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quinta-feira, 29 de dezembro de 2022

George Kennan e as duas guerras frias - Fredrik Logevall (Foreign Affairs)

 Foreign Affairs, Nova York – Jan.-Fev.2023

The Ghosts of Kennan

Lessons From the Start of a Cold War

Fredrik Logevall

 

 

We all read him, those of us who did graduate work in U.S. diplomatic history in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For although there were other important figures in modern U.S. foreign relations, only one was George Kennan, the “father of containment,” who later became an astute critic of U.S. policy as well as a prize-winning historian. We dissected Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram” of February 1946, his “X” article in these pages from the following year, and his lengthy and unvarnished report on Latin America from March 1950. We devoured his slim but influential 1951 book, American Diplomacy, based on lectures he gave at the University of Chicago; his memoirs, which appeared in two installments in 1967 and 1972 and the first of which received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and any other publication he wrote that we could get our hands on. (I figured there was no skipping Russia Leaves the War, from 1956, as it won not only the same awards garnered by the first volume of his memoirs but also the George Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize.) And we dove into the quartet of important studies of Kennan then coming out in rapid succession by our seniors in the guild—by David Mayers, Walter Hixson, Anders Stephanson, and Wilson Miscamble.

Even then, some of us wondered whether Kennan was quite as important to U.S. policy during the early Cold War as numerous analysts made him out to be.Perhaps, we thought, he should be considered an architect of American strategy, not the architect. Perhaps the most that could be said was that he gave a name—containment—and a certain conceptual focus to a foreign policy approach that was already emerging, if not indeed in place. Even at the Potsdam Conference in mid-1945, after all, well before either the Long Telegram or the “X” article, U.S. diplomats understood that Joseph Stalin and his lieutenants were intent on dominating those areas of Eastern and Central Europe that the Red Army had seized. Little could be done to thwart these designs, officials determined, but they vowed to resist any effort by Kremlin leaders to move farther west. Likewise, the Soviets would not be permitted to interfere in Japan or be allowed to take control of Iran or Turkey. This was containment in all but name. By early 1946, when Kennan penned the Long Telegram from the embassy in Moscow, the wartime Grand Alliance was but a fading memory; by then, anti-Soviet sentiment was a stock feature of internal U.S. policy deliberations.

Still, the 1946 telegram and the 1947 article were remarkable pieces of analytical writing that explained much about how U.S. officials saw the postwar world and their country’s place in it. That Kennan soon began to distance himself from containment, and to claim that he had been grievously misunderstood, that the policy in action was turning out to be more bellicose than he had envisioned or wanted, only added to the intrigue. Was he more hawkish regarding Moscow in this early period than he later claimed? Or had he merely been uncharacteristically loose in his phrasing in these writings, implying a hawkishness he did not feel? The available evidence suggested the former, but one held off final judgment, pending the full opening of Kennan’s personal papers and especially his gargantuan diaries, which spanned 88 years and ran to more than 8,000 pages.

These materials were indeed rich, as the world learned with the publication of John Lewis Gaddis’s authorized biography, three decades in the making, which appeared to wide acclaim in 2011 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Gaddis had full access to the papers and made extensive and incisive use of them. Then, in 2014, came the publication of The Kennan Diaries, a 768-page compendium of entries ably selected and annotated by the historian Frank Costigliola. Scholars had long known about Kennan’s prickly, complex personality and his tendency toward curmudgeonly brooding, but the diaries laid bare these qualities. What emerged was a man of formidable intellectual gifts, sensitive and proud, expressive and emotional, ill at ease in the modern world, prone to self-pity, disdainful of what he saw as America’s moral decadence and rampant materialism, and given to derogatory claims about women, immigrants, and foreigners. 

Yet in one key respect, Kennan’s diaries proved unrevealing. Like many people, Kennan journaled less when he was busy, and there is virtually nothing of consequence from 1946 or 1947, when he wrote the two documents on which his influence rested and when he began to reconsider fundamental assumptions about the nature of the Soviet challenge and the preferred American response. For the entirety of 1947, arguably the pivotal year of both the early Cold War and Kennan’s career, there is but a single entry: a one-page rhyme. Any serious assessment of Kennan’s historical importance—How deeply did he shape U.S. policy at the dawn of the superpower struggle? When and why did he sour on containment as practiced? Is it proper to speak of “two Kennans” with respect to the Cold War?—must center on this period of the late 1940s. 

Now Costigliola has come out with a full-scale biography of the man, from his birth into a prosperous middle-class family in Milwaukee, in 1904, to his death in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2005. (What a century to live through!) It is an absorbing, skillfully wrought, at times frustrating book, more than half of which is focused on the diplomat’s youth and early career. Costigliola’s unmatched familiarity with the diaries is on full display, and although he does not shy away from quoting from some of their more unsavory parts, his overall assessment is sympathetic, especially vis-à-vis the “second” Kennan, the one who decried the militarization of containment and pushed for U.S.-Soviet negotiations. Kennan, he writes, was a “largely unsung hero” for his diligent efforts to ease the Cold War.

Intriguingly, as Costigliola shows but could have developed more fully, these efforts were already underway in the late 1940s, while the superpower conflict was still in its infancy. This transformation in Kennan’s thinking is especially resonant today, in an era that many analysts are calling the early stages of yet another cold war, with U.S.-Russian relations in a deep freeze and China playing the role of an assertive Soviet Union. If the analogy is correct, then it bears asking: How did Kennan’s thinking change? And does his evolution hold lessons for his successors as they forge policy for a new era of conflict?

 

OUR MAN IN MOSCOW

 

Kennan’s love of Russia came early, and partly because of family ties: his grandfather’s cousin, also named George Kennan, was an explorer who achieved considerable fame in the late nineteenth century for his writings on tsarist Russia and for casting light on the harsh penal system in Siberia. Soon after graduating from Princeton, in 1925, the younger Kennan joined the Foreign Service and developed an interest in the country; in time, it became much more. Costigliola writes, “Kennan’s love for Russia, his quest for some mystical connection—impulses that stemmed in part from the hurt and loneliness in his psyche going back to the loss of his mother—had enormous consequences for policy.” That is a pregnant sentence indeed, with claims that would seem hard to verify, but there can be no doubt that Kennan’s passion for pre-revolutionary Russia and its culture was real and abiding, staying with him to the end of his days.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, as an ambitious young State Department officer, Kennan toggled between Germany, Estonia, and Latvia, working hard to develop facility in the Russian language and serving from 1931 to 1933 at the Soviet listening post in Riga. There followed an intense, exhilarating, draining period in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, under the mercurial ambassador William Bullitt. Costigliola finds the middle of the decade to be a formative period for Kennan—he devotes an entire 48-page chapter to “The ‘Madness of ’34,’” and another of equal length to the years 1935–37, writing, in effect, a small book within a book and adding much to our understanding of Kennan’s worldview—as the diplomat worked to the point of exhaustion to establish himself as the premier Soviet expert in the Foreign Service.

Kennan treasured Russians as a warm and generous people but looked askance at Marxist-Leninist ideology, speculating even then that Russian communism was headed toward ultimate disintegration, on account of its disregard for individual expression, spirituality, and human diversity. About Western capitalism he had scarcely better things to say: it was characterized by systemic overproduction, crass materialism, and destructive individualism. He disliked and distrusted the “rough and tumble” of his own country’s democracy and longed for rule by an “intelligent, determined ruling minority.”

