My TakeStarting a new cold war by stealth

“Leaders today talk eloquently about peace,” Martin Luther King Jnr said in one of his many memorable speeches. “Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President [Lyndon] Johnson talks eloquently about peace.”

If you ever wonder why every time Washington holds a high-level meeting with Beijing, there are more severe sanctions, military threats or other unpleasantries immediately before or afterwards, King’s observation may offer some insights. Perhaps China should rejoice that the United States is only imposing sanctions rather than dropping bombs, at least for now.

Recently, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong talked of a multipolar world against great power rivalry, while effectively declaring her government’s clear intention to fulfil its newly designated role by Washington to help maintain the latter’s unipolar dominance in the Indo-Pacific, including Taiwan.

And last week, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said her country had no intention of stifling China’s rise, then promised full-on economic warfare, or worse, that would achieve precisely that.

Yellen’s argument is quite interesting. She said it was false to believe “[a] conflict between the United States and China” was “increasingly inevitable”. The false premise was that “the United States was in decline. And that China would imminently leapfrog us as the world’s top economic power, leading to a clash between nations”.

However, she argued that “the United States remains the most dynamic and prosperous economy in the world”, and hinted that China was still way behind. This raises several intriguing questions. Does she mean absolute or relative decline? If the latter, I don’t think there is any dispute. Against the rise of the rest, US dominance in the global economy just isn’t what it was even at the turn of the century.