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View all search resultsASEAN at crossroads: NAM has no alternative
Strategic decoupling between the biggest manufacturer of American goods, China and its largest consumer, the US seems inevitable.
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s the present world order weakens, the mega confrontations have appeared more likely: On its post-Soviet revival quest, Russia becomes increasingly assertive in Euro-Mediterranean theatre and beyond. The Sino-American relations are increasingly adversarial, with escalating frictions over trade, advanced technology, human rights, and global strategic influence.
Currently, both sides – as president of the United States Council of Foreign Relations Richard Haass states “are developing scenarios for a possible war”. The two countries rhetoric has grown so hostile that its speed and severity is unprecedented for the post WWII period, rather belonging to the forgotten vocabulary of 1910s and 1930s.
(E.g. referring to China as “country of kung flu” or to the US as “trigger happy nation”, calling the COVID-19 “China virus” or “US Army brought pathogen”, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman referring to the US leadership as “elements deluded by the Capitol Hill metastasis” while the US state secretary calls the Chinese Communist Party “rogue actor”, and then in return Secretary Pompeo gets proclaimed as “the public enemy of mankind” – just to name but few from the long list of heavy verbal fire exchanges between the two.)
Strategic decoupling between the biggest manufacturer of American goods, China and its largest consumer, the US seems inevitable. It also appears increasingly irreversible, no matter if the change of leaders in Beijing or in Washington may or may not happen beyond 2020. This will of course trigger a global realignment and new fragilities on a default lines on land and seas, in skies, cyberspace and near outer space.
It was expected that by the end of 2020s, Asian economies will be larger than the rest of world’s economies combined. Of course, that was only a prediction made before COVID-19 and the sudden Sino-American rift. Or this was the origin of that rift? It is still to be seen.
Past the demise of global communism, many in Asia enjoyed for decades, the best of both worlds: Cheep products from China and the military protection (or at least an implicit security guaranty) from the US, nearly for free. This especially goes to the southeaster Asia (formerly representing the mayor Asian default line), large sways of south Asia and the Far East.