During World War II, Kennan served first as the chief administrative officer of the Berlin embassy and then, after a brief assignment in Washington in 1942, as second-in-command at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Lisbon. The top U.S. representative at the post, Bert Fish, seldom set foot in the building, which left Kennan to negotiate base rights in the Azores with Portugal’s premier, António de Oliveira Salazar, whose dictatorial but anti-Nazi rule Kennan admired. He grew disenchanted, by contrast, with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime diplomacy. He opposed the president’s demand that Germany and Japan unconditionally surrender, as it foreclosed the possibility of a negotiated settlement. And after returning to the Moscow embassy in mid-1944, he faulted as naive Roosevelt’s belief that the United States could secure long-term cooperation with Stalin. Both then and later, Costigliola maintains, Kennan failed to detect Roosevelt’s underlying realism and shrewd grasp of power politics, as he continually mistook the president’s public statements for his private views. He missed the degree to which, despite their differences, he and Roosevelt “agreed on the fundamental issue of working out with the Soviets separate spheres of influence in Europe.”

About the subsequent Cold War, Costigliola is unequivocal: it need not have happened and, having broken out, need not have lasted nearly as long as it did. This argument is less novel than the book implies, but the author is certainly correct that “the story of Kennan’s life demands that we rethink the Cold War as an era of possibilities for dialogue and diplomacy, not the inevitable series of confrontations and crises we came to see.”

All the more puzzling, then, that Costigliola gives scant attention to the sharp downturn in U.S.-Soviet relations that began in the fall of 1945, as the two powers clashed over plans for Europe and the Middle East. He notes in passing that Kennan was “unaware how rapidly U.S. opinion and policy were souring on Russia” in this period, but he does little to contextualize this important point. The schism over the Soviet occupation of Iran goes unmentioned, and readers learn nothing of Washington’s decision in early 1946 to abandon atomic cooperation with Moscow. And if indeed Kennan was incognizant of how swiftly American views and policy were changing as the year turned, how is this ignorance to be explained?

 

“X” MARKS THE SPOT

 

Costigliola is surely correct to note Kennan’s transformation from a position of opposing negotiations with the Kremlin in 1946 to one of advocating them in 1948. But one wants to know more about this metamorphosis. Costigliola is authoritative (if, especially compared to Gaddis, terse) on the Long Telegram and the “X” article, but one wishes for more context—even in a biography—especially concerning 1947, when the latter piece appeared. There is no discussion, or even mention, of the crises in Greece and Turkey that raged during that year; of President Harry Truman’s speech to a joint session of Congress, in which he asked for $400 million in aid for the two countries and articulated what became known as the Truman Doctrine, by which the United States pledged to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”; or of the 1947 National Security Act, which was closely tied to the perceived Soviet threat and which gave the president vastly enhanced power over foreign affairs.

Kennan, as other sources reveal, objected to the expansive nature of Truman’s speech and what it implied for policy. But he chose not to alter the “X” article—then still in production—by emphasizing his desire for a limited form of containment. Appearing in these pages in July under the pseudonym “X” and the title “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the essay was widely seen as a systematic articulation of the administration’s latest thinking about relations with Moscow, as its author laid out policy of “firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.” For the foreseeable future, Kennan seemed to be saying, diplomacy was a waste of time. Stalin’s hostility to the West was irrational, unjustified by any U.S. actions, and thus the Kremlin could not be reasoned with; negotiations could not be expected to ease or eliminate the hostility and end the U.S.-Soviet clash. The Soviet Union, he wrote, was “committed fanatically to the belief that with the United States there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional ways of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”

The assertion likely raised few eyebrows among Foreign Affairs readers that tense summer of 1947. But not everyone in the establishment was convinced. The influential columnist Walter Lippmann railed against Kennan’s essay in a stunning series of 14 articles in The New York Herald Tribune in September and October that were parsed in government offices around the world. The columns were then grouped in a slim book whose title, The Cold War, gave a name to the superpower competition. Lippmann did not dispute Kennan’s contention that the Soviet Union would expand its reach unless confronted by American power. But to his mind, the threat was primarily political, not military.

Moreover, Lippmann insisted that officials in Moscow had genuine security fears and were motivated mostly by a defensive determination to forestall the resurgence of German power. Hence their determination to seize control of Eastern Europe. It distressed Lippmann that Kennan, as well as the Truman White House, seemed blind to this reality and to the possibility of negotiating with the Kremlin over issues of mutual concern. As he wrote,

The history of diplomacy is the history of relations among rival powers, which did not enjoy political intimacy and did not respond to appeals to common purposes. Nevertheless, there have been settlements. Some of them did not last very long. Some of them did. For a diplomat to think that rival and unfriendly powers cannot be brought to a settlement is to forget what diplomacy is all about. There would be little for diplomats to do if the world consisted of partners, enjoying political intimacy, and responding to common appeals.

Containment as outlined by Kennan, Lippmann added, risked drawing Washington into defending any number of distant and nonvital parts of the world. Military commitments in such peripheral areas might bankrupt the Treasury and would in any event do little to enhance U.S. security. American society would become militarized to fight a “Cold War.”

Kennan was stung by this multipronged, multiweek takedown, which Costigliola oddly does not discuss. The diplomat admired Lippmann’s stature as perhaps the most formidable foreign policy analyst in Washington, and he felt flattered that the great man would devote so much space to something he had written. More than that, he found himself agreeing with much of Lippmann’s interpretation, including with respect to Moscow’s defensive orientation and the need for U.S. strategists to distinguish between core and peripheral areas. “The Soviets don’t want to invade anyone,” he wrote in an unsent letter to Lippmann in April 1948, adding that his intention in the “X” article had been to make his compatriots aware that they faced a long period of complex diplomacy when political skills would dominate. Once Western Europe had been shored up, he assured Lippmann, negotiations under qualitatively new conditions could follow. 

In the months thereafter, Kennan, now director of the newly formed Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, began to decry the militarization of containment and the apparent abandonment of diplomacy in Truman’s Soviet policy. He pushed for negotiations with the Kremlin, just as Lippmann had earlier. His influence waning, Kennan left the government in 1950, returning for a brief stint as ambassador to Moscow in 1952 and later, under President John F. Kennedy, a longer spell as ambassador to Yugoslavia.

 

OUT OF THE ARENA

 

So began George Kennan’s second career, as a historian and public intellectual, from a perch at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. It would last half a century. Costigliola is consistently fascinating here, even if he is less interested in Kennan’s writings and policy analysis than in his deep and deepening alienation from modern society and his strenuous efforts to curate his legacy. Readers get almost nothing on American Diplomacy, Kennan’s important, realist critique of what he called the “legalistic-moralistic” approach to U.S. foreign policy, or on the two volumes of memoirs, the first of which must be considered a modern classic. Costigliola says little about Kennan’s analysis of the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam (he was less dovish in 1965–66 than Costigliola implies) but a great deal about his loathing of the student protesters—with their “defiant rags and hairdos,” in Kennan’s words—against the war. As elsewhere in A Life Between Worlds, more would have been better. Readers deserve more, for example, on what the diplomat-historian made of the crises over Berlin and Cuba under Kennedy in the early 1960s or on how he interpreted the severe worsening of superpower tensions under Jimmy Carter in 1979–80.

