Dear Editor,
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit and his meeting with President Ali followed one to China last month where he met President Xi Jinping. From the reports emanating after the latter meeting, Blinken’s goal was to convince the Chinese to accept the US’s position that competition was the defining characteristic of their relationship, and that they should work together to manage the competition to prevent it from veering into conflict. However, President Xi rejected the American premise and retorted: “Competition among major powers does not conform to the trend of the times, let alone solve America’s own problems and the challenges facing the world.” As the leader of a small state in a region that the US has considered its “backyard” since 1823, when it promulgated its “keep out” Monroe Doctrine, President Ali was forced to dance between the raindrops between these two extremes in his meeting with Secretary Blinken.
It was not even a subtext as an ABC correspondent explicitly asked President Ali if Guyana’s relationship with China was only economic or could it possibly become military. President Ali developed the message he had sent two days before to President Biden on the US Independence anniversary: “…my Government remains committed to deepening cooperation with the United States of America as our most strategic and valued partner.” He told the reporter, “We are a partner with many countries, and China is one of our development partners.” As such, he clearly defined Guyana’s relationship with China as economic – a “development partner”. However, he pointed out that in the economic arena, US corporations are not as “aggressive” as the Chinese ones. But they had discerned a change after the discovery of oil with the signing of a MOU with the US Exim Bank on a US$2 billion programme. The President candidly announced that borrowing costs would be a major criterion for accepting investment financing.
What is ironic about the US present contretemps with China is it of their creation. It started with President Nixon’s surprise trip to meet Chairman Mao in 1972; President Jimmy Carter’s diplomatic recognition in 1978, which kick started American investment in the country. This became a deluge after President Clinton facilitated China’s entry into the WTO in 2001. However, from a US$83B trade deficit in that year, which caused the loss of 1 million high-wage manufacturing jobs, this ballooned to a deficit of US$295 billion by 2011 with a loss of 5 million jobs. It was these job losses by predominantly White Americans in what became the “Rust Belt” because of abandoned factories, that led to the ideological shift culminating with President Trump’s jingoistic MAGA (Make America Great Again) bully pulpit.
Yet even with trade restrictions in the last decade – presently with advanced computer chips – because of the Chinese economic ‘aggressiveness” described by President Ali, the US trade deficit with China last year was US$382.9b – second only to 2018’s historic US$418b, making the US China’s largest trading partner. This distinction is shared by 124 other countries – compared to 76 having that relationship with the US. In 2006, the US was the largest trading partner of 127 countries.
But China’s rise has not only been economic but military. From 2000 to 2016, China’s military budget increased annually by about 10% annually before levelling off to a still high 6% annually reaching $230b in 2022, second only to the United States. This military spending, combined with the Chinese strategic Belt and Road Initiative that now ties large swathes of the globe in the Chinese sphere of influence, has been the trigger for the US security concerns about China. The last APNU government signed on to the B&I in July 2018, hence the ABC reporter’s question to President Ali.
Back in 2015 a Harvard professor looked at the rise of China as challenging the US, which was left as the sole superpower standing after the USSR collapsed in 1989 and analogized the situation to that faced by the ancient superpower Sparta confronting the rising Athens. He invoked the words of the historian Thucydides, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable,” to predict the same possibility in the present. But as another expert has pointed out, “war is a choice, not a trap.” However, President Xi’s refusal to accept the systemic effects of competition between two major powers is troubling since he does not concede the need for coordination – especially in flashpoints like Taiwan.
Sincerely,
Ravi Dev