The past few weeks have shown us all how quickly geopolitical certainties and strategies can collapse. Just a short while ago, Europe and China were adjusting their economic relationship in an investment agreement. And now the result of the negotiations – however you want to assess it – seems to have become a wastepaper because of mutual sanctions. At the same time, Americans and Europeans are reassuring themselves of the solidity of their alliance, knowing full well how different their interests are – also in their respective relations with China.
What is daily political nervousness, where do we see the signs of tectonic power shifts, and, above all, what conclusions should we Europeans draw from all this? The experienced foreign policy expert and convinced transatlanticist Sigmar Gabriel guides us and you in his essay “Farewell to the Atlantic”. Far-sighted and at the same time unsparing. I wish you an enlightening and, at the same time, informative read.
The election of Joe Biden as the new US president has raised many hopes in Europe and, above all, in Germany. Perhaps too many, because despite shared values, it is the different global interests that are causing Europe and the US to drift in different directions. It would be good if both sides were clear about this to prevent new disappointments. “America is back” also has a meaning that has more to do with the transformation of the United States under Barack Obama than with the continuation of old transatlantic traditions. If there is to be a renewed transatlantic alliance, it will have to deal with many things – but least of all with the Atlantic.
It was Barack Obama’s speech on the “Pivot to Asia” that impressively described the marker of the United States’ change of direction. The US, shaped by its transatlantic relations, had been aware for some time that it was increasingly becoming a Pacific Nation. A term that both George W. Bush and Barack Obama used prominently. As early as 2007, then-presidential candidate Obama wrote that he would “reshape the alliances, partnerships, and institutions needed to address common threats and enhance shared security” and, to that end, would also “build new alliances and partnerships in other important regions” that are precisely not NATO regions. In other words, the ties and alliances of the post-war world were no longer a matter of course, and not just since Donald Trump’s presidency.
However, the “Pivot to Asia” speech was not immediately followed by a change in US foreign policy: The US remained deeply involved in the conflicts in the Middle East, Russia’s foreign policy continued to challenge US attention and presence, and the planned reset in China policy failed. Obama’s successor in office then put the finishing touches to this by derailing the most strategically important US project in the Indo-Pacific: The previously negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), which was intended to draw a ring of firm US economic ties with all neighboring states around China to virtually hem in the “Middle Kingdom”. Therefore, Donald Trump’s cancelation of this agreement was probably the most stupid foreign policy decision the former US president has made.
In the meantime, China’s neighbors – including those like Australia, Japan, and South Korea that see themselves in a tough political confrontation with China and as security partners of the United States – have joined the new Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) free trade agreement. A project of China that has always seen itself as a counter-offer to TPP. Just as for the investment agreement between Europe and China, which was concluded at about the same time, the countries involved succumbed to the “Chinese temptation” because the return to US free trade agreements was considered more than unlikely, even after Trump was voted out of office. Freely according to the motto “The sparrow in the hand is more important to us than the pigeon on the roof”. Beijing’s leadership once again took advantage of the vacuum that the United States had allowed to develop in trade policy under Donald Trump. China is using these agreements to alienate the major economies from the domestically torn USA.
So Beijing has made good use of Donald Trump’s years in power. It benefited not first from what it had to offer other countries, but above all from what the US (and the West as a whole) was no longer prepared to offer. The Chinese Silk Road initiative “One Belt, One Road” was, of course, from the beginning a grand geopolitical strategy to gain political and economic influence in other regions of the world in addition to building an infrastructure for the export of Chinese goods. Not only China’s old “Eurasian” trade axes were revived in this way after centuries, but also the African continent is at the center of China’s geopolitics. Not least because of the anti-colonial tradition in many African states and the anti-American affect that often exists at the same time, China’s offers in Africa are not perceived primarily as an “exploratory strategy” and as a threat to its own sovereignty.
The frequently voiced European and American criticism of this Chinese geopolitical strategy was above all an indication of the lack of any strategy of its own and of any alternative to it. Where the European Union member states cannot even manage to ratify the Ceta free trade agreement with Canada in five years, one can hardly hope for a common Africa or Central Asia strategy. And even on its own doorstep, Europe is allowing the Belgrade-Budapest high-speed rail link to be built with Chinese, not European, help. From the perspective of the United States, this only shows the naivety and inaction on our side of the Atlantic.
And, of course, China is now using the absence of a joint offer of aid to the world’s poorer countries in the fight against the pandemic as an opportunity to expand its influence by supplying medical supplies and vaccines. The “medical Silk Road” follows the infrastructural one. The European “response” to this is to stop an agreed supply of vaccines to Australia – a mistake! At the height of the financial crisis, G-20 finance ministers immediately met in Washington to find a global response to the global crisis. There has been nothing like it since the outbreak of the pandemic. This is one of the reasons why Joe Biden’s announcement that he intends to put the global fight against the pandemic at the center of the G-7 summit soon to be held in London makes us sit up and take notice. Better late than never.
The first weeks of US President Biden’s term in office show that he is probably the first US administration to follow up Obama’s words about the “Pivot to Asia” with action. America will also be less European and more Pacific under Biden. Incidentally, the same applies to the UK, which is seeking new alliances with countries such as India, Japan, and South Korea following its exit from the EU. Unlike the US, however, it is at the same time trying to maintain a good relationship with China, at least economically.
