Many people accuse Donald Trump of recklessness in the international arena, believing that he has done grave harm to American position in the world, alienating its friends and allies, while pursuing head on rivalry with China.
The reality is, however, that his actions - regardless of how unpleasant and unsympathetic they may appear to millions of people - are perfectly rational.
USA is strong enough that nobody can ignore or isolate it. And it is well within its rights to demand others to abide by their commitments to it (like many NATO member states unwilling to spend the agreed 2% of their GDP on defense). Trump knows how to wield that power with few side effects other than groans of complaint, usually coming from the bankrupt museum that Europe is.
Paradoxically, for all its Machiavellian appearances, the real recklessness is present in Beijing, not Washington.
CCP bears many characteristics of an intellectual, technocratic, disciplined leadership - and, in quite a few domains, it is. But its foreign policy is a disaster of proportions so catastrophic that it may very well lead to a repeat of the “century of humiliation”, which too was rooted in excessive pride that came before a very painful fall.
Nobody in the world likes China.
Developed countries quite clearly not only view it negatively but have a grave distrust of it. And developing countries are happy to take money and invite Chinese investment - but are not reliable or in any way valuable allies.
The problem with China isn’t even that it is assertive in its foreign policy - but that it behaves like a street thug (both dumb and violent).
Just a few days ago Chinese ambassador to Canada said that the country should not admit ‘refugees’ from Hong Kong if it cares “about the good health and safety of those 300,000 Canadian passport-holders in Hong Kong, and the large number of Canadian companies operating in Hong Kong”.
This is an equivalent of saying “we’re going to harm your family if you don’t do what we tell you to”.
Around the same time Chinese “diplomats”, charged into a meeting held by Taiwanese representatives in Fiji, and started a fist fight, during an event to celebrate Taiwanese National day, which had Taiwan’s flags and a cake with Taiwanese flag on display.
These are not isolated incidents, of course. After all China has already resorted to similar measures earlier, when Canadian authorities held Meng Wanzhou, what was suddenly and surprisingly followed by detentions of Canadian citizens in the PRC.
It seems that not only has Beijing returned to neo-Maoism at the helm - building a personality cult around a single leader - but it is now exporting Maoist methods of violent targeting of anybody even suspected of being an opponent or critic of the communist regime, abroad.
Quite frankly I have no idea what China aims to achieve through these means, other than broad international isolation. Especially as the demographic trends are really not in its favor.
By GDP per capita China is on par with Malaysia. Its population growth has all but halted and its labor force has already begun to shrink. By 2100 the country’s population is projected to halve to just 700 million people - 30-40% of them over the age of 60.
Since Chinese culture, language and politics are not conducive of immigration, it is not positioned to fill that gap with waves of newcomers like America or even lazy Europe can.
If it doesn’t maximize its economic growth RIGHT NOW it is going to lose tens of trillions of dollars in future GDP. To mitigate that it is in its best interest to maintain good relations with the world, to draw from it as it has done in the past 40 years.
And yet it has chosen to revert to historically failed methods of intimidation and centralization of power, that derailed many totalitarian regimes in the 20th century.
If it continues on this path, then the 21st is going to go down in history as another “lost century” for the empire - only this time there will be nobody else to shift the blame on for it.
Source of the charts, PEW Research: Increasingly negative evaluations of China across advanced economies | Pew Research Center
