US President Biden’s video conference with China’s supreme leader Xijinping had atmospherics that reflected a new and rapidly changing shift in world order.
It was very on the ball of Xijinping to call Biden an old friend – it signals trust, but is condescending in diplomacy, all the more given the $1 billion Hunter Biden China benefit background story. It made Biden very uncomfortable - putting the US President on the defensive straight away.
Biden emphasized cooperation in his engagement with China. This was to be expected as conflict is not a part of America's playbook ever since the shameful flight from Afghanistan. The appetite for a fight, the hall mark of empire, has diminished in Washington. Clearly Xi read his “old friend” well.
Xijinping on the other with his power boosted after the recently concluded communist party congress warned Biden that on Taiwan the US president was playing with fire – wow that a googly and as upfront as one can get in a summit. The time when China kept its head low and bided its time is over after this summit of the big two.
There have been other pointers for the world to worry. The most significant is the sapping of confidence in American will. While the US dollar has primacy and the way of war itself is changing with drones and aircraft carriers for example the US can – should it want disrupt Afghanistan significantly if Kabul threatened another attack on US mainland. Yet, therein is the rub. Instead of a country that led the fight against the evil empire, to paraphrase Ronald Regan, through the cold war today in Asia the US faces the challenge of grand strategy. As the US decides that avoiding an attack on the mainland is its only priority it makes allies nervous and emboldens China and Russia.
The nervousness of the allies is not to be taken lightly. The post world war II order has rested on the American nuclear umbrella. Neither Japan nor South Korea posses nuclear weapons. Legislators and think tanks in both countries, not to mention voters increasingly question if the US will sacrifice Los Angeles for Tokyo – a leaking umbrella is no good in a nuclear rain. The consequences of an America in isolation are akin to a nuclear chain reaction allies would not know how much they can trust the US with both Japan and South Korea eventually considering a walk out of the NPT and going nuclear. For India too the US global isolation is a problem, can it consider itself as a true counter weight to China in the American scheme of things with the nagging worry that the carpet will be pushed from under if push came to shove?
There have been other signs of American weakness in the public domain, Colin Kahl, undersecretary of defense for policy, recently asserted that terror safe heavens in Afghanistan can attack US mainland within a year. That assessment is widely shared and underscores the consequence of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The seeming inability of the US to protect its intellectual property is another glaring example. After all a lot of Huawei as is galling for Silicon Valley - is allegedly Cisco’s intellectual property. Great civilizations slide when they cannot maintain a hold on their genius and Biden has done very little on protecting US intellectual property since taking office.
The free world is watching the flaccid US leadership in dismay international institutions such as the UN are way out of date and the global order is threatened by a sense of each country being on their own.
The video conference may not have been a zoom call but the world is zooming in, the disruptions are nearer than they appear on the computer mirror.