The example of Saudi Arabia most clearly illustrates the change in American policy: Of course, the findings of the direct involvement of the Saudi crown prince in the murder plot against the anti-government journalist Jamal Khashoggi are not new. But the publication of the intelligence reports by the new US administration of President Biden is a signal of a change in American policy in several terms at once: The US is distancing itself significantly from its traditionally most important ally on the Arabian Peninsula – Saudi Arabia – because the old oil alliance between the two countries has lost its significance. The US has long since become independent of the region’s oil and gas resources, so there is no longer any direct national interest on the part of the United States in the conflicts in this region.
On the other hand, it is in the national interest of the United States to bring about a state of affairs that allows it to withdraw further from its military engagement in this region without creating a political vacuum that revisionist powers such as Russia, Turkey, or Iran would fill. One of the most important building blocks for this is a return to negotiations with Iran on giving up nuclear weapons, followed by talks on a changed security architecture in the Persian Gulf. The Khashoggi report is, therefore, at the same time, a signal to Tehran that the United States will not let Iran’s harshest critic – Saudi Arabia – prevent it from seeking ways to reduce the conflict with the Shiite regime. Europe’s most important neighboring region – the southern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East – is gradually slipping further down the US priority list. What this means for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, for example, is not yet clear. Above all, however, it is not apparent that an opposite development is emerging on the European scale of political challenges.
In view of USA’s geopolitical rivalry with China, Europe is not really a serious partner for the United States in its current state. Where no less than the world order of the 21st century is at stake for an all-party coalition in USA, Europe looks far more kindly on the Middle Kingdom. Even if human rights violations are currently often publicly cited in the US as a justification for opposing China, the geopolitical distribution of power in the 21st century is at the heart of the matter. The European view of China is quite different: Not least because Europe was never intended to be a geopolitical actor after the end of World War II and has never perceived itself as such, we Europeans and above all, we Germans do not see China as a strategic competitor, but rather as a kind of “frenemy”: as a political antipode, of course, because China is a dictatorship. But also as an indispensable economic partner. The views on both sides of the Atlantic could hardly be more different. But in Europe, too, some are now feeling the associated political dilemma for foreign economic policy – this applies in particular to Germany as an export nation.
The Trump administration’s idea that Western democracies must largely decouple their economies from China should force Europe and Germany and many other US allies to choose sides, for example, in the area of digitalization. For US security strategists, this is a perfectly conceivable development. Given the strong dependence of our prosperity on exports, however, this would be more of a horror scenario in Europe and especially in Germany, even if criticism of China’s unfair trade practices and human rights violations has also increased in recent years. In truth, however, no one – not even the self-appointed media advocates of Western values in this country – wants to take responsibility for the severe economic drag marks in the German economy, labor market, and social security systems that would inevitably follow a policy of decoupling from China.
Apart from that, the question must be allowed whether it is a realistic strategy to want to put a nation of 1.4 billion people like China “under house arrest”, so to speak. In the end, only China’s internal development will determine whether the country will liberalize politically over a long period of time. In any case, external pressure will not lead to success. How self-confidently China itself now deals with the issue of human rights is shown by its offense for its own global Chinese human rights dialogue: The focus here is not on the West’s individual rights to freedom, but on social rights to shared prosperity and social security. Citing its economic and social successes, China offers its political model of development to the world’s poorer countries in particular as an alternative to “Western rhetoric about individual human rights.” This shift in the arena of discourse may well be attractive to many authoritarian states in Africa and therefore affects EU efforts at mutual development cooperation on the African continent.
Confrontation or the parallelism of containment and cooperation – whatever the final outcome of the Biden administration’s deliberations on a new China policy, the two superpowers have no mutual trust and have been on a confrontational course economically and technologically for some time. And as much as the two countries differ in their view of the world, they agree on one thing: The world is entering a dangerous decade that will be marked by increasing rivalry between the two countries. That doesn’t necessarily have to come down to a military confrontation, as advisers to former President Donald Trump felt they had to predict. But preventing it will require active “management of this strategic competition”, as former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd put it.
Similar to the Cold War between the US and the West on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other, structures must be created that prevent an open conflict between the old and the new superpower. This would already go a long way in a rivalry that will otherwise be fought out fiercely in all other fields. In the field of monetary policy, where China wants to challenge the dollar as the dominant world currency. In the field of technology policy, where China will invest $150 billion in the development of artificial intelligence in the coming years. And in the field of social designs, where China’s leaders firmly believe that the era of the democratic West and its leading nation, the United States, is finally coming to an end. From infrastructure to the hunger for education, from investment in research and development and domestic polarization in many democracies to the storming of Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, from the UK’s exit from the EU to the catastrophic handling of the COVID-19 pandemic: For China, these are all evidence of the end of the European and transatlantic era and, at the same time indications of the superiority of the Chinese model of state and economy. Even the French debate about Europe’s strategic autonomy and sovereignty fits into this Chinese worldview.
There is still one area of global power politics where even China knows that its own capacities cannot keep up with those of the United States: military capabilities. Therefore, the next step is to further increase investment and modernize China’s military potential. The capacity building is intended to deter the US from military intervention in the event of a military conflict over Taiwan because this would involve too high a cost for the United States, and defeat cannot be ruled out. As a result, Taiwan would be left with only surrender or a hopeless struggle. One might argue that a country of 25 million people like Taiwan, with a well-armed army, would not surrender easily. Above all, however, the Chinese leadership’s calculation that the United States will only enter wars that it is highly certain to win could go astray. For the breach of American security guarantees vis-à-vis Taiwan would, of course, definitively shake political confidence in the reliability of the US among many other allies – with unforeseeable consequences for America’s role in the world. From these strategic discussions, one can quickly see how explosive the situation in the “China Sea” can quickly become.