More and more as the years passed, Kennan felt underappreciated. Never mind the literary prizes and other accolades, never mind the Presidential Medal of Freedom presented to him by President George H. W. Bush in 1989. On more days than not, he was a Cassandra, despairing at the state of the world and his place in it, worried about how he would be remembered. Thrilled to secure in Gaddis a brilliant young historian as his biographer, he grew apprehensive, especially as it became clear that Gaddis did not share his low opinion of U.S. Cold War policy in general and nuclear strategy under President Ronald Reagan in particular. (Another worry: that Gaddis would be too distracted by other commitments to complete the work in a timely fashion, thus allowing supposedly less able biographers—“inadequate pens,” Kennan called them—to come to the fore.)

Even the Soviet Union’s collapse, in 1991, brought Kennan little cheer. For half a century, he had predicted that this day would come, but one finds scant evidence of public or private gloating, only frustration that the Cold War had lasted so long and concern that Washington risked inciting Russian nationalism and militarism with its support for NATO expansion into former Soviet domains. The result, he feared, could be another cold war. In the fall of 2002, at the age of 98, he railed against what he saw as the George W. Bush administration’s heedless rush into war in Iraq. The history of U.S. foreign relations, he told the press, showed that although “you might start a war with certain things on your mind . . . in the end you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before.” It dismayed him that the administration seemed to have no plan for Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and he doubted the evidence about the country’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. For that matter, he argued, if it turned out Saddam in fact had the weapons or would soon acquire them, the problem was in essence a regional one, not America’s concern.

All the while, Kennan condemned what he saw as the abuses of industrialization and urbanization and called for a restoration of “the proper relationship between Man and Nature.” In the process, Costigliola convincingly argues, he became an early and prescient advocate of environmental protection. And all the while, his antimodernism showed a retrograde side, as he looked askance at feminism, gay rights, and his country’s increasing ethnic and racial diversity. Maybe only the Jews, Chinese, and “Negroes” would keep their ethnic distinctiveness, he suggested at one point, and thus use their strength to “subjugate and dominate” the rest of the nation. Costigliola comments acidly: “Kennan was aware enough to confine such racist drivel to his diary and the dinner table, where his adult children squirmed.”

Kennan’s long-held skepticism about democracy, meanwhile, showed no signs of abating. “‘The people’ haven’t the faintest idea what’s good for them,” he groused in 1984. Left to themselves, “they would (and will) simply stampede into a final, utterly disastrous, and totally unnecessary nuclear war.” Even if they somehow managed to avoid that outcome, they would complete their wrecking of the environment, “as they are now enthusiastically doing.” In his 1993 book, Around the Cragged Hill, a melancholy rumination on all that plagued modern American life, Kennan called for the creation of a nine-member “Council of State,” an unelected body to be chosen by the president and charged with advising him on pressing medium- and long-term policy issues, with no interference by the hoi polloi. The idea was half-baked at best. That American democracy was in its essence a messy, fractious, pluralistic enterprise, with hard bargaining based on mutual concessions and with noisy interest groups jockeying for influence, he never fully grasped.

What he did understand was diplomacy and statecraft. Here, his body of writing, published as well as unpublished, historical as well as contemporaneous, stands out for its cogency, intricacy, and fluency. He was not always consistent; he got some things wrong. But as a critic of the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, in the Cold War and beyond, Kennan had few if any peers. For he grasped realities that have lost none of their potency in the almost two decades since his death—about the limits of power, about the certainty of unintended consequences in war-making, about the prime importance of using good-faith diplomacy with adversaries to advance U.S. strategic interests. Understanding the growth and projection of American power over the past century and its proper use in this one, it may truly be said, means understanding this “life between worlds.”

 

FREDRIK LOGEVALL is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs and Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956.

terça-feira, 15 de novembro de 2022

Então, minha gente, como andamos de Guerra Fria? - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

 Então, minha gente, como andamos de Guerra Fria?

Vamos fazer um retrospecto rápido.

Depois da gloriosa revolução proletária de 1917 – na verdade, um mero putsch bolchevique que fechou o parlamento e a constituinte que tentavam criar um regime democrático no recém finado absolutismo czarista –, houve uma guerra quente: a dos revolucionários brancos – apoiados por potências ocidentais – contra o Exército Vermelho: este ganhou, e implantou uma ditadura ainda mais cruel do que a do czarismo.
Não houve nenhuma conciliação da URSS com o Ocidente; ao contrário, fomentou golpes e revoluções em diversos países, inclusive na China (1927) e no Brasil (1935), ambos fracassados.
Uma aproximação, mas por necessidade, se deu em 1941, após a invasão da URSS por Hitler, com quem Stalin tinha feito um "pacto de colaboração" em 1939, para decepar a Polônia.
Se não fosse pela ajuda americana e inglesa, a URSS teria sido vencida pela Wehrmacht, e a União Soviética, a Europa e boa parte do mundo teriam sido submetidos pelo totalitarismo nazista talvez por 30 anos.
Os líderes aliados – Roosevelt, Churchill e Stalin – se encontraram várias vezes durante a guerra, depois não mais, e a Guerra Fria começa de fato em Berlim a partir de 1947.
Apenas com a crise dos mísseis soviéticos em Cuba, em 1962, eles começam novamente a se falar, nessa fase de Détente na Guerra Fria, mas esta continuou, mesmo com negociações seguidas de "controle" de armas estratégicas pelos 20 anos seguintes. O socialismo continuou a bater pinos e a caminhar inconscientemente para o declínio e o desaparecimento.
Antes disso, o último líder soviético, ou da URSS, amenizou o clime da Guerra Fria, que só terminou mesmo com a implosão do socialismo e o fim da União Soviética.
A Otan criou um programa para a Rússia e o G7 incorporou a Rússia e a considerou uma economia de mercado, em 2002, mesmo com dúvidas sobre a conversão real do país à democracia e à economia de mercado.
O ex-KGB e saudosista do império soviético que conquistou o poder em 2000, e nunca mais largou, criou a maior cleptocracia do mundo, e investiu zilhões em rearmamento.
Enquanto isso, a China, aceita no Gatt-OMC, deu continuidade à sua fulgurante ascensão na economia e no comércio mundial, ultrapassando todo o G7 (menos EUA) e deixando a Rússia na sua rabeira (candidata a uma possível colonização econômica num futuro de médio prazo).
Enquanto a Rússia perdia importância – salvo para fornecimento de energia à Europa –, os dirigentes chineses pós Deng se encontravam com seus parceiros ocidentais, aperfeiçoando a incorporação da China à economia mundial. 
Os EUA se comportaram muito mal no momento unipolar pós-Guerra Fria, tratando com soberba tanto a Rússia quanto a China, e se submeteram à paranoia dos chefes do Pentágono, que passaram a considerar a China a sua inimiga estratégica (quando esta considerava os EUA seus aliados naturais, contra uma Rússia ainda perigosa.
Este foi o momento decisivo, de volta a uma Guerra Fria econômica, que não deveria existir se os EUA aceitassem a ideia da Chimerica, a complementaridade natural entre as duas maiores economias mundiais, em benefício da paz e da segurança internacionais, sobretudo em favor dos países em desenvolvimento. Perdeu-se a maior oportunidade do pós-Guerra Fria e criou-se uma fissura entre os dois gigantes.
O que era apenas uma Guerra Fria Econômica ameaçou converter-se em guerra quente por causa de uma pequena ilha que NUNCA pertenceu à jurisdição soberana da RPC, mas que era parte do antigo Império do Meio, que o novo Imperador (rompendo com o bom sistema de alternância criado por Deng) quer recolocar na sua esfera de domínio imperial.

