Opinion | In US obsession with China’s rise, it risks losing sight of Eurasia power play

War scenarios are building around Taiwan as anxieties form around a China-Russia-Iran alliance

But what if China is looking to pin down the US in the east while European integration advances to where the US is no longer needed as stabiliser and arbitrator?

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US President Joe Biden speaks in the East Room of the White House in Washington on May 7. It is far from inconceivable that Washington is, intentionally or unwittingly, creating a momentum with which Beijing can be provoked into starting a war. Photo: UPI/Bloomberg

Published: 1:00am, 15 May 2021Updated: 2:21am, 15 May 2021

“We’re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century,” said US President Joe Biden in his first address to a joint Congress session on April 28. Even Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state famed for his role in opening up China half a century ago, echoed that sentiment, saying on April 30 that the United States “must” “prevent Chinese hegemony”.

But one needs to understand the esotericism so characteristic of the 97-year-old veteran diplomat and international relations theorist – who also said at the same talk that China’s rise is all but unstoppable. “The big issue to look upon is not just to prevent Chinese hegemony, but to understand that if we achieve that objective – which we must – the need to coexist with a country of that magnitude remains,” he said.

I am not sure the powerful in Washington would heed the appeal to take a rising China as a fait accompli and to control their urge to change it by resorting to war – especially as they find out down the road that it is prohibitively difficult, even outright impossible, to derail China’s ascendancy barring a hot war, while US military power is still far more superior to China’s.

And Kissinger’s advice, unassuming as always, that “the alternative of an all-out conflict strains the imagination” tends to pale against President Xi Jinping’s widely quoted judgment that “time and momentum are on China’s side”.

Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 8, 2018. Photo: AFP

Despite Biden’s assertion that America and China “need not have conflict”, it is far from inconceivable that Washington is, intentionally or unwittingly, creating a momentum with which Beijing can be provoked into starting a war. If so, the shortest fuse for the US is none other than a Chinese “invasion” of Taiwan.

Opinion | In US obsession with China’s rise, it risks losing sight of Eurasia power play

War scenarios are building around Taiwan as anxieties form around a China-Russia-Iran alliance But what if China is looking to pin down the US in the east while European integration advances to where the US is no longer needed as stabiliser and arbitrator?

War scenarios are building around Taiwan as anxieties form around a China-Russia-Iran alliance

But what if China is looking to pin down the US in the east while European integration advances to where the US is no longer needed as stabiliser and arbitrator?