Why fears over a malign China replacing a benign America are a gross distortion of history
Jean-Pierre Lehmann says apprehensions over what future Chinese global leadership would look like should not obscure the fact that historical meddling with other democratically elected governments shows the concept of ‘America as a beacon of freedom’ to be pure propaganda
The signs had been there for some time. In 2012, Financial Times Washington Bureau chief Edward Luce published Time To Start Thinking: America and the Spectre of Decline. The beginning of the end for US leadership can be dated back to two events in 2003: the illegal US invasion of Iraq on March 20 and the collapse of the World Trade Organisation’s ministerial meeting in Cancún on September 14. These events effectively heralded the end of US leadership of a Western-oriented multilateral global order.
Certainly, in the course of his Asia Tour, Trump appears to have been ceding more and more global leadership to China and to President Xi Jinping. To suggest, however, that Pax Americana will be followed by Pax Sinica is misleading. The global circumstances of 2017 are dramatically different from those of 1945. The US and China are very different societies and their respective views of their place in the world differ radically.