O encontro Biden-Xi em Bali promete inaugurar uma nova Détente, sem que os fatores da nova Guerra Fria estejam desativados, pois eles são alimentados pela hubris imperial dos dois grandes contendores.
Conclusão: teremos mais alguns anos, talvez décadas, de gastos inúteis com armamentos sofisticados (que nunca serão usados), em lugar de uma cooperação em prol da paz mundial e do desenvolvimento internacional.
Os impérios por vezes são seguros, para dentro, mas quando suas placas tectônicas se tocam, desastres podem ocorrer.
Esta é a minha visão do cenário atual.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 15/11/2022

quarta-feira, 22 de dezembro de 2021

Relatório (secreto) da visita do vice-presidente João Goulart à China de Mao, em agosto de 1961, quando o presidente se demitiu - J.A. Araújo Castro

Agreguei à minha página do Academia.edu, a cópia fotográfica do ofício secreto encaminhado a partir do Consulado do Brasil em Hong Kong, em 4 de setembro de 1961, pelo então ministro-conselheiro da embaixada do Brasil em Tóquio, João Augusto de Araújo Castro, a propósito da visita do vice-presidente reeleito João Goulart à República Popular da China, em agosto de 1961, quando o Brasil reconhecia apenas a República da China (Formosa), com considerações pessoais sobre a forma e a natureza dessa visita, no curso da qual, brasileiros e chineses foram surpreendidos com a notícia da renúncia do presidente Jânio Quadros.



Quando puder, farei a análise desse ofício secreto, contextualizando-o na conjuntura histórica daquele momento da diplomacia brasileira, entre os "apelos" (americanos) da Guerra Fria e os novos eflúvios da Política Externa Independente, do presidente Jânio Quadros e do chanceler Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco (que acabou saindo com a demissão inopinada do presidente que se acreditava com virtudes "gaullistas".
Jânio já havia "ordenado" a retomada de relações diplomáticas e comerciais com os países socialistas da órbita soviética, mas a China de Mao era uma coisa bem diferente, e não tenho certeza de que Jânio ou Goulart tivessem plena consciência do que isso significava na geopolítica mundial e nas relações exteriores do Brasil.
A decisão de enviar Goulart à China antecedeu, provavelmente, à decisão de Jânio de tentar o seu "golpe" contra o Congresso, mas pode-se argumentar que ele partia da suposição maquiavélica de que a apresentação da sua carta de demissão, no meio daquela viagem, induziriam tanto os congressistas, quanto os militares, a pressionarem pela sua manutenção como presidente. Não aconteceu nem uma coisa, nem outra, sobretudo depois que ele resolveu dar a Ordem do Cruzeiro do Sul ao Ché Guevara...
Gostaria, neste momento, de destacar o enorme auxílio que sempre tive enquanto estive como diretor do IPRI (e aproveitava o cargo para aventurar-me em outras esferas, sobretudo históricas, do Itamaraty) do meu amigo, historiador Rogério de Souza Farias, o garimpeiro dos arquivos da Secretaria de Estado.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 22/12/2021

segunda-feira, 15 de novembro de 2021

It’s Time to Get Honest About the Biden Doctrine - Anne-Marie Slaughter

 The New York Times – 14.11.2021

It’s Time to Get Honest About the Biden Doctrine

Anne-Marie Slaughter

 

A year after President Biden’s election, we’re beginning to see the contours of his foreign policy: He has something for everyone. For balance-of-power realists, he has countered China by working much more closely with “the Quad” — India, Australia, Japan and the United States — and creating a new British, Australian, U.S. nexus with the AUKUS submarine deal, no matter how clumsily handled.

For liberal internationalists, he has re-engaged with global institutions: rejoining the World Health Organization and the U.N.-sponsored Paris Agreement to limit climate change and recommitting to NATO. For those advocating “restraint” in America’s military might, he has ended at least the visible “forever wars.”

And for democracy and human rights activists committed to a values-based foreign policy, Mr. Biden will be hosting a Summit for Democracy next month. The administration has also ratcheted up both its rhetoric and its actions on human rights issues, accusing China of both genocide and crimes against humanity for its treatment of its Uyghur population and authorizing sanctions against several officials responsible for the war and humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia.

Yet when everyone gets something, no one gets everything, which is why the core principles of Mr. Biden’s worldview have been hard to pin down.

Not for lack of trying, however. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that Mr. Biden is continuing many of Donald Trump’s “America First” policies in a different guise. Joshua Shifrinson, a Boston University professor, and Stephen Wertheim, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, claim that the Biden Doctrine is “pragmatic realism,” pursuing U.S. interests “in a competitive world” and changing course as necessary to achieve them.

On the values-based side of the foreign policy ledger, a growing number of observers insist that the real Biden Doctrine is to preserve and prove “the supremacy of democracy” worldwide. As Jonathan Tepperman, former editor in chief of Foreign Policy, argues, the “global contest between democracies and autocracies” provides an “organizing principle” to link investing in infrastructure and industrial policy at home, pursuing a foreign policy for the middle class and working to build coalitions of democracies abroad.

Perhaps Mr. Biden is perfectly comfortable with multiple “Biden Doctrines.” He might say that reconciling conflicting impulses and brokering compromises is his trademark as a politician who knows how to get things done.

The problem is that swinging from one framework and set of goals to another without a set of clear principles and priorities risks falling radically short of the progress that the world needs on existential issues. What difference does it make whether the United States “beats China” if our cities are underwater, the Gulf Stream stops warming northern Europe and the United States, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees are on the move? If we destroy the biodiversity on the planet? If millions more people die from serial pandemics? If people the world over do not have the means to flourish and care for one another?

It is time to break free of 20th-century thinking. Two decades of Mr. Biden’s 50-odd years in public life were spent during the Cold War and a third during the 1990s with the United States as a hyperpower. For most of this period great-power competition and making the world safe for democracy were fused. “People” issues were relegated to human rights advocates and development experts. Diplomacy and defense were the provinces of nations and the field of international relations.

The frameworks, paradigms and doctrines of that era, of any kind, are simply insufficient to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Bolder thinking is required, thinking that shifts away from states, whether great powers or lesser powers, democracies or autocracies. It is time to put people first, to see the world first as a planet of eight billion people rather than as an artificially constructed system of 195 countries and to measure all state actions in terms of their impact on people. Instead of competing with China today on one issue and cooperating tomorrow on another, Mr. Biden must prioritize cooperation on global issues and challenge other nations, regardless of whether they are democracies, autocracies or something in between, to join in.

This approach is known as globalism, which has a bad name because of its association with globalization. But globalism is actually closer to localism, to beginning with people, where they live and what they need, regardless of what colored square on the map they happen to be born in. It is a people-centered rather than a state-centered approach to problem-solving on a global scale. It does not pretend that governments don’t exist or don’t matter, but rejects the idea that interstate rivalry matters as an end in itself — the essence of geopolitics.

Government officials as a set of actors can contribute to either global problems or global solutions. To succeed as problem solvers, however, they must work side by side with global corporations and networks of cities, civic groups, faith groups, universities, scientists and others. These actors are not just “helpers” or catalysts or constituents. They are players in global politics.

Mr. Biden sometimes seems to be moving in this direction. His speech to the U.N. General Assembly in September laid out a long list of global problems, from health and climate change to inequality and corruption. In my view, his greatest foreign policy achievement to date was to secure a minimum global corporate tax rate of 15 percent, ensuring that corporations worldwide pay at least a portion of their fair share for the public goods — from roads to intellectual property laws — that they rely on and that benefit all citizens. The Biden administration also embraces an “all of society” approach to fighting climate change.

