The conflict between Beijing and Washington continues to escalate. The formal reason for mutual accusations today is the origin of the new coronavirus COVID-19 and the actions of the authorities of both countries to counter it. The White House believes that the PRC leadership, if not involved in the creation or leakage of the virus from the biological laboratory, is definitely guilty of concealing information about the scale of the epidemic, as well as mortality and the speed of infection.
Representatives of the US intelligence community have already made relevant statements. And the other day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the official position of the United States: they allegedly have evidence that at least the concealment of facts by the PRC took place. Earlier, President Trump expressed his point of view: Beijing could stop the pandemic, but did nothing for it. Or did not do enough. So, he is guilty of hundreds of thousands of deaths and economic damage to the whole world.
It is worth noting that earlier such accusations and claims of some countries against others have not been expressed. Moreover, intelligence data were not used to reinforce them. Yes, the American intelligence services in 2018 talked about China’s allegedly unpreparedness for the next coronavirus pandemic (the first, I recall, was in the early 2000s, and after it, the Celestial authorities assured the whole world that this would not happen again), and about “suspicious activity ”in its biological laboratories, including in the city of Wuhan. However, almost all of these studies were international, so Americans, to one degree or another, took part in them.
The problem is that there is no one to conduct an impartial and independent investigation. One could try to discuss the WHO reform “in connection with newly discovered circumstances”, only Washington had already announced the termination of its funding due to its “corruption” and “pro-Chinese position”. The United States is about to "sort out" Beijing without intermediaries - either through sanctions or by applying extraterritorial American justice.
China, in response, hints at the involvement of the US military and special services in the pandemic, actively promoting its successes in the fight against COVID-19, a rapid post-epidemic economic revival and assistance to other countries. In addition, Beijing officially announced its grudge against Washington and some European capitals for accusations of "contaminating the whole world", suspicions of opacity and reasoning about the "unreliability" of Chinese protocols in terms of biosecurity.
It is a question of resentment. And not only at the leadership level - this feeling today is shared by many Chinese, especially those who follow politics. Like, we help you, and you are treading us! This is racism! It is worth noting that the Chinese comrades clearly borrowed this definition from the American liberals. It was from the US Congress (of course, from the ranks of the democratic opposition), and not from Beijing that the thesis that the accusations against China were "racist" was first heard.
Based on this thesis, then any conflict at the level of sovereign states is a manifestation of either racism, or some other bad feeling.
It’s enough to recall that Vladimir Putin’s efforts to consolidate Russian society, develop sovereign industries and defend historical truth since at least 2007, have even been called “nationalism” in serious American political publications. We note in passing that Comrade X was called in the global liberal media “the representative of the nationalist wing of the CCP” until mid-2018. True, in January 2017, when Donald Trump took over as President of the United States, the President of the People's Republic of China at the Davos Forum was given the title “King of Globalization”. But the charm passed very quickly. First of all, because the liberal-globalist model leaked and quickly began to sink to the bottom, and China declared its right to “reprogram” the world order.
The fact that the confrontation between the “city on the hill” and the Celestial Empire, as well as the attitude of other centers of power towards this confrontation in the coming decades will determine the evolution of economic mechanisms around the planet, as well as the system of international relations, I have already told RT readers. This fight promises to be tough and uncompromising. It seems like it could not be otherwise.
Nevertheless, many experts argue that such a quick separation of the two powers, connected by economic and political ties, cannot happen in the coming years. Two powers simply cannot survive without each other.
Well, let's take a look at these assumptions from a historical perspective. Once upon a time it seemed that the USSR and the USA would never conflict with each other, and if they did, then the little things. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union was still on the periphery of world politics. Few watched his efforts to build modern industries and infrastructure. However, the United States actively cooperated with Moscow even before diplomatic relations were established between the two countries. Comrade Stalin appeared on the covers of Time magazine as the leader of a rapidly modernizing state.
