George Kennan, the US charge d’affaires in Moscow at the end of the second world war and the author of the famous Long Telegram in 1946, captured in his memoir how quickly perceptions in international relations can change.
The man widely seen as the intellectual author of the cold war recalled that if he had sent his telegram on the nature of the Soviet threat six months earlier, his message “would probably have been received in the state department with pursed lips and raised eyebrows. Six months later, it probably would have sounded redundant, a preaching to the converted.”
Now, as the US squares up to China over the coronavirus pandemic, it appears as if many of the world’s democracies are, as rapidly as in 1946, reaching a new perception of the world order. Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, has declared the Chinese Communist party to be the number one threat to security, greater than international terrorism, and a growing number of countries seem to agree.
Those who argued that a more economically liberal China would produce a more politically liberal China fear they have found themselves on the wrong side of history. From the airspace over Taiwan to the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, the frozen Himalayas on the border with India and the reefs surrounding the Xisha/Paracel islands in the South China Sea, Chinese assertiveness is prompting a reassessment. The Australian government’s decision on Friday to call out a state-led cyber-attack – without naming China – was only the latest evidence of a new mindset.
The US is demanding that its allies not only admit to previous naivety but join it in an anti-China alliance. China, perhaps less overtly, is lobbying countries to to join its rival power bloc.
Many countries are trying to hedge, but the scope for neutrality or non-alignment is narrowing. India, for instance, long proud of what its former national security adviser Shivshankar Menon calls its strategic autonomy, is reeling at the implications of the brutal Chinese clubbing of its soldiers in the Galwan valley, an act Menon regards as unprecedented in its scope and implications for relations between the two neighbours.
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New dark age...
New dark age...
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”