Time and again, however, Mr. Biden’s other goal — of beating China, or more broadly of lining up the democracies to beat the autocracies — gets in the wayThis week, thanks to the work of John Kerry, the climate envoy, the United States and China reached an important agreement to cooperate on deeper cuts to both carbon dioxide and methane emissions. It’s not enough, however, and misses a larger opportunity to mobilize the United States, China, the European Union and India as co-leaders on a global climate challenge.

The lure of competition — often on the edge of conflict — with a rival superpower is just too strong, both for Mr. Biden and for the tight-knit band of brothers who form the core of his foreign policy team. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, are veterans of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” a concept designed and advanced in large part by Kurt Campbell, now the White House Asia czar.

From the perspective of 20th-century geopolitics, it makes sense for the Biden administration to approach its relationship with China as one in which the United States has many different goals: economic, military and diplomatic. On some issues, like climate or health, we seek China’s cooperation. On many more, like military primacy, freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, fair trade, intellectual property rights, cybersecurity and human rights, our relationship requires competition and coercion. Hence we have the frequent trade-off debate, in which China hawks have demanded that Mr. Kerry not give an inch to get concessions on Chinese emissions or to encourage other actions that are necessary to stop the globe from warming another degree.

From a people-first perspective, saving the planet for humanity must be a goal that takes precedence over all others. The United States should openly challenge China to a competition to see which country can deliver the cleanest and safest environment for its people while at the same time increasing their well-being. Which country can build and deploy clean technologies the fastest? Which country can help the most developing countries upgrade their infrastructure and wean themselves off carbon?

It should be possible to develop common measures to assess the climate impact of China’s Belt and Road investments versus the Build Back Better World initiative — a project of the Group of 7 wealthiest economies — and the E.U.’s Global Gateway investments and to agree on a set of nongovernmental organizations charged with applying and publicizing these metrics.Global youth movements, from the Sunrise Movement in the United States to the China Youth Climate Action Network and Greta Thunberg’s followers everywhere, would be ideal candidates.

When it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic, if our collective goal really is to vaccinate and treat as many people as possible worldwide, then it’s time to ignore geopolitics. Back in September, the Biden administration’s global vaccine summit brought together over 100 governments and an additional 100 global actors to commit to vaccinating 70 percent of the world’s people by 2022. China has said that it is now working with 19 nations to produce vaccines and cooperating with another 30 countries on vaccine distribution through the Belt and Road Initiative. Indeed, President Xi Jinping of China proposed a Global Vaccine Cooperation Action Initiative at the Group of 20 summit last month, without an apparent response from the United States. Aboard Air Force One, on his way to Rome, Mr. Sullivan told reporters that “the main thrust of the effort on Covid-19 is not actually traveling through the G20.” My translation: The Chinese and their partners have one effort and the United States and its partners have another.

Mr. Biden believes in the inherent value and ultimate superiority of democracy. He sees it as the form of government that best recognizes human dignity and agency, and that can deliver well-being and prosperity for the greatest number of people. So do I. But this conviction, which was as reflexive as breathing for most Americans during the 20th century, must now be put to an empirical test, starting at home.

Mr. Biden gets this, in part. He has made clear that the United States must demonstrate that our democracy can in fact represent and deliver results for our own people. Bolder thinking would insist that the United States face all the ways in which our democracy has fallen short for millions of our people and accept at least the possibility that other forms of government could be better. Beyond U.S. borders, the contest between democracy and autocracy should be an open competition to see which governments can deliver more — materially, intellectually, spiritually and all the other ways we measure human flourishing — for their people. One measure might be which country does the most to achieve the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, as assessed by a global coalition of civic organizations.

Globalism is not mushy government idealism — far from it. It does not deny the existence or importance of government — at the local, state, national and international levels — or of intergovernmental diplomacy. But it insists that the great-power games, as deadly as they have been and could still be, must give way to planetary politics, in which human beings matter more than nationalities. Competition itself is fine and natural, but it needs to be competition to achieve a goal that benefits us all.

Under normal circumstances, administrations set goals and navigate the conflicting interests that are the essence of politics. They muddle through one crisis, one summit, one speech at a time. But we are not living in normal times. As Mr. Biden understands and is striving to achieve on the domestic front, it’s time for bold, transformative change. To vaccinate fewer people globally in the hope of demonstrating American or even democratic superiority is a moral calamity that will hurt us all.

To some, adopting people-centered policies at the national and global levels might seem so fanciful as to be delusional. But history shows that it is possible to change course, even drastically. Just over a hundred years ago, the United States Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and turned its back on the League of Nations. At the time, no one would have predicted that a quarter-century later, President Franklin Roosevelt would be a principal architect of the United Nations and that the United States would embrace a set of global institutions designed to maintain peace, prosperity and security. Gen Z and many millennials are already thinking in planetary terms, putting people ahead of states. It is time for the rest of us to catch up.

 

Ms. Slaughter is C.E.O. of New America, a think tank and civic enterprise.

 

domingo, 30 de maio de 2021

Origens da hostilidade entre a China e a Índia: o Tibete, 1959

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xthe53TvFg4&t=1538s

When India And Communist China Became Enemies | Mao's Cold War | Timeline

831.414 visualizações
11 de jun. de 2020

At the height of the Cold War, China's ally India would turn from friend to foe as the issue of Tibetan independence rips the Asian brotherhood apart. 📺 
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terça-feira, 25 de maio de 2021

Sun Tzu e Tucídides: da arte da guerra aos erros da diplomacia - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

 Um possível ensaio reflexivo sobre uma das grandes paranoias contemporâneas, não muito diferente, talvez, da ridícula teoria conspiratória sobre a dominação do mundo e a subtração das soberanias nacionais pelo monstro metafísico do globalismo. A primeira lição da História, inventada pelos gregos, é que os homens não aprendem nada com as lições da História...


Sun Tzu e Tucídides: da arte da guerra aos erros da diplomacia

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Uma releitura da obra do mestre chinês em estratégia, que é bem mais uma profunda reflexão sobre as virtudes da diplomacia como meio de evitar um tipo de guerra que foi apenas relatado, com os dotes de verdadeiro estadista pelo genial historiador grego da Antiguidade, não teorizado, e transformado em suposta “armadilha”, por cientistas políticos contaminados pela arrogância míope de um império pretensamente hegemônico. 

Analogias históricas são atraentes, mas geralmente, ou inevitavelmente, falsas. A História não se repete, nem como tragédia, nem como farsa. 

Sun Tzu ainda tem muito a ensinar aos contemporâneos, sobretudo aos que equivocadamente imaginam que o mundo gira em torno de seus interesses nacionais. Esse novo tipo de “geocentrismo” está destinado a falhar, como falharam os infelizes equívocos diplomáticos dos atenienses, no trato com seus aliados, tomados que foram pela conhecida  “hubris” sobre a qual alertavam os mesmos gregos da Antiguidade.

A História pode fornecer lições, mas uma das principais é a de que os homens enfrentam algumas dificuldades para aprender com as lições da História. 

Será que a diplomacia não fez grandes progressos desde a guerra de Troia? As paixões e os interesses continuam a prevalecer sobre a modesta racionalidade da ciência histórica, criada pelos mesmos gregos, da poesia de Homero às cruéis realidades descritas por Heródoto e, finalmente, refletidas de forma ponderada por Tucídides? 