In those years, at least 400 thousand American engineers, workers, and businessmen worked in the USSR. And the first foreign exchange stores (they were honestly called "For Americans") appeared just then. The Putilovets tractors (aka Fordson), the legendary Lorry (aka GAZ AA, aka Ford AA), widely advertised in Soviet films and chronicles, all came from America. As well as turbines manufactured by General Electric Corporation for the Dnieper. And it was not just the supply of finished goods. Almost all of them were accompanied by technology transfer. Washington (as well as London and Paris) did not consider it dangerous - they did not see a competitor in Soviet Russia.
A little later, in the 1940s, the attitude towards the USSR became even more “tender”. In 1941-1942, in American cinemas, before watching movies (just like in the Soviet Union), they showed clips about the heroic resistance of the Red Army to the German invasion. In fact, Soviet successes were in full swing advertised in the United States. Lend-Lease deliveries were sent with pomp. In the summer of 1944 (almost a year before the Victory), the Bretton Woods Agreement was concluded, where Moscow and Washington acted as the main skirmishers of the new global financial system. Britain, France, and other countries agreed to participate in it only because the Soviet Union and the United States voiced their solidarity. And without Bretton Woods it is impossible to imagine Yalta of 1945.
It was assumed that the Soviet Union was not just a partner in the anti-Hitler coalition (namely, it ruled the world then), but an “inevitable partner” in the new world order.
The entire UN charter (and later the “nuclear club”) was built under the cooperation of albeit different, but friendly to each other powers. But was this attitude to Moscow sincere? Well, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it’s possible. But the rest of the Western leaders were simply afraid of the sudden emergence of a new center of power on the world stage.
In September 2019, this was quite openly written on the pages of The National Interest by international journalist Michael Peck. In his opinion, it was the Second World War that made the USSR a superpower. And the Western elite could not accept this. Already in February 1946, the infamous "long telegram" of the special envoy of George Kennan arrived from the American embassy in Moscow to Washington, which claimed that the only way to interact with Moscow was to contain. This was before Churchill's Fulton speech and the publication of Truman's doctrine. The emergence of a new force with its ideas about the world order by “foreign policy professionals” was considered fundamentally dangerous. And then the cold war began.
I understand that all analogies are lame, but roughly the same thing happened in the relationship between the United States and China. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon and his foreign policy guru, Henry Kissinger, began a rapprochement with China. After 20 years, the Celestial Empire has long been on its knives with the USSR and was a rapidly growing factory of things for the United States and Europe. When China joined the WTO in 2001, it seemed to many Western (and not only Western) strategists that the mutual dependence of Washington and Beijing was such that it was simply impossible to break their economic alliance (often called Chimerica).
Nevertheless, already during the crisis of 2007-2009, it became clear that the Celestial Empire is too strong and alien to the collective West to continue to calmly look at the growth of its influence. China turned out to be one of the beneficiaries of the end of the Cold War on the terms of "global bosses." He was very much loved in Washington, Brussels and other Euro-Atlantic capitals for his “loyalty to the ideals of globalization”, but exactly until the time when he became an economic superpower with his own geostrategic interests.
Beijing was lucky in the sense that the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations simply lacked the resources and time to start a new Cold War, this time with China. One had to deal with Belgrade, then with Baghdad ...
But already in Obama’s second term, the so-called “Pacific U-turn” strategy was announced, that is, switching the US military and economic power from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region, where China is a key player. He was noticed, appreciated and turned into an enemy.
Of course, if Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, such a fierce attack on Beijing would not have happened. More precisely, it would have happened later. Just as if, at the 1944 Democratic Party Conference of the Democrats, not Harry Truman, but Henry Wallace had been nominated as vice president, the Soviet Union would not have seen the enemy for a long time. Well - how long ... Ten years at most.
And of course, if the coronavirus pandemic did not happen, events in the very beginning of the 2020s would develop much more slowly. But what happened happened. Perhaps if Joe Biden wins the presidential election on November 3 this year, there will be a strategic pause in the clearly defined conflict. But there will be no return to the past. Confrontation is inevitable. And all countries of the world, including Russia, will have to take this into account.
Today, everyone would like to predict the outcome of this conflict and its duration. But this is a completely different story ...
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.