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View all search resultsChina's turn to play a leader again
The hope is that North America and Europe will be drawn closer to the Asia-Pacific in order to both complement and balance Chinese power in this part of the world.
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C
hina must use its domestic emergence from the coronavirus pandemic to resume its leadership of international affairs in partnership with other global stakeholders. This is but natural, because attention turns to how winners and losers can come together to create a new world order, and a new equilibrium, in the aftermath of great wars.
World War I resulted in the formation of the League of Nations, which was meant to prevent the next global conflict. That attempt proved unsuccessful, but World War II led to the durable creation of the United Nations and of Bretton Woods institutions, namely, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
They helped to keep the global strategic and economic peace even amid the nuclear contest of wills between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Institutions matter in the preservation of international peace and stability following a period of intense conflict.
China’s rise over the last three decades, capped off by the coronavirus pandemic, is one such period. True, COVID-19 is not conventional war. However, it is war nevertheless and has accelerated existing geopolitical trends. The pandemic has attacked nations at will, hardened economic and social borders among them and led to the threat of a general retreat from globalization. That was also the case in the two defining wars of the 20th century.
In the 21st, a virus has wrought social destruction comparable to the physical devastation produced by artillery, naval, air, biological and chemical attacks. While the enemy this time is not human, humans have suffered, and are suffering, from epidemiological violence comparable also to the 1918 influenza pandemic that scarred global society in its time. A century later, COVID-19 reminds us that war can take many forms.
Peace calls for rapprochement, the rebuilding of broken bridges and the quest for new horizons and a new equilibrium. And this is where China comes in.
COVID-19 originated in Wuhan. After an initial period of hesitancy, the leadership in Beijing decided to treat the new disease as not only an attack on a city or a province but also an attack on China and its place in a globalizing world. That decisive response has created a situation today in which China is faring largely well in its fight against COVID. Indeed, it is doing much better than some of its rivals in the developed world, including the United States.
