By Prof. Silverio Allocca (DIPLOMATICINFO.COM GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST).
China announced the replacement of Foreign Minister Qin Gang, a couple of months after President Xi Jinping’s former favorite disappeared from the public scene.
China’s state news agency Xinhua said Tuesday that the country’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, removed Qin and replaced him with the country’s most senior diplomat, Wang Yi, his predecessor as minister. The somber statement provided no further details.
I would say that the explanation for this choice is immediately obvious: Qin Gang has been the great absentee at Kissinger’s meetings in Beijing, probably because in recent months he has represented the hard wing of Chinese foreign policy, either out of strategic necessity or because of that shortsightedness that does not dwell only in the West.
This substitution, in my view, represents a clear signal to the U.S. establishment that reinforces the reading of the recent diplomatic mission of Henry Kissinger, the 100-year-old former U.S. Secretary of State, amply documented by an article recently in ofcs.report (available in 12 languages) with the significant title “Kissinger meets Xi Jinping: a new Yalta?”.
Henry Kissinger, a controversial leading figure in U.S. politics for much of the 20th century, has repeatedly stigmatized the lack of foresight in U.S. policy over the past 30 years, a policy that over the past two administrations, Donald Trump’s and J. Biden’s current administration, has repeatedly demonstrated a total lack of programmatic capacity worthy of the name.
Confirming this judgment we have:
1) the unsuccessful handling of the whole Ukrainian affair, which stands out as one of the most resounding flops of White House foreign policy, with the American neocons finally being forced to confront the – evident from the outset – total impossibility for Ukraine to defeat Russia. Not to mention the support given to an insignificant, vainglorious, incompetent showman who is not given to understand by what lucky grace he received (as indeed can be said of many of the political figures who over the years have animated and still animate the media catwalks of the Western political vanguard, from Trump to Boris Johnson, from Giorgia Meloni to the very disappointing Ursula von der Leyen herself) ascension to the rank of President of Ukraine;
2) the dispute with Beijing, among others, over the Taiwan issue. The real problem is that we are consistently faced with a president who is manifestly incapable of grasping the significant weight of a couple of decidedly non-negligible elements:
a) U.S.-Taiwan relations are governed by the Taiwan Relations Act, which does not provide for the automaticity of U.S. military intervention: everything must, in fact, be concerted by the President of the United States and Congress, which means that Biden’s repeated statements regarding the certainty of prompt and immediate U.S. military intervention on Taiwan’s side in the event of an attack by China are simply boutas, statements useful for reassuring allies and not the manifestation of a changed strategic line in Washington. Confirming this reading is an article by Kevin Liptak, Donald Judd, and Nectar Gan, written for CNN on May 23, 2022 and published with the significant headline “Biden says U.S. would respond ‘militarily’ if China attacks Taiwan, but White House insists there is no change in policy,” which underscores the need for a reminder of the reality of the facts of a president dimly aware of an inescapable truth That of the real risk of putting at stake, by his repeated ill-considered attitudes (unfortunately interpretable, true or false, as indicative of a surreptitious willingness allegedly shared by certain -undefined and undefined- circles of the American establishment, to abandon the so-called “policy of strategic ambiguity” toward Beijing), not only himself but his own country by involving it in a war that it could never win as the military balance is rapidly shifting in favor of China. Not to mention that even should it not come to that, the mere consideration of a potential backtrack exposes the U.S. to an image damage equal-if not greater-than that already largely ‘earned’ by the U.S. on the ground in July at the Vilnius NATO summit, when Biden himself was forced to say NO! to Ukraine’s entry into NATO;
b) Henry Kissinger’s recent non-extemporaneous trip to Beijing with all that follows strategically in light of the need for Washington to quickly surrender to the impossibility of further relying on the possibility of building a U.S.-led unipolar New World Order
c) the U.S. national debt, recently ‘addressed’ and ‘solved’, so to speak, by simply raising the planned ceiling: a debt whose burden is likely to fall entirely on the shoulders of U.S. taxpayers in the near future, given that the U.S. dollar will soon cease to be the sole reference currency for all trade transactions involving energy sources and raw materials.
Although the issue of the U.S. debt is a rather complex matter that as such requires extensive study in an appropriate forum, it is nonetheless worth making a reflection here that argues in favor of a change in the White House’s attitude in the near future, a change characterized by the assumption of dutifully less rigid tones since ideological proclamations may at most prove useful, strictly pro tempore, to inflame the spirits of simpletons and proselytize among nationalists of any political tendency, while real politics has always been something else, as evidenced by the recent call to order by part of the business community to U.S. warmongering circles.
Those circles that, in the throes of national security fears, have recently forced the country away, blatantly damaging in all respects, from far more logical and productive pragmatic thinking.
In this sense, it is more than fair to assume that Qin Gang’s departure from the Chinese Foreign Ministry occurred, at least philosophically, as a result of calls to reality aimed at the Chinese establishment quite similar to those in the United States that motivated the CEOs of Intel and Nvidia to urge Biden to ease China’s semiconductor-related sanctions because this is causing the two high-tech giants billions in profit losses due to the peremptory ban on selling their advanced technology to the likes of Chinese customers such as Huawei, DJI, Hikvision customers that affect the multi-billion-dollar revenues of the aforementioned U.S. companies annually.
Incidentally, in the specifics of the industry, eight years of Trump- and Biden-style veteran-nationalist populist rhetoric has produced damage that is nothing short of irreversible, as the reckless political handling of the Sino-US dispute has prompted Chinese semiconductor companies to act swiftly to fill the vacuum created by Beijing’s imposition of a “do-or-die” scenario, under the blatant illusion that this “strategic” move would force China into an unconditional surrender, which in fact not only did not happen, but put America in the unfortunate position of now having to try to outdo China with innovation and low prices (two courses of action that the Fed-imposed rate hike hinders in no small measure).
This, by the way, is one of many examples that demonstrate how sanctions, tariffs and other forms of economic coercion that cause inflation and reduced productivity not only do not solve the problems on the table, but open the way to much more onerous problems that threaten to plunge the world into a global war with apocalyptic implications.
As I am wont to say, the politicians who are truly harmful to a country are those who act on the basis of ideological delusions, not those who set their governing actions by being guided by logical thinking and pragmatism.
In light of these considerations, it must be said that while the possibility of a new détente in relations between Beijing and Washington puts the world in the happy position of being able to breathe a sigh of relief that the possibility of a dangerous military escalation has been averted, it does not represent positive news for those who have so far shown that they want to free themselves from the yoke of the cumbersome U.S. leadership, that is, that they want to take advantage of the dispute between China and the United States to gain the visibility and political autonomy they have long sought.
I am thinking of India, but also of several Arab and South American countries and France itself, which from the game of the aforementioned opposition have well hoped to take different advantages by choosing to gravitate to the orbit of one or the other Great Power, or to promote a third, as in the case of the Elysée.
These and many other countries are not mentioned not so much because of their, at the moment, marginal importance, but rather because of the prudential choice made by them in favor of a low profile while waiting for the unraveling of the mists to glimpse the choice, however strictly gregarious at the moment, that is most appropriate.
Indeed, a new course in Sino-US relations could lead to the reconstitution of a planetary duopoly similar to that of the Cold War days, which was unprofitable for all but the major geopolitical players in the field.
In such a context, the fate of Russia and old Europe is not reflected in any of the patterns of the past. The question is, will Russia and the European Union be able to foster a cooperative pact that will enable them to rise from the ashes of the current conflict?
At the moment it is not known, so all that remains is to await events.
Play and Lead with Sahabet