G7 and the rest of the world
China and the “new G8” in America’s sights
by Wolfgang Effenberger*
(11 July 2022) While the merciless war in Ukraine was once more gaining momentum, the heads of state and government of the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy and France met at the idyllic Bavarian castle of Elmau from 26 to 28 June 2022. Representing the European Union, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU Council President Charles Michel attended the G7 Summit on all three days.
At the start of their deliberations, jokes were made about Russian President Vladimir Putin, who likes to pose bare-chested at times1 – triggered by the question of whether participants should take off their jackets in summery temperatures.
After this problem was sorted out, the participants established a “Partnership for Global Infrastructure” initiated by the U.S. president as a response to the successful “New Silk Road” (One Belt, One Road) project launched by China in 2013, with which China is opening up new trade routes to Europe, Africa, and Latin America. In order to curb China’s growing influence, a lot of money is to be invested in it (about 600 billion US dollars by 2027, of which the USA alone will mobilise 200 billion).2
A second front now appears to be opening up alongside Russia. Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken portrayed China as the greatest challenge to the international order in the long term, despite the acute crisis caused by Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine. And a day before the summit, White House National Security Council Communications Director John Kirby said China would be “a major focus” at the G7 summit in Bavaria.
US long-term strategy since 2014
This is no big surprise. Since September 2014 – half a year after the Maidan coup – the applicable U.S. long-term strategy TRADCOC 525-3-1 “Win in a Complex World 2020-2040” states that U.S. forces should prepare to eliminate the threat posed by Russia and China.
While both countries are already engaged in a trade war, the U.S. military views China as a potential adversary. And a recent Pew Research Center poll showed: 55 percent of the U.S. population has a negative image of China.3
In the hustle and bustle of the run-up to Christmas, the White House published the new “National Security Strategy of the United States” (NSS) on 17 December 2017. It contains the administration’s foreign and security policy priorities, not to mention those of the president. This National Security Strategy put America first,4 labelled China – along with Russia – a “revisionist power” and declared it a “strategic competitor.”5
This security directive had been drafted by the highly decorated soldier and Russia hardliner General Herbert R. McMaster. Before his appointment as National Security Advisor, he was Deputy Commanding General of the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) at Fort Monroe, Hampton (Virginia), where he was jointly responsible for the above-mentioned U.S. long-term strategy TRADOC 525-3-1.
the United States” (NSS) 2017
Thucydides trap – only to be solved by war?
Since then, people speculated whether a war between the declining superpower U.S. and the rising power of China is inevitable, and looked at history for comparable situations.
The Greek historian Thucydides (454–395 B.C.) portrayed the war between Athens and Sparta in his work “The Peloponnesian War” (431 and 411 B.C.) as inevitable because the rising naval power of Athens had fueled the fears of the established land power of Sparta. Neither Athens nor Sparta was able to resolve the rivalry peacefully, and they then inevitably destroyed each other.
Harvard professor Graham Allison – former advisor to the Secretary of Defense under Reagan, Clinton and Obama – sees parallels to this situation in the relationship between the declining US naval power and the rising land power of China: “Like Germany, China feels it was deprived of its rightful place among the great powers when it was weak,” and “like Germany, China has the will and the means to change the status quo. Meanwhile, the United States, like Britain once did, jealously defends its leading position in the world and resolutely prevents Chinese attempts to change the existing world order.”6 For Allison, the so-called Thucydides Trap, the threat to an existing power by an emerging power, can ultimately be solved only through warfare. According to Allison, there have been a total of 16 such Thucydides Traps in human history. Only four of them ended up without any bloodshed.
A hundred years ago, the USA, with its rapid economic growth, became a rival of the then world power Great Britain – one of the four Thucydides traps, by the way, that could be solved peacefully between two related sea powers. In contrast, the rivalry between the land power Germany and the declining sea power Great Britain led to devastating wars toward the end of the 19th century (World War I and World War II and the Thirty Years’ War, respectively). The U.S. has the geographical advantage of having two oceans serving as strategic buffer zones, while Germany, with its central position, stood in the way of all its neighbors, so to speak; China had to make the experience “that enemy powers exerted military pressure on its eastern coast for 200 years.”7
USA and China in the Thucydides trap?
USA and China in the Thucydides trap? Unfortunately, the question must be answered in the affirmative, since China’s rise as an economic superpower and military competitor is even more spectacular than Germany’s rise was at the time. In contrast, China is only allied with Pakistan and Cambodia in the Indo-Asian region, while the U.S. has alliances with Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Australia and the Philippines, and Vietnam, Singapore are strategic partners of Washington. Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Mongolia, Laos, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh are neutral and try to build close economic relations with both the U.S. and China.
What role are the G7 countries still playing?
With their imperial attitudes, both the US and the UK inflicted great damage upon the people living in wide parts of the world for 100 years, and more than 300 years respectively. This will not be forgotten there.
Canada can also look back to a large extent on its Anglo-Saxon and thus European origins. Besides the Anglo-Saxons, the only other countries in the G7 apart from Germany and Japan are Italy and France. But Germany and Japan are the countries that fought against and were defeated by the Anglo-Saxon countries in World War II. They are the only countries in the UN for which the enemy state clause was introduced.