At present, however, China fears that the new US president may well succeed in breathing new life into old alliances, thereby reviving the very multiplier of American power. The “bowling alone” policy of the US President-elect Trump, despite all the threats of tariffs and sanctions, would clearly have been preferable to the strategists of the CCP than a United States-led alliance of North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and one day perhaps even India.
For just as China’s capabilities and ambitions should not be underestimated, neither should the country be considered unassailable: It is surrounded by rivals, four of whom, after all, have nuclear weapons; it has trade conflicts not only with the United States, but also with Europe, Australia, and several other countries that now resist being too dependent on China.
At the same time, China also needs open markets, especially in the two most prosperous regions of the world: Europe and America. As much as the Chinese leadership is striving to develop its domestic market to exploit the enormous growth opportunities that exist there, technology transfer and economic cooperation with other markets also remain essential.
We do, then, have something to offer the Middle Kingdom, and we certainly do not have to put up with the Communist Party leadership there thinking that it can even send its banishing ray into the democratically elected parliament of Europe if there are critical voices there about the human rights situation in China. The consequence is likely to be that the European-Chinese investment agreement will be put on ice for the time being – and rightly so! The European Parliament will certainly not “reward” sanctions against individual MEPs by approving the investment protection agreement. There is a fundamental question at stake: Do we Europeans allow a foreign power to try to put freely elected MEPs under pressure? The answer can only be no! In addition to the offer of economic cooperation, there is obviously also a need for red lines.
Last but not least, China faces a massive demographic problem because by the 2030s at the latest, the decades-long one-child policy will mean that a declining number of working people will have to finance a significantly growing number of pensioners. China will have to invest a considerable part of its economic strength in its own country to avoid social unrest – and will have correspondingly fewer resources available for its foreign policy ambitions.
Strategic patience is one of the great advantages of Chinese politics. We can learn from it. In China, too, we know that, sooner or later, great powers in history are always shaken by external and internal tensions – both of which must be kept in view and under control.
Conversely, the Biden administration knows that it can only achieve a sustainable balance with China by recovering its own national economic and technological strength. This includes addressing growing social inequality and injustice in the United States because that will be the prerequisite for the majority of the electorate to accept a renewed American engagement with the world. The “Wilsonian Era”, as the American scholar Walter Russel Mead called it, came to an end in the US with Donald Trump at the latest, and it is not simply returning with Joe Biden.
It is no longer taken for granted that American international engagement or investment in international organizations is always in the well-understood interests of the United States. Or, as the new US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has put it: Any American engagement in the world will have to be measured by whether it serves the American middle class. The necessary spending on the United States’ international engagement – and this includes not least military spending – must therefore not come at the expense of domestic economic and social reform programs. No easy task for Joe Biden.
So if we Europeans have an interest in the US taking on the task of keeping the world order, and China in particular, in balance, because we rightly do not trust ourselves to do so, then we would be wise to do everything we can to keep the American President’s back up: by pursuing a common foreign and development policy in the Middle East and Africa, by funding a genuine alternative offer of infrastructure investment in Central Asia and Africa to compete with the Chinese ‘Silk Road’. Increasing efficiency and spending on European defense is also part of this, to relieve the US financially. And why not take unilateral steps to reduce trade barriers to, say, the American auto industry? All of this can help to show unsettled American voters that international partnership and cooperation also benefits them and is in their interest.
Above all, however, Europe must “gain weight” economically and technologically. Europe as a “civil power” can ultimately only gain international influence as a strong and innovative economic region and as the world’s most successful single market. Germany’s model of prosperity as a highly productive export nation is in particular danger. For it is based on technological leadership. Germany has been one of the winners of globalization for more than 20 years, not least because it has become the world’s “industrializer”. In mechanical and plant engineering, electrical engineering, the automotive industry, and many other sectors, our country was and is “Master of the Universe” when it comes to the products themselves.
However, for years, an ever-increasing share of value creation has been shifting from the product to the data platform. However, these are dominated by American and Chinese companies and not by a single European competitor. The platform economy has the potential to turn Germany into an extended workbench and push us to the end of the value chain. And relegation from the economic Champions League is followed by political relegation – also from the perspective of the United States.
But the US would also be well advised to make fair trade offers to its allies in Europe or the Indo-Pacific and to stop punishing them with tariffs or sanctions when there are differences of interest with allies in individual fields. In the end, the elimination of tariff or non-tariff barriers to trade, even in the 21st century, means that goods will also become cheaper for American consumers, that the international division of labor will enable higher productivity and thus higher wages, and that more money can be invested in education, infrastructure, and social security.
Suppose the point is that the transatlantic partnership should also serve to keep the world in balance in view of China’s increasing weight. In that case, the US and Europe face a very different challenge: The model of capitalism that is as deregulated globally as possible has become increasingly unattractive in recent years. Not only did the financial crisis of 2008/2009 unsettle large parts of the world’s developed democracies, but increasing inequality has long made the call for a fairer world order louder.
