US-China cold war could split world in two, UN chief Antonio Guterres says
- ‘Completely dysfunctional’ relationship needs repair with the world struggling to tackle shared problems such as Covid-19 and climate, Guterres says
- A new cold war could be more dangerous and difficult to manage than the last, he says before UN’s annual gathering of world leaders
02:27
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Two years ago, Guterres warned global leaders of the risk of the world splitting in two, with the United States and China creating rival internets, currency, trade, financial rules “and their own zero-sum geopolitical and military strategies”.
He has reiterated that warning, adding that two rival geopolitical and military strategies would pose “dangers” and divide the world. Thus, he said, the foundering relationship must be repaired – and soon.
“We need to avoid at all cost a cold war that would be different from the past one, and probably more dangerous and more difficult to manage,” Guterres said.
The so-called Cold War between the Soviet Union and its East bloc allies and the United States and its Western allies began immediately after World War II and ended with the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. It was a clash of two nuclear-armed superpowers with rival ideologies – communism and authoritarianism on one side, capitalism and democracy on the other.
The UN chief said a new cold war could be more perilous because the Soviet-US antipathy created clear rules, and both sides were conscious of the risk of nuclear destruction. That produced backchannels and forums “to guarantee that things would not get out of control”, he said.
“Now, today, everything is more fluid, and even the experience that existed in the past to manage crisis is no longer there,” Guterres said.
02:53
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He said the US-Britain deal to give Australia nuclear-powered submarines so it could operate undetected in Asia “is just one small piece of a more complex puzzle … this completely dysfunctional relationship between China and the United States”.
The secretly negotiated deal angered China and France, which had signed a contract with Australia worth at least US$66 billion for a dozen French conventional diesel-electric submarines.
What role would the United Nations have in the new Afghanistan? Guterres called it “a fantasy” to believe that UN involvement “will be able all of a sudden to produce an inclusive government, to guarantee that all human rights are respected, to guarantee that no terrorists will ever exist in Afghanistan, that drug trafficking will stop”.
After all, he said, the United States and many other countries had thousands of soldiers in Afghanistan and spent trillions of dollars and were not able to solve the country’s problems – and some say made them worse.
Though the United Nations had “limited capacity and limited leverage”, he said, it was playing a key role in leading efforts to provide humanitarian aid to Afghans. The UN was also drawing the Taliban’s attention to the importance of an inclusive government that respects human rights, especially for women and girls, he said.
“There is clearly a fight for power within different groups in the Taliban leadership. The situation is not yet clarified,” he said, calling it one more reason the international community should engage with the Taliban.
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Guterres said Biden’s commitment to global action on climate, including rejoining the 2015 Paris climate agreement that Trump withdrew from, was “probably the most important of them all”.
He said there was “a completely different environment in the relationship” between the United Nations and the United States under Biden. But Guterres said: “I did everything – and I’m proud of it – in order to make sure that we would keep a functional relationship with the United States in the past administration.”
Of the past year of Covid-19 struggles, he said: “We were not able to make any real progress in relation to effective coordination of global efforts.”
And of climate: “One year ago, we were seeing a more clear movement in the right direction, and that movement has slowed down in the recent past. So we need to reaccelerate again if we are not going into disaster.”
Guterres called it “totally unacceptable” that 80 per cent of the population in his native Portugal had been vaccinated while in many African countries, less than 2 per cent of the population was vaccinated.
“It’s completely stupid from the point of view of defeating the virus, but if the virus goes on spreading like wildfire in the global south, there will be more mutations,” he said. “And we know that mutations are making it more transmissible, more dangerous.”
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He again urged the world’s 20 major economic powers in the G20, who failed to take united action against Covid-19 in early 2020, to create the conditions for a global vaccination plan. Such a plan, he said, must bring together vaccine-producing countries with international financial institutions and pharmaceutical companies to double production and ensure equitable distribution.
“I think this is possible,” Guterres said. “It depends on political will.”
The secretary general said rich, developed countries were spending about 20 per cent of their GDP on recovery problems, middle-income countries about 6 per cent and the least developed countries 2 per cent of a small GDP. That, he said, had produced frustration and mistrust in parts of the developing world that have received neither vaccines nor recovery assistance.
