Twice in the 20th century, Japan challenged the West, first in a military-led attempt to become an imperial power and then as an industrial powerhouse. Now, it is China’s turn to take the global stage. Seventy-five years after Japan’s surrender in World War II, and 30 years after its economic bubble popped, the emergence of a 21st-century Asian power is shaking up the “status quo.”
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For the past 50 years, the West has clung to the hope that modernization would automatically transform China into a capitalist liberal democracy. For decades, maintaining this illusion was good for the bottom line, but now the implications of China’s ascendancy have become disturbingly clear.
China has always said it is not seeking to overthrow the global order. We should listen. Why would China go to the trouble of capsizing the global order when it can simply take it over, whole and intact? … Far from opening up a new battleground, China’s plan is to fight on familiar territory. Its message to the world is simple: China is ready to pick up the slack, as the United States retreats from its global responsibilities. For a world exhausted and impoverished by the pandemic, it’s a seductive proposition.
The burst of communications was unusual. While Chinese diplomats have spoken publicly before on big issues such as the China-US trade war and the Belt and Road Initiative, it had not been on such a scale. Observers said the effort was an attempt to shape international opinion about the unrest in Hong Kong, but no matter how united the approach, the campaign was unlikely to be effective.
Much of the Kremlin’s self-confidence stems from the belief that the Western world is changing in ways that suit Russia. Donald Trump is seen to represent a long-term trend in the US rather than a short-term blip: Russian analysts reckon that the US will be less focused on intervening around the world to uphold a liberal, rules-based, US-led order, and that it will be more nationalist, mercantilist and interest-focused. So in the long run, the US and Russia should be able to accommodate each other.
In reality, China’s longstanding suspicion of foreign influence has not prevented the government or the people from becoming remarkably adept at marshalling the flow of overseas cultural touchstones into the country’s borders, remoulding them into something that isn’t entirely Chinese, but is also totally different from its original form.
China and Russia both have features that unite them. Both are blatantly autocratic, show a callous disregard for human rights, and share an openness to using military force in their neighbourhoods. They also share a great interest in pushing back the West’s influence in the world. Yet, despite these various areas of cooperation, the list of potential conflict points between the two powers is long.
Arab regimes spend millions of dollars on think tanks, academic institutions, and lobbying firms in part to shape the thinking in Western capitals about domestic political activists opposed to their rule, many of whom happen to be religious. The field of counter-extremism has been the ideal front for the regional governments’ preferred narrative: They elicit sympathy from the West by claiming to also suffer from the perfidies of radical jihadis and offer to work together to stem the ideological roots of the Islamist threat.
The pope’s visit was advertised as the UAE’s gift to the many thousands of Catholic guest workers, including nearly 700,000 from the Philippines alone. That was only part of its purpose. Freed from any obligation to Islamists, and faced with the promise that those Islamists would work implacably to end the monarchies, the Gulf States have everything to gain from embracing the West, opening further, and reaping the benefits of cooperation against Islamists. The visit was not a concession to Christianity but a strategic calculation, and a canny one at that.
While the West moves to re-isolate Myanmar after a short period of re-engagement, neighbouring India is taking a more realpolitik approach to reports of massive rights abuses by the nation’s security forces. Indeed, India is doing its utmost to improve relations while the United States and European Union impose new sanctions aimed specifically at Myanmar’s military, including top soldiers involved in the abuses.