The COVID-19 pandemic will act as an accelerant in destroying the appeal of the previous “Western” model of globalization. For overall, the post-COVID-19 pandemic recovery is a story of the rich getting richer first, but very unevenly: The United States is overtaking Europe, the Chinese are overtaking other middle-income countries, and poorly governed low- and middle-income countries are coming under tremendous pressure because they do not have adequate resources to get their countries’ economies back on track. A k-shaped economic development is likely to emerge within Europe: The North will emerge stronger from the crisis and the South weaker than it started. Accordingly, the European and global distribution of income will develop dramatically in the coming years.
The globalization of the last 40 years has created great wealth in previously poor countries and regions. The clearest example of this is the rise of China, which was, after all, a direct consequence of a liberalized world order. Lifting 800 million people out of abject poverty and building a middle class of millions is evidence of a trend towards great global convergence. However, we are now witnessing a geopolitically far less stable world, with larger proportions of the population increasingly dissatisfied with the models of governance on offer. The world is no longer moving towards parity, as it has been by and large in recent decades. Even in poorer countries, there was a prevailing sense that they were largely “evolving” and becoming more equal. But as we know at the latest from polarization within the US and other democracies, changes in relative status can be as significant as absolute levels of wealth.
It already seems clear that the pandemic will make the gap between rich and poor much more of an ideological driver of geopolitical conflict in the future than it was even during the Cold War. The world’s democratic industrial states – especially the United States together with Europe and Japan – will either develop a more socially just form of global capitalism or lose the social competition with authoritarian offerings such as from China. Just as the second half of the 20th century succeeded in containing capitalism nationally through ideas of a social market economy, globally, this becomes a prerequisite for the attractiveness of the concept of liberal democracies. Setting this common goal could become the unifying element of the “old” transatlantic cooperation and the new alliances with the democracies of the Indo-Pacific. In any case, this would give Europe far more influence than the occasionally expressed idea of sending a few – to put it flippantly – gunboats there.
Europe’s most significant contribution to the summit of the D(emocratic) 10 planned by US President Joe Biden would therefore be proposals on the social shaping of globalization. It would also offer the chance to settle the strategic rivalry between the US and China within a clearly defined framework. A framework in which there are agreed parameters to which both must adhere to reduce the risk of an unintended military escalation. We know this from the Nato-Russia Act, where limited military cooperation is supposed to prevent imminent conflicts.
Such agreements can be developed over time. For example, through the contractual renunciation by both sides of cyber-attacks against each other or the renunciation of large-scale military maneuvers. And last but not least, renouncing nuclear weapons testing, nuclear disarmament, and joint control of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) with Russia. In economic and trade policy, this framework must be created by reforming the WTO. Getting China to the negotiating table would be one of the most important tasks that the United States should undertake, together with Europe and the Southeast Asian democracies.
Containing the risk of military confrontations and creating reliable rules would leave enough room for strategic competition in the field of economic and technology policy and the struggle for political influence in the world. At the same time, the military containment of possible conflict scenarios and the renunciation of confrontations of a kind of “Cold War 2.0” also open up cooperation in other areas. Examples of this would be international climate protection or the joint fight against the consequences of the Corona pandemic. These possibilities would be blocked if China and the USA were to face each other in a completely unregulated competition in which all forms of cooperation would be nothing more than mere “chips” on the playing field of geopolitical power struggles. It is unlikely that China will be willing to make far-reaching commitments to international climate protection while, on the other hand, being in constant confrontation with the United States.
There are probably quite a few who consider this path of “antagonistic cooperation” to be naïve. And for whom the moral criticism of China’s domestic situation and the way it deals with human rights comes up short. However, it must be pointed out to them that no international conflict has ever been resolved peacefully with a policy geared exclusively to confrontation. It may be a hard truth, but it is always better to manage a strategic rivalry than to allow it to become unpredictable.
The consequence of these developments will be that the US will place much more emphasis on its alliances in the Indo-Pacific than on its traditional alliances with Europe. Of course, with Joe Biden and the overwhelming majority of its congressmen, the US stands by NATO. But away from this rhetoric, which is pleasant to our ears, in practical politics the United States must invest its strength primarily in its partnership with India, Japan and Australia. Today, protectionist opposition on the left wing of the Democrats is probably too strong for a return to the TPP free trade agreement. Biden will avoid that conflict. But work is already underway on a new form of strategic alliance involving technology, trade, and military cooperation. And despite all the resentment toward Japan, South Korea is also likely to join this new partnership.
We Europeans would do well not to see this as a rejection but as part of a global power shift that we alone cannot balance. Paradoxical as it may seem, the United States’ turning away from Europe and towards the Indo-Pacific is in our own European interest. For we ourselves have no real influence in this Indo-Pacific parallelogram of forces. All the more, however, we Europeans will be reminded in the coming years by this global shift in power that we must finally “grow up” in foreign and security policy and assume more responsibility in our immediate European neighborhood.
In this sense, it really is a question of European sovereignty, so that we can also look after our own interests ourselves instead of always waiting for the US to take this task off our hands. This is where the end of convenience has been reached. But this is different from insisting on European “autonomy”. For without reliable partnerships and alliances, even a far more united Europe than we find today would not carry sufficient weight to keep the world in balance. Achieving both in equal measure – moving Europe towards greater resilience and self-reliance while renewing its alliance with the US and other democracies – are two sides of the same coin. It will be “the” political litmus test for our maturity and ability to act in the 21st century.
