In defense, trade, technology, media and diplomacy, among other areas, the rancor between the Trump administration and China\u2019s ruling Communist Party is worsening.<\/p>\n
The abrupt closure of China\u2019s consulate in Houston marks the latest incident in a rapidly escalating conflict between China and the United States.<\/p>\n
Future historians will probably focus on 2020 as the point when intensifying strategic competition between the United States and China turned into a new cold war.<\/p>\n
The administration is even weighing a blanket ban on travel to the United States by the 92 million members of China\u2019s ruling Communist Party and the possible expulsion of any members currently in the country, an action that would likely invite retaliation against American travel and residency in China.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019re in a dangerous and precipitous spiral downward, not without cause, but without the proper diplomatic skills to arrest it,\u201d said Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. The severity of the confrontation, he said, \u201chas jumped the wall from specific and solvable challenges to a clash of systems and values.\u201d<\/p>\n
Craig Allen, president of the U.S.-China Business Council, said he was alarmed by the increasing invective from two superpowers that together represent 40 percent of global economic output. \u201cIf we are yelling at each other and slamming doors, then the world is a very unstable place, and businesses are not able to plan,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Here is a look at what has happened in the past few years to exacerbate the tensions:<\/p>\n
In the case of the United States and China, the two powers are selectively but rapidly ‘decoupling’ from each other.<\/p>\n
Tensions are mounting by the day between the United States and China, leading to talk of a new Cold War. Analysts see important historical differences but believe the two powers are entering dangerous territory.<\/p>\n
US President Donald Trump’s administration has increasingly gone global against China, pushing other nations to reject its strings-attached aid and telecommunications titan Huawei, and siding unreservedly with Beijing’s rivals in the dispute-rife South China Sea.<\/p>\n
Trump has made China a major campaign issue as he heads into the November election, but the relationship looks unlikely to change in more than tone if he loses to Joe Biden, who has accused the president of not being tough enough.<\/p>\n
Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard University, said the world’s two largest economic powers were engaged in a long-term competition over “incompatible strategic visions”, including China’s desire to dominate Asia.<\/p>\n
China sees Trump as a “weak and error-prone leader” and likely believes the “disastrous” US response to the coronavirus pandemic presented opportunities to press its advantage, he said.<\/p>\n
“It resembles the US-Soviet ‘Cold War’ in certain respects, but it is not yet as dangerous as that earlier rivalry,” Walt said.<\/p>\n
“One key difference is that the two states are still closely connected economically, although that relationship is now under considerable strain.”<\/p>\n
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is taking stern warnings about Beijing around the world, did not reject the Cold War comparison in a recent radio interview.<\/p>\n
He also noted the US was never as economically intertwined with the Soviet Union, and said the West, therefore, needed to separate from China, especially its technology, which Washington fears will be used for espionage.<\/p>\n
The superpowers have articulated a lengthening list of grievances and almost no significant interests in common. Both are attempting to push third countries into an alliance system that would see the world carved into two decoupled blocs. Red versus Blue. With us or against us. Total confrontation. Basically the definition of cold war.<\/p>\n
Some policymakers and strategic studies analysts still hesitate to employ the cold war concept, wary of the analogy with the decades-long U.S.\/USSR conflict and its implications for international relations in the medium and long-term.<\/p>\n
But there is no doubt both countries increasingly see and describe the conflict in existential terms. If it looks like a cold war, and sounds like a cold war, it probably is a cold war, and the concept illuminates more than it hides.<\/p>\n
Name: Syed Tahir Rashdi<\/p>\n
Address: Shahdadpur, Sindh, Pakistan<\/p>\n
Student of BS Pakistan Studies at University of Sindh<\/p>\n
Freelance Writer Reviewer and Journalist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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