My Take | Beijing must prepare for a drastic reversal ahead of China’s rise and America’s fall
- Washington’s domestic agenda may be confused, but its new foreign policy consensus is extraordinarily coherent, comprehensive and bipartisan, and is intended to be a guide for a multi-generational struggle against its adversaries well into the rest of the 21st century
Someone once wrote, I don’t know who, that knowing only your own country means you don’t know any country at all. The same may be said about your own war or conflict zone.
Many Chinese are over-focusing on the political rhetoric and actions of Washington over the South China Sea. It is only one of three major theatres of political and possible military confrontations to contain and roll back America’s adversaries.
The other two theatres are eastern Europe and the Black Sea, against Russia, and the Persian Gulf and rest of the Middle East, against Iran. The Chinese need to appreciate what the fight in their own corner of the world means in the context of America’s attempt at restoring global hegemony.
China, Russia and Iran are all at the receiving end of the same overall strategic goal. They are being drawn closer together, not because they have much else in common other than a fearsome enemy.
But, given the global-economic importance of Asia, America’s anti-China strategies and tactics have to be much more subtle and multidimensional than its overtly militant approach in other parts of the world.
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China, Russia foreign ministers meet as countries stand ‘back to back’ amid rise in US tensions
Under the illusionary and self-congratulatory narrative of the inexorable rise of China and the inevitable decline of the United States, many Chinese now think Washington’s “contain and roll back” strategy will prove to be futile and self-defeating, the last hurrah of a superpower that can’t accept its own fall from grace. That is not necessarily so.