The past few weeks have shown us all how quickly geopolitical certainties and strategies can collapse. Just a short while ago, Europe and China were adjusting their economic relationship in an investment agreement. And now the result of the negotiations – however you want to assess it – seems to have become a wastepaper because of mutual sanctions. At the same time, Americans and Europeans are reassuring themselves of the solidity of their alliance, knowing full well how different their interests are – also in their respective relations with China.
What is daily political nervousness, where do we see the signs of tectonic power shifts, and, above all, what conclusions should we Europeans draw from all this? The experienced foreign policy expert and convinced transatlanticist Sigmar Gabriel guides us and you in his essay “Farewell to the Atlantic”. Far-sighted and at the same time unsparing. I wish you an enlightening and, at the same time, informative read.
The election of Joe Biden as the new US president has raised many hopes in Europe and, above all, in Germany. Perhaps too many, because despite shared values, it is the different global interests that are causing Europe and the US to drift in different directions. It would be good if both sides were clear about this to prevent new disappointments. “America is back” also has a meaning that has more to do with the transformation of the United States under Barack Obama than with the continuation of old transatlantic traditions. If there is to be a renewed transatlantic alliance, it will have to deal with many things – but least of all with the Atlantic.
It was Barack Obama’s speech on the “Pivot to Asia” that impressively described the marker of the United States’ change of direction. The US, shaped by its transatlantic relations, had been aware for some time that it was increasingly becoming a Pacific Nation. A term that both George W. Bush and Barack Obama used prominently. As early as 2007, then-presidential candidate Obama wrote that he would “reshape the alliances, partnerships, and institutions needed to address common threats and enhance shared security” and, to that end, would also “build new alliances and partnerships in other important regions” that are precisely not NATO regions. In other words, the ties and alliances of the post-war world were no longer a matter of course, and not just since Donald Trump’s presidency.
However, the “Pivot to Asia” speech was not immediately followed by a change in US foreign policy: The US remained deeply involved in the conflicts in the Middle East, Russia’s foreign policy continued to challenge US attention and presence, and the planned reset in China policy failed. Obama’s successor in office then put the finishing touches to this by derailing the most strategically important US project in the Indo-Pacific: The previously negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), which was intended to draw a ring of firm US economic ties with all neighboring states around China to virtually hem in the “Middle Kingdom”. Therefore, Donald Trump’s cancelation of this agreement was probably the most stupid foreign policy decision the former US president has made.
In the meantime, China’s neighbors – including those like Australia, Japan, and South Korea that see themselves in a tough political confrontation with China and as security partners of the United States – have joined the new Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) free trade agreement. A project of China that has always seen itself as a counter-offer to TPP. Just as for the investment agreement between Europe and China, which was concluded at about the same time, the countries involved succumbed to the “Chinese temptation” because the return to US free trade agreements was considered more than unlikely, even after Trump was voted out of office. Freely according to the motto “The sparrow in the hand is more important to us than the pigeon on the roof”. Beijing’s leadership once again took advantage of the vacuum that the United States had allowed to develop in trade policy under Donald Trump. China is using these agreements to alienate the major economies from the domestically torn USA.
So Beijing has made good use of Donald Trump’s years in power. It benefited not first from what it had to offer other countries, but above all from what the US (and the West as a whole) was no longer prepared to offer. The Chinese Silk Road initiative “One Belt, One Road” was, of course, from the beginning a grand geopolitical strategy to gain political and economic influence in other regions of the world in addition to building an infrastructure for the export of Chinese goods. Not only China’s old “Eurasian” trade axes were revived in this way after centuries, but also the African continent is at the center of China’s geopolitics. Not least because of the anti-colonial tradition in many African states and the anti-American affect that often exists at the same time, China’s offers in Africa are not perceived primarily as an “exploratory strategy” and as a threat to its own sovereignty.
The frequently voiced European and American criticism of this Chinese geopolitical strategy was above all an indication of the lack of any strategy of its own and of any alternative to it. Where the European Union member states cannot even manage to ratify the Ceta free trade agreement with Canada in five years, one can hardly hope for a common Africa or Central Asia strategy. And even on its own doorstep, Europe is allowing the Belgrade-Budapest high-speed rail link to be built with Chinese, not European, help. From the perspective of the United States, this only shows the naivety and inaction on our side of the Atlantic.
And, of course, China is now using the absence of a joint offer of aid to the world’s poorer countries in the fight against the pandemic as an opportunity to expand its influence by supplying medical supplies and vaccines. The “medical Silk Road” follows the infrastructural one. The European “response” to this is to stop an agreed supply of vaccines to Australia – a mistake! At the height of the financial crisis, G-20 finance ministers immediately met in Washington to find a global response to the global crisis. There has been nothing like it since the outbreak of the pandemic. This is one of the reasons why Joe Biden’s announcement that he intends to put the global fight against the pandemic at the center of the G-7 summit soon to be held in London makes us sit up and take notice. Better late than never.
The first weeks of US President Biden’s term in office show that he is probably the first US administration to follow up Obama’s words about the “Pivot to Asia” with action. America will also be less European and more Pacific under Biden. Incidentally, the same applies to the UK, which is seeking new alliances with countries such as India, Japan, and South Korea following its exit from the EU. Unlike the US, however, it is at the same time trying to maintain a good relationship with China, at least economically.
