Welcome to the alphabet soup of Cold War 2.0
But what seems to be missing from all the talk is a clear understanding of what are the goals of a US-led united international front directed at China.
MOST of you are probably too young to remember John Foster Dulles, the mythical American statesman who had served as US Secretary of State under President Dwight Eisenhower and is considered as one of the architects of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. And by the way, those who fly to Washington, DC: for your information, Dulles International Airport was named after him.
To make a long story short and with abbreviations (literally!), the heavy-set Secretary Dulles' preferred strategy to dealing with communism (which he described as "Godless terrorism") was to contain the Soviet bloc by a set of military pacts led by the US dubbed as "pactomania".
The result was an alphabet soup of regional pacts which included among others (in addition to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Nato, which had been established by his predecessor in office) the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (Seato, which consisted of Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, and the United States); the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty (Anzus); the Central Treaty Organization (Cento), aka the Baghdad Treaty, which consisted of Turkey, Iraq, Great Britain, Pakistan and Iran.
Historians still debate whether these and other US-led security treaties had actually improved America's geostrategic position during the Cold War. In fact, some argue that they helped ignite anti-American backlash and ended up playing into the hands of the Soviets, like in the case of Egypt, which espoused neutrality, and that saw Cento as directed against it.
In any case, the post-Cold World era and the ensuing global war on terror has only left us with only the, well, the Global War On Terror or the GWOT. In fact, the expectation for a while was that instead of security treaties we would see the launching of peace-oriented multilateral free-trade pacts and organisations, like those that the US helped to launch, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Trans-Pacific Agreement (TPP).
US policymakers had envisioned at that time that the TPP would put pressure on emerging China to embrace the international trade rules set by the West. But then after confronting a rising wave of populism and nationalism, Washington decided to abandon the project.
Instead, with the US policy of "engagement" with Beijing proving to be a major victim of growing anti-globalism sentiments, an evolving consensus in Washington started targeting China as America's new geostrategic and geo-economic challenge. That threat supposedly required a clear US response in the form of "containment", recalling the language that was used to describe the policy towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Indeed, as President Joe Biden is preparing to host the first in-person summit of a new international pact consisting of Quad countries - Australia, India, Japan, and the United States - that have pledged to boost cooperation to push back against China's growing assertiveness, it may not be surprising that the talk in Washington these days is about the making of Cold War 2.0.
CHAOTIC WITHDRAWAL
The summit on the level of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue will take place a week after the Biden administration stunned the world by announcing the signing of a new military pact with Australia and Britain (Aukus), which, very much like the launching of the Quad, was meant as a strategic deterrent to China.
These major strategic moves come a few weeks after the Biden administration was bashed for its chaotic withdrawal of US military troops from Afghanistan that some critics depicted as a major blow to the American global position.
But if anything, as yours truly pointed out in an August 19 piece in BT the decision by the Biden administration to withdraw from Afghanistan, and for all practical matters, to end the era of two decades of US military interventions in the Middle East, would now allow Washington to finally begin to fulfil its pledge, going back to the Obama administration, to "pivot" to Asia.
After all, as then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it in 2011, "the future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the centre of the action".
Policymakers and pundits who since 2011 have been expressing their dismay of America's failure to switch its focus from the Middle East to the Pacific may now finally get their wish, although it's not clear whether growing tensions between Beijing and Washington was what they had in mind when they urged the Americans to pay more attention to the Indo-Pacific region.
Most observers expected that the rise of US military and economic profile in East Asia would lead to more competition with China, but also to some cooperation on dealing with common threats like climate change and cyber crime. But that doesn't look like the shape of things to come in the Sino-American relationship. In the same week that the US agreed to help Australia build at least eight nuclear-powered submarines and supply it with long-range Tomahawk missiles, giving Australia strategic deterrence and attack capabilities, President Biden's climate envoy, John Kerry, was visiting Beijing but he failed to make progress on cooperation with China on climate issues. In fact, an angry Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi even refused to hold a face-to-face meeting with him.
The Chinese had hoped that President Biden and his top foreign policy aides - Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and his two Asia hands, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Indo-Pacific coordinator, Kurt Campbell - would reboot the relationship between the two countries and reverse the anti-China policies of the Trump administration.
But if anything, President Biden has embraced a tougher stand on China than his predecessor, but unlike former President Donald Trump he has tried to come up with a more coherent strategy under which Washington would work together with its military allies - including Australia, Britain, India, and Japan - to deal with such issues like freedom of navigation patrols in the South China Sea, China's human rights policies, and the status of Taiwan.
President Biden's introduction of a three-way military technology pact with Australia and Britain last week was a strategic masterstroke, even if it antagonised another military ally, France, who saw its US$50 billion deal to supply Australia with conventional weapons vanish into thin air.
CLEAR MESSAGE
But in a way, the Biden administration was sending a clear message to France and other members of the European Union (EU) that their strategic game of not taking sides in the Sino-American rivalry and searching for a "middle way" was not going to work.
Angering the incoming Biden administration, the European Union (EU) rejected its plea not to sign an investment deal with China in December 2000 and waited for the new president to introduce his China strategy. The Americans are sceptical about the ability of the EU to pursue an independent foreign policy and believe that France and other members would have no choice but to team with Washington to deal with the Chinese challenge.
And while the Quad isn't a formal military alliance, like Nato, the gathering of the prime ministers of Australia, India and Japan in the White House in the name of "promoting a free and open Indo-Pacific" is bound to anger China who would see it as aimed against them.
Reflecting those sentiments, during a phone call two weeks ago with President Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping didn't respond to the suggestion that the two leaders hold a face-to-face summit. That points to one of the major costs involved in the Biden administration's approach: it's going to be difficult, if not impossible, to make deals with China on central global issues like the environment.
Moreover, while all the members of the Quad share security concerns about China and are ready to cooperate in the military and intelligence sphere, India for one is reluctant to turn the forum into an anti-China bloc, although Japan as well as Britain are more likely to back such an arrangement. And even Australia is probably averse to the idea of "decoupling" the Chinese and Western economies.
But what seems to be missing from all the talk about Cold War 2.0 is a clear understanding of what are the goals of a US-led united international front directed at China, especially when it comes to the future status of Taiwan which Beijing regards as part of China.
During the Cold War, Nato was united by a common goal of protecting its members against a military attack by the Soviet bloc. Are the members of the Quad and other US military allies in Asia ready to respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan?
Which raises a more important issue: the notion that the US should be ready for a new Cold War with China may be supported by members of Washington's foreign policy establishment. But it has yet to be debated in Congress and among the American people who would have to decide whether they are ready to pay the price for such an costly endeavour. Or to put it in more concrete terms, are they willing to fight and die to protect Taiwan?
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