Living and travelling as I have over the years between America and China, I am repeatedly asked whether China is replacing America as the global leader – more than ever since Trump became president.
Sitting at the United Club bar at the airport in San Francisco last Saturday, waiting for my flight back to Hong Kong, a scene that played out there triggered this blog because it is a metaphor of U.S.-China relations and their struggle to dominate and lead the New World Disorder.
A Chinese businessman loudly demanded another beer while the bar tender was serving a customer. “Mainland Chinese are pushy” said an American businessman out loud as several patrons nodded in agreement.
“Just a minute,” Miss Chow the longtime Hong Kong-American bartender responded that elicited a grunt and apology from the mainlander. “Mainlanders are pushy” Chow continued, “that’s why I live in America and love it.”
America and China’s global roles have definitely evolved and changed over the last few decades – make that centuries. China’s leadership role has grown while America’s has shrunk.
President Trump’s foreign policy initiatives, from his Saudi visit, to Poland and stops in between in Belgium, France, Germany, Israel and the Vatican, have done nothing to enhance or shore-up America’s global standing. On the contrary, they have all been criticized and labelled as examples of America’s declining and shrinking global leadership role. This while China’s global moves are characterized as filling the global vacuum America is leaving in its wake.
North Korea has thus become the centerpiece of the Trump administrations’ foreign policy legacy. One that can denuclearize the Hermit Kingdom peacefully or militarily with America and China fighting each other with boots on the ground again. In other words, North Korea has become a “make or break” issue in the US-China relationship, along with the trade deficit.
American political scientist Graham Allison, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University coined the phrase that best describes the conundrum America and China face. The “Thucydides Trap,” named after the Greek philosopher whose account of the Peloponnesian war (431BC-404BC) gave rise to the theory that now applies to America and China.
“It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this instilled in Sparta, that made war inevitable.” The underlying hypothesis is that insecurity sparked between an ambitious rapidly rising nation and an established power desperate to maintain the status quo vastly increases the chances of war.
Both countries have to change their political trajectory and get off the dangerous track they are on to avoid a head on economic and military collision. The percolating trade war can turn into a military conflict. With the 2018 midterm elections looming in America, and the upcoming 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China this fall, when a majority of the Politburo Standing Committee (top decision making body) will be replaced, makes time of the essence.
The $300 billion trade deficit between the two countries must be shrunk constructively because it is no longer sustainable. China imported $134.4 billion worth of American goods last year.
The 10-point trade deal announced in May which included China lifting its ban on American beef and liquefied natural gas that took effect in July is a good start. China should commit to buying additional goods such as crude and refined oil products, cotton and machine tools. The sooner the better.
America and China must lead the New World Order of the 21st-century as partners — coleaders – and stop wasting their time and resources to be the sole global leader – a subject and proposal I have repeatedly advocated in all my books. A good place to start on the economic front is a bilateral economic and trade agreement. On the military front, is the denuclearization of North Korea. The time to do so is long overdue.