Cabe, portanto, destacar, as virtudes do mestre chinês da Grande Estratégia diplomática, em face das deformações militaristas de aprendizes de pequenas estratégias equivocadas, e portanto condenadas ao fracasso. Os paranoicos da “armadilha” inventada fariam bem em aprender com Sun Tzu, em primeiro lugar sua lição principal: a grande sabedoria está em ganhar a “guerra” sem precisar combater.


Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 25/05/2021

domingo, 25 de abril de 2021

A “ordem liberal” que na verdade era hegemonica - Velina Tchakarova

Is a Cold War 2.0 inevitable?

23 April 2021

The message is clear — every state actor, big or small, will have to choose sides between two very different global offerings, each with their own set of norms, rules and ideologies.

This article is part of the series — Raisina Files 2021.


The global system[1] has never been as interconnected as was demonstrated by the COVID-19 outbreak. But global affairs are also at an inflection point. An unexpected manifestation of the pandemic is the bifurcation of the global order in a way unseen since the Cold War. It begs the question — is the world witnessing the beginning of a new bipolar era of global competition?

Global powers rise and fall. The pendulum swings back and forth, and a fragile equilibrium is achieved through the constant struggle for power and influence that keeps global affairs afloat. The rationale behind it lies in maximising the gains, forming powerful alliances and partnerships, and building enough capabilities to project power beyond the national realm. Any competitor strong enough to question the dominance of a global power will surely seize an opportunity to fill the gaps wherever they may present themselves. In the presence of a hegemon, there is always a process of polarisation that leads to the creation of a secondary system organised around a pole consisting of a single competitor or a group of rivals that seek to undermine the incumbent’s global power supremacy. To put things into perspective: a global reserve currency is not possible nowadays without the global power projection capabilities that enable the US to control the interconnected flows of goods, capital, services, and data, and to protect trade and transport routes from disruptions that might result in major supply shocks.

Any competitor strong enough to question the dominance of a global power will surely seize an opportunity to fill the gaps wherever they may present themselves.

Global affairs are constantly influenced by competition and cooperation. The global system has recently entered a new transitional period with the formation of two centres of power — the US and China. The former has predominantly shaped international relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War through global power projection via transnational networks established over decades of world dominance. On the other hand, given China’s impressive economic growth trajectories, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, there are heightened expectations around its continued rise to prominence in the global arena. However, it remains to be seen whether Beijing will be capable of transforming its growing geoeconomic clout and geopolitical influence into global power projection. Under any circumstance, the global system is already facing profound consequences, with long-lasting impacts for international affairs. Is a Cold War 2.0 inevitable amid the competition between the US and China?

From ‘Chimerica’ to systemic decoupling

According to US President Joe Biden’s new administration, China “is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system.”[2] Furthermore, Secretary of State Antony Blinken portrayed China as “America’s most powerful adversary and competitor” as well as “America’s biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century.”[3] Chinese President Xi Jinping similarly identified the US as “the biggest source of chaos in the present-day world” as well as “the biggest threat to our country’s development and security.”[4] Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party “revealed late last year that the [Five Year] plan would span not just military but also economic, financial, and technological security.”[5]

The integration of China into US-led systems during the Cold War and afterwards led to the emergence of what many have termed as “Chimerica.”

A systemic rivalry means competition over the access to and control of global socioeconomic networks and structures. The integration of China into US-led systems during the Cold War and afterwards led to the emergence of what many have termed as “Chimerica.”[6] Globalisation created highly interconnected networks between Washington and Beijing, while also causing the consequent rise of China. This unintended outcome has led to China challenging US dominance in various spheres. This ongoing phenomenon has a ‘Cold War-like’ texture and may implicate the emergence of what has been termed as systemic decoupling — “the creation of two separate systems, that are often in competition with each other.”[7]

In the 1960s, British geographer Halford Mackinder claimed that China could become a major player in global affairs based on its geographic location, stretching from the “heartland” to “rimland terrains” of the world.[8] In keeping with Mackinder’s vision, China is seeking to establish a terrestrial connectivity through Eurasia[9] with the industrial heart of Europe — Germany, France, Italy, and Great Britain. Central and Eastern Europe are key to win “the heartland” as the control over these geographies will enable China’s global power projection. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)[10] can be viewed through the Mackinder prism. The BRI entails two terrestrial connectivity routes to Central and Eastern Europe — one through Russia, and the other through Central Asia and Turkey. Additionally, Beijing has also introduced various political and economic platforms for engagement and cooperation, with the ‘Cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries’ (or the ‘17+1’) initiative the most prominent among them.[11]Based on Nicholas Spykman’s geopolitical premises,[12] China is also building up its sea power presence in the ‘rimland terrains’ of the South China Sea and the Indo-Pacific, and has developed a “string of pearls” approach in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) to create a network of friendly ports and trade posts in India’s immediate neighbourhood as part of the maritime connectivity within the BRI.[13]

In reality, China is already pursuing the simultaneous formation of alternative routes via maritime and terrestrial connectivity, an approach combining Mackinder’s “heartland” and Spykman’s “rimland” strategies. China is seizing the opportunity to become the first Asian global power in modern international relations.

Political scientist Andrew Michta describes Beijing’s endgame as a “global inversion” of the interconnected trade flows, “which currently favour maritime routes, a setup that relies on U.S. naval power as enforcement. If China can develop a cross-Eurasian supply chain and protect it, it won’t need to match America in the maritime domain.”[14] In reality, China is already pursuing the simultaneous formation of alternative routes via maritime and terrestrial connectivity, an approach combining Mackinder’s “heartland” and Spykman’s “rimland” strategies. China is seizing the opportunity to become the first Asian global power in modern international relations. However, Beijing’s global rise will primarily be determined by the outcome of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its capability to establish global networks of finance, trade, energy, economics and diplomacy.

Contrary to the bipolar global order established during the Cold War, the systemic rivalry between the US and China is evolving simultaneously at sea and on land. State actors seek to “weaponise interdependence” by leveraging global networks for strategic advantages.[15] There are four domains that will be crucial in determining the outcome of this mutual competition — political economy, technology, international rules and ideology, and partnerships and alliances.

Political economy

According to realpolitik thinking,[16] the distribution of power lies at the heart of international relations. Realpolitik has once again become the true motor of global affairs; it is the main driver of the systemic decoupling between the US and China following the shift of global power from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific. Competition between the two systemic rivals was already taking shape when former US President Barack Obama launched the American pivot to Asia and engaged with likeminded states to build institutional alliances, trade blocs and coalitions to counterbalance China’s increasing geoeconomic clout. His successor Donald Trump continued building up the pressure on Beijing on all fronts, mostly by applying a protectionist approach through bilateral agreements and coalitions.[17]

Beijing is just as keen to break up its dependence on American monetary, financial, economic, trade, diplomatic and technological networks.

But Washington is not the only one pursuing the decoupling of ‘Chimerica’; Beijing is just as keen to break up its dependence on American monetary, financial, economic, trade, diplomatic and technological networks. China is focusing on “sustaining economic growth and prosperity, developing its domestic markets, boosting innovation and technology, improving its military capabilities and maintaining domestic stability.”[18] Its approach is clearly aimed at achieving greater self-sufficiency by establishing alternative systems and substituting critical connectedness that is “forcing China and the United States towards a zero-sum understanding” [19] due to the complex challenges and the bifurcation of the global affairs today.

