Chronic. By the middle of the century, China is expected to be the world’s dominant economic power. For the first time in a long time, the heavyweight of the global economy will not be a democracy. The United States will endeavor to preserve their strategic preponderance and, in this test, they are counting on their allies, Europeans in particular. But these hesitate.
Drawn in very broad outline, the geopolitical scenario of the years to come should resemble this three-party game – which will come to complicate other players, and particularly the next economic giant which is announced: India.
But the salient fact of the international landscape, the one that concretes the horizon, will remain the American-Chinese battle. And President Joe Biden places American diplomacy in the continuity of a multifaceted rivalry with China. He follows in the footsteps of his predecessors, Barack Obama, strategic head, and Donald Trump, crazy spirit.
New US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made it clear on January 19: “There is no doubt that China is the biggest challenge for the United Statess clear that no nation-state has ever posed to them. “ Auditioned by the Senate, which confirmed his appointment, Blinken echoed the Trump team’s speech about China – on the situation faced by Uighurs and Democrats in Hong Kong, on Taiwan, on the half-truths in About the Covid-19 and the dispute in the China Sea, all against a backdrop of technological and economic confrontation.
The erosion of American “soft power”
The difference lies in the method. In the confrontation with Beijing, Trump, an ultranationalist with an oversized ego, wanted to act alone, when Biden wants to take on the traditional allies of the United States, starting with the Europeans.
The American president wants to bring together a summit of democracies. We do not really know what this assembly of the free world will look like. But Joe Biden is aware of the degraded image of the United States – a legacy of the Trump years and just as much, if not more, of the series of crises which, from 2003 (Iraq) to 2008 (Wall Street), eroded the soft power American, this ability to seduce by example.
In the Financial Times, political scientist Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former senior State Department official, gives the Biden team some good advice: “Act like she embodies new American leadership rather than going back to the old. “ Why ? Because Europe is starting to exist politically. Today we can see the outline of the beginning of a European consciousness. At least that is the conclusion of the opinion study conducted at the end of 2020 by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) among 15,000 nationals of eleven countries of the Old Continent.
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