Viktor Orbán recently gave a speech in which he predicted that the United States will go to war with China to preserve its hegemony. Speaking of historical patterns, one of the strongest is the unwillingness of a dominant hegemon to cede wealth, power and influence to a rising challenger.
Wrong classification, unexpected consequences. But what happened has happened, and now the fact is that there has never been such a rapid and tectonic shift in the global balance of power as the one we are living through today. Remember – or note – that the way in which China is rising is different from that in which the United States rose: the United States emerged; China was, and is.
In other words, we are really talking about a return: we are talking about the return of a 5,000-year-old civilisation of 1.4 billion people. And this is a problem that needs to be solved, because it is not going to solve itself. China has become a production powerhouse. In fact it has already overtaken the US – or is overtaking it at this very moment: car manufacturing, computers, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, infocommunication systems; in the world today it is the strongest in all of these areas.
What has happened is that China has made the roughly three-hundred-year journey from the Western industrial revolution to the global information revolution in just thirty years. As a result, it has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, and today humanity’s combined prosperity and knowledge is greater than it was. But if this is the case, what is the danger? The danger, the reason the situation is dangerous, Dear Friends, is that the gold medal already has an owner: after its own civil war, from the 1870s onwards the United States grew to be the preeminent country, and its inalienable right to world economic supremacy is part of its national identity, and a kind of article of faith. And whenever that position has been challenged, the United States has always successfully repelled the challenge. It repelled the Soviet Union. And, let us remember, it also repelled the European Union.
A few decades ago the European Union’s plan was to promote the euro as a world currency alongside the dollar. We can see where the euro is today. And we also had a plan, which we expressed as the need to create a great free trade zone stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok. What do we see today? Today, the free trade zone stretches from Lisbon to the outskirts of Donetsk at the furthest. In 2010 the US and the European Union contributed 22 – 23 per cent of total world production; today the US contributes 25 per cent and the European Union 17 per cent. In other words, the US has successfully repelled the European Union’s attempt to move up alongside it – or even ahead of it.
In other words, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Summer Camp, the situation we are living in today is one in which day by day we are moving towards conflict. The question – the 1-million-dollar question – is whether this conflict can be avoided. There are ever more studies and books on this, and I am also working from them.
One notable work says that in the last three hundred years there have been sixteen occasions when a new “champion” has risen to pull alongside – or overtake – the world’s leading power. The bad news is that of the sixteen instances thus identified, twelve have ended in war, and only four were peacefully resolved. In other words, Dear Friends, we are at the most dangerous moment in world politics today, when the leading great power sees itself sinking towards second place. Experience shows that the dominant great power tends to see itself as more benevolent and better-intentioned than it really is, and attributes malice to its challenger more often than is – or should be – justified.
Consequently, the starting point for each opposing party is not the intentions of the counterpart, but its capabilities: not what the counterpart wants to do, but what it is capable of doing. And thus war is already in the making. This is what is called the “Thucydides Trap”, named after the man who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens, and who first identified the problem.
A war with China could solve another of problems.
First, we should have no doubt that America’s political class on both sides is dumb enough and reckless enough to go there, as Kevin McCarthy’s recent grand standing with the president of Taiwan illustrated. Saber rattling against China is one of the few issues that unites our elites.
Second, America’s domestic politics could soon get bad enough that our liberal elites might see a war with China and Russia as a way out. This is the road that FDR took when he got into the war with the Axis Powers because his policies had failed to get us out of the Great Depression.
Third, the liberal rhetoric of the global struggle of “liberal democracy” against “authoritarianism” is already being used to describe both domestic groups and foreign adversaries.
Finally, such a huge shift in global wealth and power rarely occurs without a major war and the war has already started over a year ago in Ukraine.
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