Riding the Fourth Industrial Revolution wave

The nature of globalisation is determined by the geoeconomic and geopolitical expansion model by the nation-state that has established global dominance, much like Great Britain did in the nineteenth century and the US did at the end of the Cold War in the twentieth century. Both states achieved a dominant position in global affairs by riding the wave of previous industrial revolutions. Which country will emerge the winner from the ongoing digital revolution is yet to be seen, but the victor will surely impose its dominance on competitors and allies alike in the future. Attempts at establishing supremacy during the Fourth Industrial Revolution necessitates a drive towards self-sufficiency in critical technologies and global supply chains. Logically, there can only be one winner in such a contest; Xi has staked early claim and “has publicly proclaimed the imminence of China’s industrial superiority and strived to achieve it via the largest industrial espionage offensive in history.”[20]

Which country will emerge the winner from the ongoing digital revolution is yet to be seen, but the victor will surely impose its dominance on competitors and allies alike in the future.

At the same time, reconfiguring global supply chains away from China is becoming a reality as American capital withdrew from Beijing amidst COVID-19.[21] A global disruption of supply chains, alongside an imperilled rules-based global order and eroding international structures, has impacted all regions around the world. But the reconfiguration will be initiated mainly by the US to bring manufacturing and supply chains back home or to trusted partner countries. Moving production from traditional hubs to new ones will take time and effort but will also certainly create new geoeconomic advantages for certain actor such as India, projected to become the world’s third-largest economic power in the next decade.[22] Regional centres of trade, such as Japan and the European Union (EU), have already began considering a shift of manufacturing operations out of China. Over the long term, two parallel supply chains networks are likely to emerge — one centred around the US, the other facilitated by China.[23]

Sectors such as space technologies, artificial intelligence, defence and the cyber domain will witness strategic investments to promote the growth of new, regional power centres. This is important since any significant breakthrough in these areas will bestow global competitiveness and geoeconomic advantages. Further, the unprecedented interconnectedness of all socioeconomic systems has obfuscated any distinction between economic and trade indicators on one hand, and defence and security considerations on the other. This explains why the competition between the US and China does not solely represent a trade war but a broader rivalry extending to the global networks of finance, trade, economy, diplomacy, energy, defence and so forth.

Moving production from traditional hubs to new ones will take time and effort but will also certainly create new geoeconomic advantages for certain actor such as India, projected to become the world’s third-largest economic power in the next decade.

Battle over global norms and ideologies

The Cold War encompassed a competition over the systemic hierarchy of international values, norms, and rules. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, the US was able to define this agenda by promoting the liberal ideas of a democratic political order coupled with a market economy, human rights, and freedoms. Similarly, the outcome of the ongoing competition between Washington and Beijing will also have an impact on the future of the global order in terms of norms, standards, rules, and values.[24] This will be implicated by a growing systemic coordination between China and Russia (the “Dragonbear”[25]) that indicates “a willingness to challenge the international order and the US position in it.”[26]

While there is no overt ideological competition yet, the US-led liberal international order is facing a threat from the growing influence of the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian ideology and governance model.[27] Following China’s global ascent, authoritarian regimes and ideas have established a stronghold in Southeast Asia, with “strongmen in power in Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia, single parties in Laos and Vietnam, and democracy eroding in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia.”[28] China has also drawn international attention for human rights abuses, “including a crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and against Uighurs in Xinjiang.”[29] And there is some speculation that Beijing might seek to penetrate the political spectrum and socioeconomic fabric of Taiwan to establish control over its processes and structures in the long run.[30]

Following China’s global ascent, authoritarian regimes and ideas have established a stronghold in Southeast Asia.

At the same time, the demand for a COVID-19 vaccine scenario has presented a new dimension to the ongoing battle of international vaccines, and will pose a new challenge for the West as China sought to establish a “Health Silk Road” at the beginning of the pandemic to support partner countries with medical supplies.[31] Furthermore, Beijing aims to enhance its global image through its vaccine diplomacy.[32] In response, the US and three of its closest Indo-Pacific partners — India, Japan and Australia; together known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad)[33] — committed to boosting COVID-19 vaccine supply at their first summit and pledged to cooperate in the maritime, security, and cyber domain to meet the challenges posed by China.[34] Quad cooperation is aimed at boosting security and defence ties between the four Indo-Pacific countries, while counterbalancing China’s rise in this region.

The United Nations (UN) and other international organisations have already been impacted by the ongoing global power competition between the US and China. The diminished role of the UN Security Council (UNSC) is linked to Washington’s declining international role, particularly under the Trump administration.[35] It has been unable to keep the transatlantic community together and often faces difficulties in convincing allies to vote in favour of its draft resolutions (for instance, on Iran[36]). This is compounded by the rising assertiveness of China and Russia as diplomatic powers and their deft manoeuvring of multilateral institutions.

Quad cooperation is aimed at boosting security and defence ties between the four Indo-Pacific countries, while counterbalancing China’s rise in this region.

Multilateralism is at risk of becoming only a buzzword,[37] with institutions reduced to playgrounds for diplomatic battles between competing powers, much like the UNSC was during the Cold War. This dynamic could easily resurface, with the transatlantic community on one side, and China and Russia on the other. China and Russia operate within the existent global order with the clear goal of disrupting it, dismantling its multilateral structures, and creating better conditions for their conceptualisation of multilateralism, which is strictly opposed to Western values, norms and rules.[38] Coordinated efforts by the Dragonbear within the UNSC and other international organisations will likely increase further, as both states will seek to boost their international image as norm-setters in a rapidly changing rules-based global order.

Systemic bipolar era and alliances

The emergence of regional power centres has created the illusion of multipolarity, even as the systemic bipolarity between the US and China encompasses all relevant networks. An important structural layer of the global system consists of middle-sized powers oscillating between Washington and Beijing to maximise their own gains while avoiding picking a side for as long as possible — there are neither eternal allies, nor perpetual enemies, only eternal and perpetual interests.[39] This seems to be the leading geopolitical maxim of the upcoming Indo-Pacific decade. To counterbalance the growing Chinese presence in the IOR and its direct neighbourhood, India is expanding its network of regional and bilateral partnerships through various security and defence constellations, “while playing as well, carefully but with dedication, the card of the Indo-Pacific.”[40] Other key players like Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, and Turkey have one thing in common, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic — playing a balancing act between the US and China while delaying the difficult task of choosing a side. From a geopolitical point of view, the new great game will be predominantly situated in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean due to rising competition between the two Asian giants, China and India, in addition to the systemic rivalry between China and the US.

The chasm between Washington and Beijing has not only led to the bipolarisation of the global order but has also increasingly put pressure on the regional powers caught in the middle.

The main hotspots and potential triggers for an escalation of the US-China rivalry are in the South and East China Seas, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Caspian, and the Black Sea, as well as in the Middle East and North Africa. Tensions are also expected along the global chokepoints for energy and food as well as the Chinese Belt and Road connectivity. China has been in the lead at various multilateral forums, such as BRICS, the Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and trade blocs such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which covers 15 countries in the Asia-Pacific region but excludes major economic powers like the US, EU and India.[41] The chasm between Washington and Beijing has not only led to the bipolarisation of the global order but has also increasingly put pressure on the regional powers caught in the middle.

