of the public health crisis in China. Beijing’s dogged determination to take advantage of the crisis, to bolster its claim to global leadership and Trump’s insistence on calling it the “Chinese Virus” for weeks opened new faultlines in a great power dynamic that was already confrontational. (3)>>The Chinese government initially signaled its displeasure at U.S. apathy over the initial stages of the virus – criticizing Washington for evacuating its citizens without offering any help (although the U.S. CDC reportedly offered to send a team to help as early as January 6). On social media, Chinese diplomats strongly signaled their anger and some even went as far as to back the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was a bioweapon manufactured in American laboratories. And while its geopolitical implications should be considered secondary to matters of health and safety, those implications may, in the long term, prove just as consequential—especially when it comes to the United States’ global position. Global orders have a tendency to change gradually at first and then all at once. Trump administration has launched a series of all-round attacks, sanctions, and containment policies toward China, making many commentators very pessimistic about the future trend of China-U.S. relations. It seems that the “cold war” between China and the United States will really materialize under such circumstances. Let alone to demonize China and treat it like an enemy, which could easily become a self-fulfilling prophesy. China surpassed the United States in purchasing power parity in 2014 and is on track to have the world’s largest GDP in absolute terms by 2030. In comparison, our Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, was hobbled by unsustainable economic contradictions that ultimately crumbled under pressure. Instead the United States should develop a comprehensive strategy to defend its interests and compete with China based on domestic and economic renewal, leveraging global alliances, bolstering regional deterrence, and clear-eyed dialogue with Beijing.
NOTES AND COMMENTS:
(1)>>America threw out diplomacy. The neglect and distortion of American diplomacy is not a purely Trumpian invention. It has been an episodic feature of the United States’ approach to the world since the end of the Cold War. The Trump administration, however, has made the problem infinitely worse. There is never a good time for diplomatic malpractice, but the administration’s unilateral diplomatic disarmament is spectacularly mistimed, unfolding precisely at a moment when American diplomacy matters more than ever to American interests. The United States is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block, and no longer able get everything it wants on its own, or by force alone. The erosion of the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus in itself is not a tragedy, given its innumerable flaws, blind spots, and uneven track record. But the intense divisiveness and scorched-earth tactics that have poisoned our domestic politics over the past decade are crippling American diplomacy as well. The U.S. is stuck in the mud of its own polarized dysfunction, its already-bruised reputation for getting big things done suffering badly. Others around the world have always had grievances with America’s policies and its geopolitical weight, but they usually had a grudging respect for our competence, and for the power of our example. Today, the U.S. government can’t pass a budget, let alone bring the world together to stop the spread of a ruinous pandemic. (1.2)>>Obama era. Obama entered office as a critic of American foreign policy, but he soon disappointed the expectations of those who hoped for fundamental change .what disappoints me about Obama is that, when he came into office, he gave the impression he was going to reduce America’s global commitments, in the sense that he was going to wind down the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and greatly reduce our footprint in the Middle East. Obama’s mistakes are not limited to Iraq and Afghanistan. He has contributed substantially to destabilizing the entire Middle East, and interventionism is once more to blame.”Just to focus on the Middle East, . . .Obama is principally responsible for getting the United States involved in Syria—although we didn’t use military force there, we have played a key role in the effort to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, which has failed and has created a disastrous situation. We also played a key role in bringing down Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and helped turn that country into the Wild West.Obama’s anti-Russian foreign policy. Obama’s much-ballyhooed “Reset” with Russia, launched in 2009, was in keeping with optimistic attempts by every post-Cold War American administration to improve relations with Moscow was thrown out of the gate,which has led the downward spiral of relations with Moscow , the root cause of Trump winning the 2016 election based on failed promise "reset getting along with Russia".(2)>>That's the 'big price' that will be inevitable. With the failure of these repressive policies toward China, the pandemic outbreak in 2020 also struck the United States with heavy economic losses: once a long-term bull market, American stock markets saw the successive triggering of their circuit-breaker mechanisms in 10 consecutive days in March. The Dow Jones, S&P 500, and the Nasdaq indexes dropped to the levels they were at before Trump’s term began. Despite the recent improvement in the stock market, the extremely high unemployment rate will remain for a long period, which could be a fatal blow to the economic performance of Trump’s three years in office. On top of this, more than 100,000 Americans have died as a result of COVID-19. Under the huge domestic economic impact of the pandemic, it is difficult for the United States to launch a new round of large-scale suppressive policies against China in the short term. (3)>>The Chinese government initially signaled its displeasure at U.S. apathy over the initial stages of the virus –. Notwithstanding Trump’s aggressive courtship of President and Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping — as recently as late February 2020 Trump was praising Xi’s “hard work” and “transparency” and claiming the relationship was “very good” — bilateral diplomatic relations are in tatters. Trump and Xi have not spoken since March 27.
