by Emil Avdaliani
Suffice it to say here, however, that the pandemic will accentuate the divide between the West (especially the US) and China.
Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, photo via Wikimedia Commons
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,553, May 6, 2020
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Many
argue that the coronavirus pandemic will ultimately benefit China more
than the rest of the world, especially the US. After all, America is now
the worst-hit country on earth in terms of human casualties. But the
crisis could in fact help the US reorganize its geopolitical thinking
toward the People’s Republic, resulting in a radical break in which
Washington’s political and economic elites are newly unified against a
rising Beijing.
Analyses abound on which state or region will
benefit the most from the coronavirus crisis. Many believe it will be
China, which has (or says it has) sustained many fewer human and
economic losses than the US and western European countries. The US and
Europe, meanwhile, are experiencing their deepest crises since WWII.
A battle of narratives has arisen on who is to
blame for what has happened to the global and national economies. These
narratives warrant their own analysis. Suffice it to say here, however,
that the pandemic will accentuate the divide between the West (especially the US) and China.
Though Beijing might well succeed at portraying
itself as highly efficient in combating the virus, it could suffer an
unexpected consequence: a unifying of the American political and
business elites against it.
This process was already in place well before the
pandemic struck. Indeed, it can be argued that it predated the rise of
Donald Trump. US leaders have been gradually shifting American
geopolitical attention away from the Middle East and toward China and
Southeast Asia for years. Both the Obama and the Trump administrations
made significant moves toward this end.
Still, there has not been a conclusive accord
within the American political elite on what kind of threat China poses
to US geopolitical interests. The US’s deep economic interconnectedness
with China has complicated reaching a policy consensus on this question.
Another no less significant factor in the seeming
US indecisiveness toward China is the very nature of the US government.
It is a huge bureaucratic apparatus with numerous agencies, each with
its own vision, and those visions often clash. Contrary to autocratic
states where divisions are not seen and decisions are taken without
consulting the wider public and often without economic considerations,
the democratic US traditionally needs much longer to adjust to new
geopolitical realities. This can take years.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, when the US entered the world stage as a major geopolitical
player, the country faced two major rivals: Japan before WWII and the
Soviet Union, a rivalry that persisted from 1945-46 through the late
1980s. Analysis of US foreign policy during those periods shows how
slowly and at times clumsily Washington came to realize the fundamental
nature of the threat Tokyo and Moscow posed to American interests.
These cases show an interesting pattern in US
foreign policy. To form a definitive foreign policy stance—that is, to
cast a foreign state as an unequivocal geopolitical enemy—the US usually
had to experience a deep geopolitical shock that would consolidate its
vision of the rival. Take Japan. It took the attack on Pearl Harbor in
late 1941 to shake the US political elite out of the last vestiges of
isolationism and indecisiveness to view Tokyo as a direct geopolitical
threat. The US needed a decade, from 1931 when the Japanese attacked
China to the Pearl Harbor strike of 1941, to grasp the extent to which
Tokyo’s ambitions were fundamentally opposed to American ambitions.
Something similar occurred with the Soviet Union.
It took Washington many years to fully comprehend the extent of Soviet
opposition to the US. America’s peculiar indecisiveness in the later
stages of WWII and in its immediate aftermath made it lose precious time
that would otherwise have enabled the western world to be better
prepared to counter Soviet geopolitical ambitions across Eurasia. The US
foreign policy readjustment lasted until the war in Korea, which showed
American resolve in thwarting communist ambitions.
The coronavirus, which has hit the US more
severely than any other country in the world, could well serve as a
defining moment for American foreign policy for the rest of this decade
and into the 2030s. The US political elite will likely become more
focused on China and competition with Beijing will become more
pronounced. The economic and human losses in the US are of a magnitude
that American policymakers will need to explain them to the broader
public. Those in the top leadership who were ambivalent, as well as
America’s allies around the world, will be more inclined to cast China
as a competitor and even an enemy.
It is likely that major attempts from the American
side will be made to produce a China strategy. This will involve
reinvigorating the US military presence among its allies across the
Indo-Pacific. India, Japan, and South Korea will play a larger role in
Washington’s calculus.
There is simply no alternative to this policy as
China’s military and economic power will not only not dissipate but will
increase in the coming decade. And this is not only about American
military posturing. Major steps will have to be taken inside the US to
bolster innovation, grow the economy, and coordinate among various
structures of power.
There will be problems. As the shock of the Pearl
Harbor attack and the astoundingly gruesome policies of Stalin in
post-1945 eastern Europe helped the US reorganize its economic and
military thinking to counter Japan and the Soviet Union, respectively, a
reorganization of the entire US state machine to counter China might
take time, from months to a few years. Moreover, with Japan and the
Soviets, it was easier for the Americans to make a policy shift as those
countries were interconnected economically. With the Chinese it is a
different story. China and the US engage in trade on a massive scale.
Though readjustment of the entire US state apparatus will likely
accelerate to produce a viable “China strategy,” it will take time to
convince the American business community to withdraw from China.
The pandemic will likely sharpen anti-China
rhetoric in the US. More than that, US losses should help Washington
streamline its China policy. Success is not guaranteed. Imperial Japan
and the Soviets had crucial deficiencies the US was able to exploit, and
the US will have to identify China’s weaknesses. It has not done this
very successfully up to this point, but the coronavirus should serve as
the kind of crisis that prompts a redefinition of the country’s foreign
policy by causing political and business elites to reach a common vision
about how to combat a geopolitical rival. The pandemic thus has the
potential to revolutionize Washington’s China policy.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/coronavirus-us-china-policy/
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