Opinion | As Alaska talks showed, the US’ attitude to China and the world is outdated. When will it realise this?

Name: Alaska summit: China tells US not to underestimate Beijing’s will to safeguard national dignity
Uploaded: 2021-03-26T17:30:13.000Z
Duration: 4 min 7 s
Description: Alaska summit: China tells US not to underestimate Beijing’s will to safeguard national dignity

America’s approach to China is binary, deep-seated and transparently hegemonic. Washington can’t seem to see that the world has moved on

China is not perfect but it stands for multipolarity under the banner of the UN, not a US-led ‘rules based order’ that represents a minority of the world’s peoples

Reading Time:3 minutes

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Michael Pembroke

Published: 1:30am, 27 Mar 2021Updated: 3:52am, 27 Mar 2021

The United States has far more to gain from cooperation with China than it will achieve by confrontation. Fortunately, Antony Blinken, the new US secretary of state, is not a biblical literalist like his predecessor Mike Pompeo.

But underlying the American opening statement at the recent China-US talks in Anchorage, Alaska, was a fundamental misconception of the state of global play in the 21st century. The world has changed.

The US is no longer the undisputed global leader; it no longer commands the respect and credibility it once had; it will soon cease to be the largest and most dominant global economy; and it has ceased to enjoy military primacy in the Indo-Pacific.

The beginning of the change can probably be dated to the first US air strike on the outskirts of Baghdad on March 20, 2003, which missed its target. The misconceived Iraq invasion, like so many US interventions before it, was not authorised by the United Nations and served to diminish, rather than enhance, peace, security and stability in the region.

To paraphrase noted US economist Jeffrey Sachs, president George W. Bush’s call to arms – “You are with us or you are against us” – can now be seen for what it was: simple, simplistic and antiquated.

04:07

Alaska summit: China tells US not to underestimate Beijing’s will to safeguard national dignity

Far wiser were the words of senator William Fulbright, the longest serving chairman in the history of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Fifty years ago, he warned his fellow Americans that they “should accept the world as it is, with all its existing nations and ideologies, with all its existing qualities and shortcomings”.

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