by CHRISTOPHER MCCALLAN
US is learning the hard way that if you treat everyone else as a pariah you are eventually treated as one yourself
China’s diplomatic maneuvers over the past weeks have produced all sorts of alarm among members of the Washington foreign policy establishment and media that America’s influence is being supplanted in favor of a new and hostile “world order.”
The failure to see current events in balance-of-power terms goes a long way toward explaining how this situation has come about in the first place.
Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Moscow to affirm the Sino-Russian “no limits partnership” the same week the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for war crimes against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Earlier in the month, China successfully brokered a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran to re-establish diplomatic ties between the Gulf rivals. In late February, Beijing released a 12-point peace plan for the war in Ukraine to which Kiev signaled both skepticism and openness.
Xi concluded his trip to Moscow by telling Russian President Vladimir Putin “Now there are changes that haven’t happened in 100 years. When we are together, we drive these changes.”
American commentators responded that China is “emerging[…] as the leader of a Eurasian bloc,” that “[a]lliances and rivalries that have governed diplomacy for generations have[…] been upended,” and that an “anti-US world order [is] taking shape.”
The question seems to be limited to “whether this confrontation will heat up, pushing three nuclear powers to the brink of World War III, or merely marks the opening chords of Cold War 2.0. [emphasis mine]”
Few seem interested in asking whether both World War III and Cold War 2.0 can be avoided, or why it is that China has found such a receptive audience for its diplomatic overtures.
A notable exception is Fareed Zakaria’s admirable recent column, which states bluntly that, “America’s unipolar status has corrupted the country’s foreign policy elite. Our foreign policy is all too often an exercise in making demands and issuing threats and condemnations. There is very little effort made to understand the other side’s views or actually negotiate.”
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