Opinion Trump-Xi meeting: Washington-Beijing rivalry is more than a tale of rise and decline — it’s a mirror of two nations wrestling to determine the next global order

Great powers will rise and fall. The US has had a good run as a superpower but staying that way depends on both a people’s common aspiration and the ability to exercise scientific, rational thought in achieving those aspirations. The American people today are a divided house and their politicians weak and pusillanimous across the aisle on domestic issues. As a result, not only are their aspirations increasingly narrow, what remains of their greatness, of their capacity for global good, is being frittered away by acts of both commission — think the criticism and targeting of even allies and partners like Canada, the EU or India — and of omission — think of the defunding of USAID or of the United Nations.

China, meanwhile, is clearly and obviously stepping into the breach. However, it is also a breach that the Chinese anticipated — the Belt and Road Initiative was launched in 2013 well before Trump appeared on the scene and it has since followed up with several more specialised enterprises such as the Global Security Initiative and, most recently, the Global Governance Initiative, clearly preparing for a time when the global institutions that we know today and which were built on the back of US muscle or diplomacy have weakened or will start collapsing.

It was also a breach that the Chinese played a part in creating. Consider, for example, China’s promises in 2015 to Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama on not militarising the South China Sea and then continuing to do precisely that. It is the US failure to respond adequately at the time that has led to a situation today where China routinely bullies its neighbours and the rest of the world does not even treat it as front-page news.

However, for all his seeming unpredictability, Trump also flipped the script as America’s 45th president by turning his country’s China policy around to acknowledging the reality of China’s exploitation of both American goodwill and greed. That this new China policy became bipartisan in nature and continued by Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, also underlines a much-ignored American strength. If adaptability and the ability to deploy considerable resources to quickly change course and achieve fresh and scaled up objectives are Chinese strengths, they are equally if not more so also American strengths. Even if American self-interest rules, it has at least some positives for China’s neighbours dealing with a security threat.

The world might look askance at the US Secretary of Health’s unscientific reordering of America’s health priorities or its Secretary of War’s political lectures to the military leadership, but as misguided as these attempts might be, the clarity of purpose these attempts represent can also serve America’s foreign policy objectives when necessary. Indeed, they already do or have in terms of creating a useful correction of European defence spending and priorities. The US might have disrespected its allies but reports of the death of either NATO or of alliances with East Asian powers have been greatly exaggerated. As India’s case shows, when Washington imposes tariffs, it also clearly understands the limits of New Delhi’s options with either Russia or China — almost from the get-go, the Indian government has claimed that the rupture is temporary and has caved, however gradually, on buying Russian oil and on trade terms with the Americans.

If the Chinese have stopped biding their time and hiding their capabilities, so have the Americans under Trump — and these capabilities are about more than making war.

In China, meanwhile, the fourth plenum of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party has focused on encouraging “new quality productive forces” through innovation-led, high-efficiency manufacturing. It is easy to suppose that China is declaring its determination to do even better what it is already quite good at doing. But it can equally be the case that ringing calls to focus on “reinforcing the foundations of the real economy”, “achieving greater self-reliance” and the need to “inspire greater confidence in Chinese culture among our people” betray weaknesses in the economy and insecurities about the capacity of the Chinese people to push on under current circumstances.

It could be argued that both China and the US are engaged in a circular exercise of copying each other — the Chinese economic reform process started in the late 1970s with the desire to replicate Japanese and American economic success, and the US soon became the model to replicate. Today, American military leaders and politicians call China the “pacing challenge” and strive mightily to retain the lead in technological innovation. Alongside, a section of the American political class is attempting to reimagine the West not so much as a geopolitical entity with liberal values, but as a civilisational one with a narrow, White nationalist and Christian mien. The Chinese would understand.

At the Trump-Xi meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation event in South Korea, it was announced that the US would reduce tariffs on Chinese products while China would lift restrictions on rare earths exports. Even so, assessments of which country has gained or lost based on just issues of trade and geopolitics will be incomplete. Each country’s internal conditions and resilience will be equally important to the final scorecard.

The writer is associate professor, Department of International Relations and Governance Studies, and director, Centre of Excellence for Himalayan Studies, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR