Collision or rapprochement? What will relations between Washington and Beijing be like in 2022?
Relations between the United States and China became more strained under former President Donald Trump (2016-2020), who did with China what no US president had done before. The challenge this time around was not China's longtime Mao Tse-tung closure, but its opening up to the world and its subsequent entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). In both cases, China fell under the banner of Third World countries and the privileges and preferential treatment afforded to them by international agreements, resulting in a mythical surplus in Beijing's favor in international trade.
Since 2003, China has been running a $500 billion trade surplus with the United States. What was then described as the "new Cold War" between China and the United States was at the core of Trump's policy that wants to place Beijing and deal with it in the global economic system in the interest of the United States and the world's countries. In December 2019, Trump reached the first parity agreement with China, and at the same time he had succeeded in attracting American investments in China to return again, or at least have their next expansions inside the United States rather than outside it.
More importantly, the coronavirus pandemic brought to light the extent to which China has monopolized key supply chains for the world's industries. The US president was not giving China a chance to become a superpower, as has been rumored, but was taming Chinese economic behavior that came at the expense of much of the world. The GDPs of the two countries are converging, and at the moment, calculated in terms of the purchasing power of the US dollar, China's output is outpacing the US. Given the current growth rates, China is on its way to further superiority, especially after penetrating the fields of the fourth technological industrial revolution.
The pattern in the interactions of the two poles points to their competition, and the transition from competition to trade and strategic warfare in the South China Sea, and political sanctions by the US on Chinese allies such as North Korea and Iran. So the competition appears to be about trade, but it is also strategic about control and influence in the world. In the shadow of the global pandemic, China and the United States have traded accusations of responsibility for the coronavirus pandemic that has plagued humanity.
All in all, there are three scenarios for U.S.-China relations in 2022:
Scenario One: "Continued Escalation"
While the rivalry between the United States and Russia resurfaced in the second decade of the 21st century, another rivalry is taking place between Washington and Beijing. The first rivalry is essentially strategic, with its theater in Europe and the Middle East, while the second appears to be economic and revolves around trade, but it is also strategic in terms of dominance and influence in the world. The rivalry is between three powers: the United States of America, which is still theoretically the first economic and military power in the world, and Russia, which, although its economic capabilities are modest, has more than 9,000 nuclear warheads sufficient to destroy the earth several times, and has distinct areas of technological superiority in weapons and space. The third major power is China, which is not only a powerful economic power, but also the most promising in terms of growth rates and new technologies. For the first time in human history, China has been able to compete with the United States in some areas of technological development.
Under current President Joe Biden, the U.S. focus has shifted from the Middle East to Asia to counter China's rising power in an intense geopolitical competition. Biden is trying to balance the Asian balance of power by coordinating the policies of the major powers in the region, bringing India into the alliance, and building Australia's capabilities in the elements of power. There have been developments in the Indo-Pacific, and what appears to be a new alliance involving the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The alliance, or what appeared to be, was based on breaking an agreement between Australia and France to build submarines, and replacing them with nuclear-powered submarines by the United States. This move led to two kinds of conclusions:
1- This alliance necessarily means surrounding and threatening China as the new shift in international relations, as Beijing has become another pole facing Washington. The move also appeared to be an extension of the Biden administration's moves, which began with his speech at the G7 economic forum and did not end with all the meetings that took place thereafter, whether bilateral or multilateral, whether related to the economy or security. In a moment of the US administration, this move meant that President Biden's statements about leading the world again were in the direction of confronting China after the Corona crisis resulted in a major rise of the Chinese state in many areas at the global level, through the Belt and Road Initiative, or at the regional level of the South China Sea, where Beijing has built a number of artificial islands that created a major issue in determining the extent of the Chinese territorial sea or the Chinese exclusive economic zone (EEZ). No less important, China became more interested in Afghanistan in the wake of the US exit, and Chinese diplomacy was active in establishing a coalition of neighboring countries consisting of Russia, Pakistan, Iran and China to deal with the turbulent circumstances of the Afghan situation.
2- The alliance in the Indo-Pacific region is another combination of the Quad, which includes the United States, Japan, Australia, and India, in an association that leaves little ambiguity that sends a warning message to China, as well as the Anglo-Saxon "Five Eyes" alliance, which includes the intelligence services of the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. All these combinations of strategic relationships lead, at least in part, to a new state of international tension between the US and Chinese giants. It is a tension of a security and strategic nature that may not reach the level of the situation between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War era, but it carries a picture of it that imposes difficult choices on the countries of the world between Beijing and Washington.
Adding fuel to the fire was the accumulation of tensions between Washington and Beijing, including responsibility for the coronavirus, the discovery of China's dominance in supply chains, and the negative effects of China's flexibility in international relations in general when it established close ties with Iran, which has another chapter of tension related to the pursuit of nuclear weapons.
The rapid developments that took place in the wake of the first shots of the "US-China" confrontation came first with the US dealing with France, which expressed its strong anger at the US "stab in the back" by hijacking the nuclear submarine deal, by a phone call and then a meeting between US Presidents Biden and French President Macron, and the latter sent the ambassador who was withdrawn as an expression of anger, after which the presidents exchanged kind words. The second came with a phone call between US President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, after which both sides announced that Chinese air approaches to Taiwan would abide by custom, tradition, and the agreements on which they are based. This "telephone diplomacy" opened the doors to a wide range of U.S.-China contacts and meetings on a wide range of common issues. In short, Sino-American interdependence has been steering the international situation away from the danger of slipping into something detrimental to both countries.
Scenario Two: "Cold War"
It has become commonplace in media and political circles to settle on the "New Cold War" as the framework for explaining Sino-American relations. The truth is that these relations are completely different from the US-Soviet relationship, in which the threat was military and ideological, both of which are absent in the Chinese case. Militarily, the United States has become the world's number one power, and although no one knows when China will catch up, at the moment there is no longer the balance of nuclear deterrence that existed in the previous Cold War. There is no intellectual or theoretical message that China has to offer the world about existence and the ideal world order. There is no Lenin, no Stalin, no Mao Tse-tung, and no one in the world now demonstrating with pictures of Chinese leader Xi Jinping or wearing him on their chests.
The truth is that relations between China and the United States are not moving in the direction of the "classic Cold War," nor are they moving in the direction of what was called in the first half of the 1970s the "Entente," which was defined by Henry Kissinger, then US Secretary of State, as "managing adversarial relations between two countries." It is a new type of international relationship that combines "power" and "interdependence," a relationship that was foreshadowed by American political scientist Joseph Nye in the 1970s. But it is a new type of international relations that combines "power" and "interdependence," a relationship heralded by American political scientist Joseph Nye in the 1970s, in which each party to the relationship tries to increase its power by increasing its dependence on each other. This new type of international relations requires more thought and sensitivity in recognizing the advantages that each party has over the other, which can sometimes be used to pressure them.
Scenario Three: "Cooperative Competition"
In this scenario, scholar Joseph Nye coins a new expression to add to his arsenal: that China and the United States have become linked to each other in a relationship he calls "Cooperative Rivalry" or "Cooperative Rivalry," which requires strategies that seek to achieve the paradoxical: competition and cooperation. In both, Nye offers a range of ideas, including advancing U.S. technological advantages through research and development; in the military realm, restructuring the military force to accommodate new technologies and strengthening historical alliances; and in the military realm, restructuring the military force to accommodate new technologies and strengthen historical alliances.
As far as the economic sphere is concerned, it looks like the classic area of interdependence, whether it is currency, trade, or even overlap in many forms of technology. Chinese supply chains have become essential to the chances of a major economic recovery following the containment of the coronavirus crisis, offsetting the significant decline during the crisis in the United States, which President Biden wants to declare over, both health-wise and economically.
The call in Washington, according to Joseph Nye, for "decoupling" with China is a kind of "high-cost folly," and other countries are not expected to do so because China has more trade relations with the rest of the world than the United States. What's more, the two countries are interconnected by millions of relationships and social ties, and it is impossible to disengage based on the fight against pandemics and climate change.
Here, as it was half a century ago, interdependence, for all its complexity and caution, also creates new areas for power practices and relations. In this context, the rapprochement with Japan and India is understandable because it maintains the balance of power in Asia, while at the same time interdependent power relations in the economic and transnational spheres cannot be ignored. Nye argues that if the United States exploits these areas, it will suffer. At the global level, combating pandemics and climate change and dealing with terrorism and its transnational organizations cannot be handled by one country alone, and China is the highest emitter of heat and carbon emissions. The United States and China have pledged to unveil their 2035 emissions targets in 2025 and agree to strengthen climate action.
In conclusion, based on all of the above, it is likely that 2022 will witness the institutionalization of the "cooperative rivalry" trend between Washington and Beijing, and while their cooperation will be in global areas (confronting global warming and epidemics, and preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons), competition will take place in the South China Sea region, and to some extent in the Middle East with regard to Iran.
