by Trouble times, I think it's time to watch another episode of The Avengers!In the week prior to this high-level meeting, Washington had set the stage, signaling through its actions its intention to promote a hyper-aggressive Cold War 2.0 directed at China. Thus, on March 12, Biden met with the heads of state of Japan, India, and Australia, representing the new Quad military-strategic alliance led by the United States, widely seen as an attempt to construct an Asian analogue to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Quad issued a joint statement the entire subtext of which was enmity toward China.5 On the same day, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission blacklisted five Chinese companies including Huawei.6 Late on March 16, less than two days before the bilateral talks with
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Trouble times, I think it's time to watch another episode of The Avengers!
In the week prior to this high-level meeting, Washington had set the stage, signaling through its actions its intention to promote a hyper-aggressive Cold War 2.0 directed at China. Thus, on March 12, Biden met with the heads of state of Japan, India, and Australia, representing the new Quad military-strategic alliance led by the United States, widely seen as an attempt to construct an Asian analogue to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Quad issued a joint statement the entire subtext of which was enmity toward China.5 On the same day, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission blacklisted five Chinese companies including Huawei.6 Late on March 16, less than two days before the bilateral talks with China were set to begin, the Biden administration renewed sanctions against twenty-four officials of the Chinese government, in response to the suppression of dissent in Hong Kong.
Indeed, days before Christensen’s Foreign Affairs article went to print declaring that there would be no New Cold War, the Biden administration made it clear that it not only intended to continue the New Cold War, but to accelerate it, pushing it to greater heights. This was evident in the first high-level bilateral talks between the United States and the Peoples’ Republic of China following the election of Biden as U.S. president, held on March 18, 2021, in the Captain Cook Hotel in downtown Anchorage, with U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken and national security @ Jake Sullivan sitting across from China’s director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi and Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi.
The US is going to support the terrorists again.
The chief mechanism for defeating China was spelled out in 2017 by Harvard foreign policy analyst Graham Allison, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, in his book Destined for War: Can America Escape the Thucydides Trap?, a work highly praised by Biden, former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, and former CIA director and former commander of the U.S. Central Command David Petraeus. In Allison’s words:
US forces could covertly train and support separatist insurgents. Fissures in the Chinese state already exist. Tibet is essentially occupied territory. Xinjiang, a traditionally Islamic region in western China, already harbors an active Uighur separatist movement responsible for waging a low-level insurgency against Beijing. And Taiwanese who watch Beijing’s heavy-handedness in Hong Kong hardly require encouragement to oppose reunification with this increasingly authoritarian government. Could US support for these separatists draw Beijing into conflicts with radical Islamist groups throughout Central Asia and the Middle East? If so, could these become quagmires, mirroring the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan where U.S.-supported mujahideen “freedom fighters” bled the Soviet Union?
A subtle but concentrated effort to accentuate the contradictions at the core of Chinese Communist ideology…could, over time, undermine the regime and encourage independence movements in Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong. By splintering China at home and keeping Beijing embroiled in maintaining domestic stability, the US could avert, or at least substantially delay, China’s challenge to American dominance.33
Monthly Review
The New Cold War on China, by John Bellamy Foster