The example of Saudi Arabia most clearly illustrates the change in American policy: Of course, the findings of the direct involvement of the Saudi crown prince in the murder plot against the anti-government journalist Jamal Khashoggi are not new. But the publication of the intelligence reports by the new US administration of President Biden is a signal of a change in American policy in several terms at once: The US is distancing itself significantly from its traditionally most important ally on the Arabian Peninsula – Saudi Arabia – because the old oil alliance between the two countries has lost its significance. The US has long since become independent of the region’s oil and gas resources, so there is no longer any direct national interest on the part of the United States in the conflicts in this region.
On the other hand, it is in the national interest of the United States to bring about a state of affairs that allows it to withdraw further from its military engagement in this region without creating a political vacuum that revisionist powers such as Russia, Turkey, or Iran would fill. One of the most important building blocks for this is a return to negotiations with Iran on giving up nuclear weapons, followed by talks on a changed security architecture in the Persian Gulf. The Khashoggi report is, therefore, at the same time, a signal to Tehran that the United States will not let Iran’s harshest critic – Saudi Arabia – prevent it from seeking ways to reduce the conflict with the Shiite regime. Europe’s most important neighboring region – the southern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East – is gradually slipping further down the US priority list. What this means for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, for example, is not yet clear. Above all, however, it is not apparent that an opposite development is emerging on the European scale of political challenges.
In view of USA’s geopolitical rivalry with China, Europe is not really a serious partner for the United States in its current state. Where no less than the world order of the 21st century is at stake for an all-party coalition in USA, Europe looks far more kindly on the Middle Kingdom. Even if human rights violations are currently often publicly cited in the US as a justification for opposing China, the geopolitical distribution of power in the 21st century is at the heart of the matter. The European view of China is quite different: Not least because Europe was never intended to be a geopolitical actor after the end of World War II and has never perceived itself as such, we Europeans and above all, we Germans do not see China as a strategic competitor, but rather as a kind of “frenemy”: as a political antipode, of course, because China is a dictatorship. But also as an indispensable economic partner. The views on both sides of the Atlantic could hardly be more different. But in Europe, too, some are now feeling the associated political dilemma for foreign economic policy – this applies in particular to Germany as an export nation.
The Trump administration’s idea that Western democracies must largely decouple their economies from China should force Europe and Germany and many other US allies to choose sides, for example, in the area of digitalization. For US security strategists, this is a perfectly conceivable development. Given the strong dependence of our prosperity on exports, however, this would be more of a horror scenario in Europe and especially in Germany, even if criticism of China’s unfair trade practices and human rights violations has also increased in recent years. In truth, however, no one – not even the self-appointed media advocates of Western values in this country – wants to take responsibility for the severe economic drag marks in the German economy, labor market, and social security systems that would inevitably follow a policy of decoupling from China.
Apart from that, the question must be allowed whether it is a realistic strategy to want to put a nation of 1.4 billion people like China “under house arrest”, so to speak. In the end, only China’s internal development will determine whether the country will liberalize politically over a long period of time. In any case, external pressure will not lead to success. How self-confidently China itself now deals with the issue of human rights is shown by its offense for its own global Chinese human rights dialogue: The focus here is not on the West’s individual rights to freedom, but on social rights to shared prosperity and social security. Citing its economic and social successes, China offers its political model of development to the world’s poorer countries in particular as an alternative to “Western rhetoric about individual human rights.” This shift in the arena of discourse may well be attractive to many authoritarian states in Africa and therefore affects EU efforts at mutual development cooperation on the African continent.
Confrontation or the parallelism of containment and cooperation – whatever the final outcome of the Biden administration’s deliberations on a new China policy, the two superpowers have no mutual trust and have been on a confrontational course economically and technologically for some time. And as much as the two countries differ in their view of the world, they agree on one thing: The world is entering a dangerous decade that will be marked by increasing rivalry between the two countries. That doesn’t necessarily have to come down to a military confrontation, as advisers to former President Donald Trump felt they had to predict. But preventing it will require active “management of this strategic competition”, as former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd put it.
Similar to the Cold War between the US and the West on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other, structures must be created that prevent an open conflict between the old and the new superpower. This would already go a long way in a rivalry that will otherwise be fought out fiercely in all other fields. In the field of monetary policy, where China wants to challenge the dollar as the dominant world currency. In the field of technology policy, where China will invest $150 billion in the development of artificial intelligence in the coming years. And in the field of social designs, where China’s leaders firmly believe that the era of the democratic West and its leading nation, the United States, is finally coming to an end. From infrastructure to the hunger for education, from investment in research and development and domestic polarization in many democracies to the storming of Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, from the UK’s exit from the EU to the catastrophic handling of the COVID-19 pandemic: For China, these are all evidence of the end of the European and transatlantic era and, at the same time indications of the superiority of the Chinese model of state and economy. Even the French debate about Europe’s strategic autonomy and sovereignty fits into this Chinese worldview.
There is still one area of global power politics where even China knows that its own capacities cannot keep up with those of the United States: military capabilities. Therefore, the next step is to further increase investment and modernize China’s military potential. The capacity building is intended to deter the US from military intervention in the event of a military conflict over Taiwan because this would involve too high a cost for the United States, and defeat cannot be ruled out. As a result, Taiwan would be left with only surrender or a hopeless struggle. One might argue that a country of 25 million people like Taiwan, with a well-armed army, would not surrender easily. Above all, however, the Chinese leadership’s calculation that the United States will only enter wars that it is highly certain to win could go astray. For the breach of American security guarantees vis-à-vis Taiwan would, of course, definitively shake political confidence in the reliability of the US among many other allies – with unforeseeable consequences for America’s role in the world. From these strategic discussions, one can quickly see how explosive the situation in the “China Sea” can quickly become.