What next

China has become the main external factor in American domestic politics, but the US can only exert a limited influence on Chinese domestic affairs. International cooperation has become a function of the competition and systemic rivalry between Washington and Beijing. But this competition need not necessarily turn into an overt and direct confrontation. Blinken stressed that the “relationship with China will be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be.”[42]During the first face-to-face high-level bilateral talks with the Biden administration, China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi stressed that “US can no longer ‘speak to China from a position of strength.’”[43]

Eventually, the systemic competition between the US and China will fragment the interdependent and globalised world by unleashing centrifugal forces of bipolarity, affecting the entire global system deeply.

The competition between the US and China is made up as much by the technological, geoeconomic and institutional decoupling as it is by the oscillating alliances of middle power countries. China has already become a second pole of global power and has also begun challenging existing international structures and networks. While the US is seeking to preserve its institutional heritage, technological leverage and geoeconomic clout in cooperation with transatlantic allies and regional partners, China will clearly aim to establish and promote alternative structures and systems to counterbalance and challenge the American dominance. These competing strategies cannot result in a win-win situation. Eventually, the systemic competition between the US and China will fragment the interdependent and globalised world by unleashing centrifugal forces of bipolarity, affecting the entire global system deeply.

A pessimistic scenario will mean a more radical and consistent mutual decoupling, while an optimistic view reveals a more peaceful systemic coexistence, with Beijing focusing on partnerships and commitments to strengthen its domestic development until it builds a counterbalance to the overwhelming American influence.[44] In both scenarios, the message is clear — every state actor, big or small, will have to choose sides between two very different global offerings, each with their own set of norms, rules and ideologies. [45] The US has so far been the biggest source of China’s wealth.[46] And yet, Washington might also become the biggest source of China’s demise. The US will certainly not shy away from advancing this idea under aggravating circumstances of global power competition.


[1] Velina Tchakarova, “Global System Outlook 2020,” Antifragilista, 9 February 2020.

[2] Joe Biden, Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, Washington, The White House, March 2021, pp. 8.

[3] Dan De Luce and Abigail Williams, “China poses ‘biggest geopolitical test’ for the U.S., Secretary of State Blinken says,” NBCNEWS, 3 March 2021.

[4] Chris Buckley, “‘The East Is Rising’: Xi Maps Out China’s Post-Covid Ascent,” New York Times, 3 March 2021.

[5] George Magnus, “Economics, National Security, and the Competition with China,” War on the Rocks, 3 March 2021.

[6] Andrew Browne, “Bloomberg New Economy: The Chimera that Was ‘Chimerica’,” Bloomberg, 11 July 2020.

[7] Mark Leon Goldberg, “How COVID-19 is Accelerating Geopolitical Shifts,” UN Dispatch, 23 April 2020.

[8] Halford Mackinder, “Democratic ideals and reality,” Diane Publishing, no. 184, 1962.

[9] Mark Bassin, “Eurasia,” in European Regions and Boundaries: A Conceptual History, eds Diana Mishkova and Balázs Trencsényi (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2019), pp. 210-32.

[10] World Bank, “Belt And Road Initiative,” 2018.

[11] Cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries, 2013.

[12] Nicholas Spykman, The Geography of the Peace (New York, Harcourt: Brace and Company, 1944); America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power, (New York, Harcourt: Brace and Company, 1942).

[13] Velina Tchakarova, “China and India: Geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific Decade, Part I,” The Defence Horizon Journal, Special Edition I/21, Geopolitics: 14-19.

[14] Andrew Michta, “Opinion | Can China Turn Europe Against America?” The Wall Street Journal, 2021.

[15] Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion,” International Security 44, no. 1 (Summer 2019): 42-79.

[16] John Bew, History of Realpolitik (Oxford University Press Inc, 2016).

[17] Guy Erb and Scott Sommers, “Still Losing Ground: The Consequences of the Trump Administration’s Bilateral Trade Policy,” Washington International Trade Association, 7 September 2020.

[18] Øystein Tunsjø, “The new US-China superpower rivalry,” East Asia Forum, 4 April 2020.

[19] Tunsjø, “The new US-China superpower rivalry”

[20] Edward Luttwak, “How to stop China’s long march,” UnHerd, 27 February 2021.

[21] Chloe Taylor, “Coronavirus is accelerating a ‘capital war’ between China and the US, investor warns,” CNBC News, 27 May 2021.

[22] “India to become 5th largest economy in 2025, 3rd largest by 2030,” The Economic Times, 26 December 2020.

[23] Velina Tchakarova, “Covid-19 and the Indo-Pacific Decade,” Observer Research Foundation, 8 July 2020.

[24] Sean Fleming, “World order is going to be rocked by AI – this is how,” The World Economic Forum, 13 February 2020.

[25] Velina Tchakarova, “The Dragonbear: An Axis of Convenience or a New Mode of Shaping the Global System?” Irmo Brief, March 2020.

[26] Michael Spirtas, “Are We Truly Prepared for a War with Russia or China?” The Rand Blog, 8 October 2018.

[27] “How China’s Communist Party trains foreign politicians,” The Economist, 10 December 2020.

[28] Bhavan Jaipragas, “Advantage China, as democracy slides from view in Southeast Asia,” South China Morning Post, 7 February 2021.

[29] Luce and Williams, “China poses ‘biggest geopolitical test’ for the U.S., Secretary of State Blinken says”

[30] Chia-Chien Chang and Alan H. Yang, “Weaponized Interdependence: China’s Economic Statecraft and Social Penetration against Taiwan,” Orbis 64, no. 2 (2020): 312-333.

[31] Wade Shepard, “China’s ‘Health Silk Road’ Gets A Boost From COVID-19,” Forbes, 27 March 2020.

[32] Emma Graham-Harrison and Tom Phillips, “China hopes ‘vaccine diplomacy’ will restore its image and boost its influence,” The Guardian, 29 November 2020.

[33] Ankit Panda, “The ‘Quad’ Summit: Delivering Value in the Indo-Pacific,” The Diplomat, 17 March 2021.

[34] “US, Indo-Pacific allies pledge to boost Covid-19 vaccine supply at Quad summit,” France 24, 13 March 2021.

[35] David Whineray, “The United States’ Current and Future Relationship With the United Nations,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 6 March 2020.

[36] “Isolated by allies, US suffers UNSC defeat on Iran arms ban,” National Herald, 15 August 2020.

[37] Velina Tchakarova, “UNSC balancing between USA and the Dragonbear,” in Powering Universalism, ed. Ursula Werther-Pietsch, to be published in April 2021.

[38] Tchakarova, “The Dragonbear”

[39] Oxford Reference, “Lord Palmerston 1784–1865,” Oxford University Press.

[40] Jean-Luc Racine, “The New Indian Geopolitics of the Sea: From the Indian Ocean to the Indo-Pacific,” Hérodote 163 (4) (2016): 101-129.

[41] Iwamoto, Kentaro, “ ” Nikkei Asia, 2020.

[42] Luce and Williams, “China poses ‘biggest geopolitical test’ for the U.S., Secretary of State Blinken says.”

[43] Justin McCurry, “US and China publicly rebuke each other in first major talks of Biden era,” The Guardian, 19 March 2021.

[44] Øystein Tunsjø, “The new US-China superpower rivalry,” East Asia Forum, 4 April 2020.

[45] Michael Auslin, “The Coronacrisis Will Simply Exacerbate The Geo-Strategic Competition Between Beijing And Washington,” Hoover Institution, no. 64, 23 April 2020.

[46] Orville Schell, “The Ugly End of Chimerica,” Foreign Policy, 3 April 2020.

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