Washington is full of hawks, besieging China is not a long-term strategy
(The Financial Times, March 9, 2023)
Let’s do a thought experiment.
If Taiwan didn’t exist in this world, would the US and China still be at odds?
In my hunch, they were in conflict. The antagonism between the hegemonic and the emerging powers is part of human history.
A follow-up brain teaser is whether such tensions would persist if China were a democracy rather than a one-party dictatorship.
The answer to this isn’t so easy, but it’s hard to say that an elected government in China would lessen anger at the US-led world order.
And it’s hard to imagine the US happily sharing the spotlight with China.
The U.S.-China Conflict Is No Longer absurd
From this, it seems that the US-China conflict is no longer a ridiculous story.
National character does not change easily. China, as its name suggests, is a kingdom in the middle, and it wants to make amends for an era when it was humiliated by the West.
The United States, on the other hand, is a dangerous country looking for monsters to defeat. Both act according to their type.
The question is whether the world can remain stable in a situation where both countries insist they must succeed.
War, not friendly consensus, is most likely to replace today’s stalemate between the United States and China.
Chinese President Xi Jinping recently went even further and singled out the United States as being behind China’s “containment,” “encirclement,” and “repression.”
It was a provocative remark, but strictly speaking, it was not wrong.