At present, however, China fears that the new US president may well succeed in breathing new life into old alliances, thereby reviving the very multiplier of American power. The “bowling alone” policy of the US President-elect Trump, despite all the threats of tariffs and sanctions, would clearly have been preferable to the strategists of the CCP than a United States-led alliance of North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and one day perhaps even India.
For just as China’s capabilities and ambitions should not be underestimated, neither should the country be considered unassailable: It is surrounded by rivals, four of whom, after all, have nuclear weapons; it has trade conflicts not only with the United States, but also with Europe, Australia, and several other countries that now resist being too dependent on China.
At the same time, China also needs open markets, especially in the two most prosperous regions of the world: Europe and America. As much as the Chinese leadership is striving to develop its domestic market to exploit the enormous growth opportunities that exist there, technology transfer and economic cooperation with other markets also remain essential.
We do, then, have something to offer the Middle Kingdom, and we certainly do not have to put up with the Communist Party leadership there thinking that it can even send its banishing ray into the democratically elected parliament of Europe if there are critical voices there about the human rights situation in China. The consequence is likely to be that the European-Chinese investment agreement will be put on ice for the time being – and rightly so! The European Parliament will certainly not “reward” sanctions against individual MEPs by approving the investment protection agreement. There is a fundamental question at stake: Do we Europeans allow a foreign power to try to put freely elected MEPs under pressure? The answer can only be no! In addition to the offer of economic cooperation, there is obviously also a need for red lines.
Last but not least, China faces a massive demographic problem because by the 2030s at the latest, the decades-long one-child policy will mean that a declining number of working people will have to finance a significantly growing number of pensioners. China will have to invest a considerable part of its economic strength in its own country to avoid social unrest – and will have correspondingly fewer resources available for its foreign policy ambitions.
Strategic patience is one of the great advantages of Chinese politics. We can learn from it. In China, too, we know that, sooner or later, great powers in history are always shaken by external and internal tensions – both of which must be kept in view and under control.
Conversely, the Biden administration knows that it can only achieve a sustainable balance with China by recovering its own national economic and technological strength. This includes addressing growing social inequality and injustice in the United States because that will be the prerequisite for the majority of the electorate to accept a renewed American engagement with the world. The “Wilsonian Era”, as the American scholar Walter Russel Mead called it, came to an end in the US with Donald Trump at the latest, and it is not simply returning with Joe Biden.
It is no longer taken for granted that American international engagement or investment in international organizations is always in the well-understood interests of the United States. Or, as the new US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has put it: Any American engagement in the world will have to be measured by whether it serves the American middle class. The necessary spending on the United States’ international engagement – and this includes not least military spending – must therefore not come at the expense of domestic economic and social reform programs. No easy task for Joe Biden.
So if we Europeans have an interest in the US taking on the task of keeping the world order, and China in particular, in balance, because we rightly do not trust ourselves to do so, then we would be wise to do everything we can to keep the American President’s back up: by pursuing a common foreign and development policy in the Middle East and Africa, by funding a genuine alternative offer of infrastructure investment in Central Asia and Africa to compete with the Chinese ‘Silk Road’. Increasing efficiency and spending on European defense is also part of this, to relieve the US financially. And why not take unilateral steps to reduce trade barriers to, say, the American auto industry? All of this can help to show unsettled American voters that international partnership and cooperation also benefits them and is in their interest.
Above all, however, Europe must “gain weight” economically and technologically. Europe as a “civil power” can ultimately only gain international influence as a strong and innovative economic region and as the world’s most successful single market. Germany’s model of prosperity as a highly productive export nation is in particular danger. For it is based on technological leadership. Germany has been one of the winners of globalization for more than 20 years, not least because it has become the world’s “industrializer”. In mechanical and plant engineering, electrical engineering, the automotive industry, and many other sectors, our country was and is “Master of the Universe” when it comes to the products themselves.
However, for years, an ever-increasing share of value creation has been shifting from the product to the data platform. However, these are dominated by American and Chinese companies and not by a single European competitor. The platform economy has the potential to turn Germany into an extended workbench and push us to the end of the value chain. And relegation from the economic Champions League is followed by political relegation – also from the perspective of the United States.
But the US would also be well advised to make fair trade offers to its allies in Europe or the Indo-Pacific and to stop punishing them with tariffs or sanctions when there are differences of interest with allies in individual fields. In the end, the elimination of tariff or non-tariff barriers to trade, even in the 21st century, means that goods will also become cheaper for American consumers, that the international division of labor will enable higher productivity and thus higher wages, and that more money can be invested in education, infrastructure, and social security.
Suppose the point is that the transatlantic partnership should also serve to keep the world in balance in view of China’s increasing weight. In that case, the US and Europe face a very different challenge: The model of capitalism that is as deregulated globally as possible has become increasingly unattractive in recent years. Not only did the financial crisis of 2008/2009 unsettle large parts of the world’s developed democracies, but increasing inequality has long made the call for a fairer world order louder.