Western significance is steadily diminishing
While G7 countries were setting the tone 30 years ago, they now account for just a quarter of the economy and trade. As the significance of the West steadily diminished, other states rose to become powerful players. Accordingly, Western influence is waning (with the exception of high-tech and the Dollar and Euro currencies).8
On 23 June, Chinese leader Xi Jinping hosted a digital counter-summit to the G7 with the BRICS meeting, made up of the five emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. There, Xi again criticised Western sanctions against Russia. “The facts have proven once again that sanctions are a double-edged sword.” And he made it clear at the BRICS meeting that Putin was no pariah in this circle. Brazil, India, China and South Africa still do not want to join the sanctions against Russia. Putin blamed the West for the global economic crisis9 and attributed a new leadership role to the BRICS countries.10
Already by late May 2022, a US motion at the World Health Assembly designed to empower the WHO with dictatorial powers like a world health government, failed because of a united veto from the WHO’s Africa office. Brazil even declared that it would rather leave the WHO than sign up to the proposal.11
The “new G8”
The speaker of the duma, Vyacheslav Volodin brought up the crucial acronym for the emerging multipolar world: the “new G8”.
Volodin noted that the US created with its own hands the conditions “for countries seeking to establish equal dialogue and mutually beneficial relations to form a ‘new G’ together with Russia.”12
This Russia-non-sanctioning G8, Volodin added, is 24.4 percent ahead of the old G8 in purchasing power parity (PPP) GDP, actually the G7, as the G7 economies are on the verge of collapse and the US is experiencing record inflation.13
Against this backdrop, the director of the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), Mikko Huotari, recommends the German government “to look at the new realities cooly. This looming bloc formation is not in Europe’s interest and moreover reinforces the world’s bipolarity – economically and in terms of security policy. Huotari blames the Chinese side for this: “In Beijing, the world is increasingly seen through these glasses – and the ideological dismissal of the West.”14
China, on the one hand, is trying to resolve territorial-maritime disputes in the long term and peacefully with its neighboring states – mainly with Taiwan and over island groups in the East China Sea such as the Senkaku Islands (Japan), the Paracel and Spratley Islands (Vietnam), and Scarborough Reef (Philippines) – and is pursuing an active defensive policy at sea.
The 2015 White Paper on China’s Military Strategy, for example, states: “The sea and ocean areas play a special role in terms of China’s stable peace, sustained stability and assured development. The traditional view that the land is more important than the sea must be overcome. The protection of maritime rights and interests is of extraordinary importance to China. China must develop a modern maritime military structure in accordance with its security and development needs to safeguard its sovereignty, maritime rights and interests. China must ensure the strategic conditions to develop itself into a maritime power.”15
Allison considers war between the United States and China a possibility.
“The stress created by China’s disruptive ascension has created the conditions whereby ordinary innocuous events can trigger a conflict of great magnitude. [...] If the trend continues, a catastrophic war between the United States and China in the coming decades has become not only possible, but more likely than we would like to admit.”16
Even if the Ukraine war now dominates the headlines, the increasing potential for conflict in Asia should not be lost from sight.
Unfortunately, most people find it hard to believe that wars are deliberately being provoked for the sake of domination and profit.
(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)
| * Wolfgang Effenberger, born in 1946, former officer in the German armed forces, is a committed author who has been working for peace since his first book “Pax Americana” “2004). In April 2022 “Die unterschätzte Macht: Von Geo- bis Biopolitik – Plutokraten transformieren die Welt” was published. Other books by him on the subject: „Wiederkehr der Hasardeure» (2014, co-author Willy Wimmer), die Trilogie „Europas Verhängnis 14/18“ (2018/19) and „Schwarzbuch EU & NATO“ (2020). |
4 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf
5 Cf. http://nssarchive.us/national-security-strategy-2017/.
7 Ibid.
9 “Because of ill-considered selfish actions taken by individual countries that use financial mechanisms to pass on their own macroeconomic mistakes to the whole world.”
10 https://www.wallstreet-online.de/nachricht/15617111-putin-wirft-westen-brics-gipfel-egoismus
11 https://tkp.at/2022/06/01/veto-aus-afrika-dieese-laender-blockierten-die-who-plaene/
12 https://tkp.at/2022/06/18/am-weg-zur-multipolaren-welt-die-neuen-G8/
13 Ibid.
14 https://taz.de/China-und-Indien-versus-G7/!5860823/
15 Quoted from Bernd Biedermann: The New Main Adversary. Massive Conflicts of Interest with China Emerge from U.S. Pacific Strategy as of 14 August 2019, at https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1124344.usa-und-china-der-neue-hauptgegner.html
16 Philipp Löpfe: The world’s most dangerous challenge: USA vs. China. Trade war and North Korea: The two superpowers are on a collision course. Are they trapped in the Thucydides Trap? https://www.watson.ch/wirtschaft/gesellschaft%20&%20politik/525357552-die-gefaehrlichste-mutprobe-der-welt-usa-gegen-china