Opinion

Moves to address the decadent and dangerous balance of world power must be based on evidence

Control of raw materials, finance, science and technology at global level is contested, but the Global North still controls information, communications, narrative and military and arms expenditure

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and China's President Xi Jinping hold a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing last month. Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and China's President Xi Jinping hold a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing last month. Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
Paul Gillespie
Sat May 04 2024 - 06:00

“China and the United States should be partners rather than rivals; help each other succeed rather than hurt each other; seek common ground and reserve differences rather than engage in vicious competition; and honour words with actions rather than say one thing but do another. He proposed mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation as the three overarching principles for the relationship.” This is the Chinese summary of President Xi Jinping’s advice to the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken during their meeting in Beijing on April 26th.

The US State Department’s account said: “The Secretary emphasised that the United States will continue to use diplomacy to make progress in areas of difference and areas of co-operation that matter to the American people and the world as part of responsibly managing competition with the PRC . . . The Secretary addressed the PRC’s non-market economic policies and practices that distort trade or threaten our national security and raised concern about the global economic consequences of PRC industrial overcapacity.”

Blinken said: “China is responsible for one-third of global production, but one tenth of global demand, so there’s a clear mismatch”.

Reflecting on the Biden administration’s economic policies, the influential economic historian and commentator Adam Tooze notes the recent remarks on economic sanctions by Daleep Singh, before his appointment as deputy national security adviser for economics. Singh advocates targeted sanctions on China in pursuit of US interests and competition. But Tooze is concerned that the Biden team, led by Jake Sullivan and Blinken, “pay lip service to global prosperity, but see globalisation as undermining America’s middle class, opening the door to Trump and propelling the rise of China”.

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For Tooze this reveals “the contradiction that Washington is seeking to defend what it likes to call the rules-based international order with a series of unruly self-interested interventions. And it resorts to such measures because large parts of the US elite no longer believe in the optimistic historical vision that once framed those rules.” That is the “dark side” of the Biden administration’s US deep state, which is likely to carry over to any Trump administration.

All the more reason for the rest of the world to pay close attention to these US-Chinese exchanges. Europe, and other world regions and regionalisms such as Asean in southeast Asia, do not share this US determination to rein China in, even if they thereby become liable to arbitrary sanctions. And the Global South as a whole, consisting of its newly confident large state elites and more expectant populations, sees opportunities for greater leverage in exploiting US competition with China. All the more reason, too, that we should listen and learn from more outright critics of US and Global North policy who provide thought leadership to Global South leaders and audiences.

Prominent among such critics is Vijay Prashad, the Indian historian, author, journalist, commentator and Marxist activist. His latest of many books, co-written with Noam Chomsky, is The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of US Power. He is chair of the Delhi-based Leftword books and runs the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, which analyses world politics from a Global South perspective. The institute has just published a detailed study, Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage, which analyses how US power links in with the overall balance of power between the Global North and the Global South.

Prashad spoke about its findings at a lively session of the Roger Casement Summer School in Dún Laoghaire recently on the subject of a multipolar world. He disputes the notion of multipolarity understood as an established and more equal structural rebalancing of global power relationships. Rather there is a new contestation of US power across five key elements, exemplified by the US-China rivalry but within the continuing overall domination by the US of the Global North, including Europe. The foreboding sense of the West in decline or in danger – such a common theme among right-wing activists like Steve Bannon and British Conservatives, along with associated tropes of Christian/Islam, race-based and immigration conflict – should be understood in this context.

Control of raw materials, finance and science and technology at global level is indeed more contested, as Global South states, including China, resist US and European monopolies of access, knowledge and control, made easier by US-China competition. But the crucial areas of information, communications and narrative or story-telling are still firmly controlled by the Global North. And they show how the Global North, led by the US through the G7 and Nato, controls 75 per cent of world military and arms expenditure compared to China’s 10 and Russia’s 3 per cent.

For Prashad, such detailed empirical analysis must form the basis of radical action to change this increasingly decadent and dangerous balance of world power.