Analysis
WASHINGTON – Despite repeated calls both in the United States and worldwide for Washington to lower the temperature of its contentious relations with China, US politicians have continued to fan the flames of hostility towards Beijing through spreading anti-China lies while upending the world order it groundlessly accused China of sabotaging.
Those in Washington should wake up to the fact that China has no intention of scrambling for influence with any other countries, and that the United States should play its due role to maintain global peace and stability, and shoulder the responsibility as a major country by engaging China in good faith and in a constructive manner.
FLAWED CHINA STRATEGY
Outlining the China policy of the current White House in late May, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken rehashed the same old “China-threat” theory, hyped up the you-win-I-lose style competition and bloc politics, peddled lies about China’s human rights record, and smeared China’s domestic and foreign policies.
Blinken’s notion laid bare Washington’s obdurate Cold War mentality, as it becomes increasingly paranoid by the fact that China is steadily on the rise by virtue of its wisely-tailored development plans, and that its own global hegemony is in constant decline.
However, Blinken’s harangue has fooled no sober-minded observer. For example, Zachary Karabell, founder of the Progress Network, wrote recently in an article published by The New York Times (NYT) that Washington’s “intensifying fixation” on hyping up China’s threat to the world order “shrinks space for cooperation with Beijing,” at a time when looking for ways to work with China is all too logical and necessary given the myriads of challenges humankind faces.
Karabell, also an author, columnist and investor, wrote that all the things Washington claimed it worries about “don’t necessarily make China a threat to American prosperity and security.”
Grounding foreign policies on imaginary situations is a “slippery slope,” he said.
Unfortunately, what Karabell has warned about is exactly what Washington has been doing. It has tried to contain China every step of the way – economically, technologically and militarily – and smear China repeatedly with long-debunked lies.
The most recent example could be found in the 19th Shangri-La Dialogue, where US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin pitched the so-called “Indo-Pacific Strategy” to rope regional countries into its anti-China agenda.
Washington’s grand strategy is “deeply flawed,” Scottish historian Niall Ferguson wrote in an opinion published recently on Bloomberg.
Ferguson, a US-based senior fellow at both Stanford University and Harvard University, said it scares him Washington reached a bipartisan consensus that “resisting China’s rise should be the foundation of American foreign policy.”
SABOTEUR OF WORLD ORDER
For a long time, Washington has touted itself as the upholder of a rules-based world order. While Blinken in his speech in May depicted China as a so-called “challenge” to the rules-based international order, he depicted the United States as a country that defends and reforms that order. In the just-concluded Shangri-La Dialogue, Austin also asked regional countries to “strengthen the rules-based international order.”
However, facts have attested to Washington’s true colors of being increasingly sanctimonious. Indeed, the United States itself is the real saboteur to the existing world order, a major threat to global peace and stability, and a serious violator of international law and human rights.
Whatever grand visions Washington presented to rope regional countries into the so-called “Indo-Pacific Economic Framework” will not paper over its sinister intentions to play small-clique politics, plot division and isolation, and undermine regional stability. Such coteries as AUKUS and Quad that Washington has formed would only impede regional centrality.
Washington’s military supplies are dampening international efforts to peacefully solve the Russia-Ukraine conflict, while its sanctions are exacerbating inflation as well as food and energy insecurity, and people around the world are bearing the brunt of this.
Just as an NYT op-ed published on May 19 said, recent bellicose statements from Washington “do not bring negotiations any closer.”
Meanwhile, Washington’s exclusion of some Latin American countries from last week’s Summit of the Americas hosted in Los Angeles has revealed its intention to split the region, and showed that allies and partners are simply instruments to be used to promote Washington’s self-interest.
The United States “lacks credibility on issues of democracy and the rule of law,” a recent Foreign Affairs article noted, adding it “can no longer pass itself off as a democracy worthy of emulation.”
RIGHT PATH FORWARD
“There are many questions that President [Joe] Biden has yet to answer for the American public with regard to the continued involvement of the United States in this [Russia-Ukraine] conflict,” the NYT op-ed said.
“Popular support for a war far from US shores will not continue indefinitely. Inflation is a much bigger issue for American voters than Ukraine, and the disruptions to global food and energy markets are likely to intensify,” it said.
In fact, many experts and officials around the world have called on Washington to change its foreign policy so as to solve pressing domestic problems in the United States.
For example, Ferguson noted that “Biden’s foreign policy not only fails the basic tests of strategic coherence and credibility,” but also “seems exceptionally poorly designed to serve the Democrats’ domestic interests.”
It is not helping solve the “number one” domestic problem of inflation at a time when “a midterm shellacking” faced by his party is “fast approaching,” he added.
Meanwhile, the United States is urged to work with China to foster a healthy and stable relationship that features mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation, which is a truly responsible way to manage what many deem as the world’s most important bilateral relationship.
During Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit to Fiji in late May, he stressed that China is not what the United States has imagined, and that there is a clear historical logic to China’s development and revitalization that has a strong endogenous power.
The US side should first be aware that a unipolar hegemony will find no support, group confrontation has no future, building small yards with high fences means self-isolation and backwardness, and decoupling and cutting supplies only hurt others and itself as well, Wang said.
It should focus its efforts on enforcing the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation, so as to find a way for the two major countries of China and the United States to properly deal with each other in the new era, he added.
Biden’s grand strategy is setting the United States and Beijing on a collision course. “It’s bad policy and terrible domestic politics,” Ferguson wrote, adding Washington should “engage with China.”
The United States “should nurture rather than endanger” its ties with China, for those ties “are crucial for both countries to remain prosperous, stable and secure,” said Karabell. – Xinhua
