The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

Author:Edward Luce
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2017-06-01T12:43:10+00:00

PART THREE

FALLOUT

All under heaven is great chaos. The situation is excellent.

CHOU ENLAI

Though anyone with eyes should have seen it coming, the US–China war of 2020 still caught us unawares.† Within days of defeating Hillary Clinton, President-Elect Trump threw down the gauntlet to China. Not only did he accept a congratulatory call from Taiwan’s president, in itself a provocative departure, he also threatened US recognition of Taiwanese independence as a bargaining chip in his coming trade showdown. To be sure, Washington’s foreign policy experts instantly grasped how reckless this was. Since 1979, America – and most of the rest of the world – has accepted the ‘One China’ policy that entailed exclusive recognition of China. But the rest of us were slow to pick up on its implications. This was Trump messing with his Twitter account, we reassured ourselves. The system will guide him to a safer place once he takes office. Even after Trump delivered the most incendiary inaugural address in US history we still reached for our comfort blankets. Though Trump escalated his ‘America first’ rhetoric, vowed America would ‘start winning again’, and promised to ‘protect our borders from the ravages of other countries’, we knew his wasn’t the true voice of America. Americans prefer speeches that appeal to the ‘better angels of our nature’, as Abraham Lincoln did in 1861, or ‘pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend’, as John F. Kennedy promised a century later. If nothing else, public opinion would bring Trump around. Little did we notice that 51 per cent of Americans thought Trump’s speech was ‘optimistic’, and 49 per cent who saw it rated it as ‘good’, or ‘excellent’.1 Who was cherry-picking the news? Was it Trump? Or us?

Looking back on it, of course, the war now seems to have been inevitable. Though Trump reluctantly endorsed a ‘One China’ stance a few weeks after taking office, and welcomed Xi Jinping to his ‘Winter White House’ at Mar-a-Lago two months after that, the genie was already out of the bottle. Indeed, with a US destroyer at the bottom of the South China Sea and large-scale US strikes on China’s naval bases, we can feel lucky it did not turn into a global conflagration. We have Vladimir Putin to thank for that. Who else had the credibility in both Beijing and Washington to broker a cessation of hostilities? Regardless of what we think of Putin’s ways, no one would begrudge Russia’s president the Nobel Peace Prize. But for Putin, we might now be picking through the smouldering ruins of World War Three. Come to think of it, Trump’s cultivation of Putin looks to have been well ahead of its time. Moreover – and painful though it is to admit it – there may have been some method to Trump’s madness. Though he stumbled recklessly into it, the US and China were probably destined for a showdown at some point. Most of us no longer seriously question that the world’s future, and

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