The COVID-19 pandemic will act as an accelerant in destroying the appeal of the previous “Western” model of globalization. For overall, the post-COVID-19 pandemic recovery is a story of the rich getting richer first, but very unevenly: The United States is overtaking Europe, the Chinese are overtaking other middle-income countries, and poorly governed low- and middle-income countries are coming under tremendous pressure because they do not have adequate resources to get their countries’ economies back on track. A k-shaped economic development is likely to emerge within Europe: The North will emerge stronger from the crisis and the South weaker than it started. Accordingly, the European and global distribution of income will develop dramatically in the coming years.
The globalization of the last 40 years has created great wealth in previously poor countries and regions. The clearest example of this is the rise of China, which was, after all, a direct consequence of a liberalized world order. Lifting 800 million people out of abject poverty and building a middle class of millions is evidence of a trend towards great global convergence. However, we are now witnessing a geopolitically far less stable world, with larger proportions of the population increasingly dissatisfied with the models of governance on offer. The world is no longer moving towards parity, as it has been by and large in recent decades. Even in poorer countries, there was a prevailing sense that they were largely “evolving” and becoming more equal. But as we know at the latest from polarization within the US and other democracies, changes in relative status can be as significant as absolute levels of wealth.
It already seems clear that the pandemic will make the gap between rich and poor much more of an ideological driver of geopolitical conflict in the future than it was even during the Cold War. The world’s democratic industrial states – especially the United States together with Europe and Japan – will either develop a more socially just form of global capitalism or lose the social competition with authoritarian offerings such as from China. Just as the second half of the 20th century succeeded in containing capitalism nationally through ideas of a social market economy, globally, this becomes a prerequisite for the attractiveness of the concept of liberal democracies. Setting this common goal could become the unifying element of the “old” transatlantic cooperation and the new alliances with the democracies of the Indo-Pacific. In any case, this would give Europe far more influence than the occasionally expressed idea of sending a few – to put it flippantly – gunboats there.
Europe’s most significant contribution to the summit of the D(emocratic) 10 planned by US President Joe Biden would therefore be proposals on the social shaping of globalization. It would also offer the chance to settle the strategic rivalry between the US and China within a clearly defined framework. A framework in which there are agreed parameters to which both must adhere to reduce the risk of an unintended military escalation. We know this from the Nato-Russia Act, where limited military cooperation is supposed to prevent imminent conflicts.
Such agreements can be developed over time. For example, through the contractual renunciation by both sides of cyber-attacks against each other or the renunciation of large-scale military maneuvers. And last but not least, renouncing nuclear weapons testing, nuclear disarmament, and joint control of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) with Russia. In economic and trade policy, this framework must be created by reforming the WTO. Getting China to the negotiating table would be one of the most important tasks that the United States should undertake, together with Europe and the Southeast Asian democracies.
Containing the risk of military confrontations and creating reliable rules would leave enough room for strategic competition in the field of economic and technology policy and the struggle for political influence in the world. At the same time, the military containment of possible conflict scenarios and the renunciation of confrontations of a kind of “Cold War 2.0” also open up cooperation in other areas. Examples of this would be international climate protection or the joint fight against the consequences of the Corona pandemic. These possibilities would be blocked if China and the USA were to face each other in a completely unregulated competition in which all forms of cooperation would be nothing more than mere “chips” on the playing field of geopolitical power struggles. It is unlikely that China will be willing to make far-reaching commitments to international climate protection while, on the other hand, being in constant confrontation with the United States.
There are probably quite a few who consider this path of “antagonistic cooperation” to be naïve. And for whom the moral criticism of China’s domestic situation and the way it deals with human rights comes up short. However, it must be pointed out to them that no international conflict has ever been resolved peacefully with a policy geared exclusively to confrontation. It may be a hard truth, but it is always better to manage a strategic rivalry than to allow it to become unpredictable.
The consequence of these developments will be that the US will place much more emphasis on its alliances in the Indo-Pacific than on its traditional alliances with Europe. Of course, with Joe Biden and the overwhelming majority of its congressmen, the US stands by NATO. But away from this rhetoric, which is pleasant to our ears, in practical politics the United States must invest its strength primarily in its partnership with India, Japan and Australia. Today, protectionist opposition on the left wing of the Democrats is probably too strong for a return to the TPP free trade agreement. Biden will avoid that conflict. But work is already underway on a new form of strategic alliance involving technology, trade, and military cooperation. And despite all the resentment toward Japan, South Korea is also likely to join this new partnership.
We Europeans would do well not to see this as a rejection but as part of a global power shift that we alone cannot balance. Paradoxical as it may seem, the United States’ turning away from Europe and towards the Indo-Pacific is in our own European interest. For we ourselves have no real influence in this Indo-Pacific parallelogram of forces. All the more, however, we Europeans will be reminded in the coming years by this global shift in power that we must finally “grow up” in foreign and security policy and assume more responsibility in our immediate European neighborhood.
In this sense, it really is a question of European sovereignty, so that we can also look after our own interests ourselves instead of always waiting for the US to take this task off our hands. This is where the end of convenience has been reached. But this is different from insisting on European “autonomy”. For without reliable partnerships and alliances, even a far more united Europe than we find today would not carry sufficient weight to keep the world in balance. Achieving both in equal measure – moving Europe towards greater resilience and self-reliance while renewing its alliance with the US and other democracies – are two sides of the same coin. It will be “the” political litmus test for our maturity and ability to act in the 21st century.
