The geopolitical reality of our time is the struggle by the United States, China and Russia for the global supremacy of the future.
The United States, which just three decades ago won the Cold War and thought of itself as the only remaining superpower setting up the New World Order, is currently in crisis.
It is not only is it a house divided.
It presents a situation in which the parts of the country that develop advanced technology, create cultural and intellectual products, that run its financial services industry — i.e., the sectors singularly responsible for America’s economic, cultural and military dominance — are coming under a sustained assault by a backward, poorly educated, tribal and, frankly, dumb section of the population.
While the radical right is more numerous, better politically organized, well-financed, and therefore more dangerous, there has been an equally alarming growth of the divisive hard left, which attacks America’s liberal democracy as racist, colonialist, exploitative, and paternalistic.
Both Russia and China have sensed America’s weakness but have responded differently. Or rather, both have been suppressing domestic dissent in equal measure but differ only in their different foreign policies.
Russia has been aggressive and confrontational. Vladimir Putin has flexed Russia’s muscle in hacking and social media, built up troops on Ukraine’s borders, and picked up fights with America’s NATO allies. He seems determined to effect another Anschluss by bringing Belarus into the Russian fold. Even as he prepares to meet Joe Biden for a kind of summit in Geneva, his propaganda keeps up its anti-American barrage.
China has been much more cautious. True, after last year’s presidential election, during the subsequent period of uncertainty culminating with a right-wing mob storming the Capitol, some observers, including the London Economist, noted a more assertive and even outright rude tone Beijing had used with the Americans. Not only did it crack down on Hong Kong but began threatening Taiwan, hinting at a possible military action to reclaim what it regards as its breakaway province.
Yet, once the transfer of power in Washington occurred peacefully and a more traditional US administration, reminiscent of the ones that governed the country throughout the post-World War II period, has been installed, China visibly pulled back. It has assumed a wait-and-see stance, awaiting the results of the next two US election cycles in 2022 and 2024.
The difference between the Russian and the Chinese approach is due to the fact that Russia has nothing but rusty nuclear weapons to bring to the table. It has a creaky resource-dependent economy, an obsolete industrial base, and no advanced technology industry to speak of while China is an emerging economic superpower.
In fact, China is one of the world’s greatest beneficiaries of the US-run economic system. Its dramatic development over the past 3o years has been largely due to its commercial relationship with the United States. During this period America combined increasingly loose monetary policy with profligate debt-financed public spending. The US Federal Reserve has been pumping cheap money, allowing America to consume much more than it produces. The Chinese built factories to meet American demand for cheap goods and borrowed American technology. They earned dollars by exporting much more to the US than they imported and invested those dollars into their industrial base. They also lent money to Washington to make sure the spending spree went on.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping may be more authoritarian and assertive than his predecessors but he is not interested in jeopardizing this relationship. What China lacks is the ability to innovate independently. Control of cutting-edge technology is key to economic and military domination, and even a cursory glance at the world’s top technology companies reveals the extent to which America shapes the IT revolution. Until China can rival the US in this area it will remain second-rate.
China will nibble at America’s interests, developing partnerships in Asia and Africa where the US had pulled backs, and even venturing into America’s backyard such as Mexico and parts of South America. But it will avoid radical steps that could lead to a direct confrontation with Washington or a breakup of the two countries’ close commercial ties. It will assert itself but do so cautiously, leaving to Putin the task of rattling the world order.
China has a good chance to come out a winner but the outcome is by no means assured. It may never develop an ability to innovate, the way the Japanese never did. And, like Japan, China may sink into stagnation with an aging population and lack of ambition. Finally, the government in Beijing may fall for some harebrained ideology and set the country back once more, the way Mao Zedong did after World War II.
But, geopolitical considerations aside, the superpower rivalry for leadership may turn not on technology but on one of the oldest human vices — greed and corruption.
Money has been the ideology of the 21st century just as various totalitarian creeds were the fodder for the Age of Dictators in the 1930s. Russia’s corruption has been mind-boggling and Chinese leaders have been corrupting Russian leaders at every level in order gradually to colonize the Russian Far East and Eastern Siberia. Corruption has also become endemic in the US political class, where the Greed Decade of the 1980s has never ended.
Putin seems to be adept at suborning US politicians, especially on the right, where the Republican Party has changed its stripes literally overnight, with many of its leaders becoming Putin stooges and mouthing his propaganda. China has been less blatant, but the Chinese are equally good at bribery — and there seems to be no shortage of Americans who are willing to take the dirty money.
Based on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, Russia is off the charts corrupt, sharing the 129th spot with the likes of Togo and Gabon. China is in 78th place whereas the United States, holding a fairly respectable 25th spot, has gone down sharply in rankings, losing a massive 9 points since 2015. This the most dramatic slide in rankings in the table, on par with Bahrain. China, meanwhile, is keen on fighting corruption with draconian measures and has gained 5 points in corruption perception during the same time
