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Beijing is winning the world’s new Cold War - by Greg Sheridan for The Australian - 15.04.23

Writer's picture: Michael JulienMichael Julien

The Cold War 2.0, if that’s what we’re living through, has taken a very bad turn for the US and its allies, including Australia. Over the past few weeks China has won every encounter.


The Cold War 2.0, if that’s what we’re living through, has taken a very bad turn for the US and its allies, including Australia. Just now, we’re losing. Over the past few weeks China has won every encounter, strongly advancing its interests and its authoritarian world view, making tangible progress in undermining the US alliance system. The Western world, led by the US, has gone backwards.


If this were a rugby league match, China has just scored three quick tries. We shouldn’t trivialise this, of course. There’s a deadly strategic competition under way and we’re doing poorly.


The global situation today is not quite a full-blown cold war. The two sides, the US-led nations and the China-led nations, trade with each other much more than the West ever did with the Soviet Union and its dependants.


But trade isn’t necessarily destiny. In recent weeks Beijing has completely encircled Taiwan militarily and conducted mock bombing raids, in practice, and perhaps rehearsal, for a full-scale blockade. It has demonstrated unprecedented influence in the Middle East, once US-dominated strategic real estate, in broking a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, then hosting a pivotal meeting of the two adversaries’ foreign ministers.


Most important, it convinced French President Emmanuel Macron to shatter NATO unity and distance Europe from US strategic policy. Macron’s dismaying words have led even the most stalwart US politicians to question why the US is making such an effort to help European security, if Macron wants to spit in their faces.


To top off a season of bad news, there has been a catastrophic leak of more than 100 highly sensitive US intelligence files. These show greater weakness in Ukraine’s military position than was thought. They also indicate that US intelligence has deeply penetrated the Russian military organisation and government, which means many American agents could well be identified and killed. The documents suggest the US is spying on its allies and that Egypt, a US ally, planned to secretly sell 40,000 rockets to Russia.


Meanwhile, internal US polarisation proceeds along destructive lines, with a partisan Democrat District Attorney in Manhattan charging former president Donald Trump with absurdly trivial offences and having the, probably desired, effect of pushing Trump to favouritism in the Republican presidential primary. Joe Biden, who has shown strategic drift everywhere but Asia, seems determined to run again so that the 2024 presidential election could offer Americans, and in a sense the world, the same dismal Biden-Trump choice it had in 2020: the lame versus the insane.


Trump, meanwhile, gave a characteristically bizarre TV interview in which he extolled the virtues and great qualities of China’s Xi Jinping, saying there was no one in Hollywood charismatic enough to play the Chinese dictator.


It was also revealed that Beijing is infiltrating spies into Britain by gaining admission to third countries and using visa-free entry from those countries to the UK. China and Russia are conducting ever more of their burgeoning trade in renminbi and roubles in an effort to diminish the US dollar as the currency of global trade. Already they conduct more than a quarter of two-way trade this way.


Beijing announced it appointed a new Catholic bishop to head the Catholic Church in Shanghai, without any consultation with the Vatican. This humiliates Pope Francis and makes a mockery of the Vatican’s deal five years ago with Beijing aimed to normalise the legal position of Chinese Catholics, and allow the Vatican, subject to a veto on choice from Beijing, to appoint more bishops who could then ordain priests.


In exchange for refusing to criticise China over human rights, and refusing to defend heroic underground Catholics in China or public ones in Hong Kong, the Vatican has got precisely nothing except contempt from Beijing. The point is there’s no institution in the world that Beijing recognises as having any moral authority at all other than the Chinese Communist Party. It’s impervious to moral pressure. No amount of pre-emptive surrender, a la the Vatican, produces any better result.


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Greg Sheridan is The Australian's foreign editor. His most recent book, Christians, the urgent case for Jesus in our world, became a best seller weeks after publication. It makes the case for the historical reliability of the New Testament and explores the lives of early Christians and contemporary Christians. He is one of the nation's most influential national security commentators, who is active across television and radio, and also writes extensively on culture and religion.

A China Coast Guard ship sails towards the zone where China said it would conduct live fire exercises northeast of Pingtan island, the closest point in China to Taiwan.





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