WASHINGTON – Sixty days after his administration, President Joe Biden got a taste of what the next four years might look like: a new era of bitter superpower competition, marked by perhaps the worst relationship Washington has had with Russia since the fall of Berlin wall and with China since it opened diplomatic relations with the United States.
It has been brewing for years, while President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China have taken sharp turns in the direction of authoritarianism. But it blew open this month after Biden agreed with the proposal that Putin is a ‘killer’ and the Chinese met with the United States for the first time since the adoption of the new government, reading aloud about the mistake of their arrogant view that the world wants to repeat their freedoms.
Much of it was visible on both sides, with cameras turning. All participants played for their domestic audience, including the Biden team. But it was not quite an act.
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Although the Cold War has not yet resumed – there is little of the nuclear threat of that era, and the current competition is about technology, cyber-conflict and influence operations – the scenes currently unfolding echo the bad old days. As a moment in theatrical diplomacy, the meeting between Americans and Chinese on Thursday and Friday in Anchorage, Alaska, recalled the fact that Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev made headlines worldwide 60 years ago by wearing his shoe on a desk of the United Nations and shouted at American imperialists.
But as veterans of the old Cold War would suggest, the superpower rivalry today seems little with the past. Putin himself lamented that Russia of the early 21st century is a shadow of the Soviet Union that trained him to be a KGB agent. The Russian economy is about as big as that of Italy. Its greatest power now is to disrupt and instill anxiety by using nerve substances such as Novichok to silence dissidents around the world or to harness its cyberbullying to keep deep in the networks that make the United States hum.
Despite all the economic weaknesses of his country, Putin has been very resilient in the face of increasing international sanctions imposed since taking over Crimea in 2014, which has accelerated after turning to nerve agents and cyber attacks. It’s hard to argue that they restrained his behavior.
Sanctions “are not going to do much good,” Robert Gates, a former CIA director and secretary of defense, said in a recent interview with David Ignatius of The Washington Post. “Russia is going to be a challenge for the United States, a national security challenge for the United States, and perhaps, in some respects, the most dangerous, as long as Putin is there.”
For the Chinese, who could still handle the failures of the Great Leap Forward when Khrushchev slammed shoes in a first meeting in Vienna and intimidated President John F. Kennedy, the story is drastically different.
The path to power is to build new networks rather than disrupt old ones. Economists are debating when the Chinese will have the largest gross domestic product in the world – perhaps by the end of this decade – and whether they can achieve their other two major national goals: building the most powerful army in the world and the race for key technologies against 2049, the 100th anniversary of former Communist President Mao Zedong’s revolution.
They may not stem from their relatively small nuclear arsenal or their expanding stockpile of conventional weapons. Instead, it stems from their growing economic power and how they use their government-subsidized technology to wire countries – whether Latin America or the Middle East, Africa or Eastern Europe – with 5G wireless networks designed to getting closer and closer to Beijing. It comes from the submarine cables that coil them around the world, so the networks work on Chinese-owned circuits.
Ultimately, it will come from how they use the networks to make other countries dependent on Chinese technology. Once that happens, the Chinese can carry out some of their authoritarianism by, for example, selling face recognition software to other countries that has enabled them to combat their differences of opinion at home.
That’s why Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, who was with Secretary of State Antony Blinken for the meeting with their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage, has warned in a series of writings over the past few years that it could be a mistake to assume that China intends to tackle victories directly by the U.S. military in the Pacific.
“The key premise of this alternative approach would be that economic and technological power is fundamentally more important than traditional military power to establish global leadership,” and that a physical sphere of influence in East Asia is not a necessary condition to maintain. such leadership. ”
The Trump administration came to similar conclusions, although only a few weeks before he left office did he publish a real strategy for dealing with China. Attempts to strangle Huawei, China’s national champion in telecommunications, and end control of social media programs such as TikTok were ultimately a disorganized attempt that threatened and angered allies who were thinking of buying Chinese technology.
Part of the purpose of the Alaska Assembly was to convince the Chinese that the Biden government is determined to compete across the board with Beijing to offer competitive technologies such as semiconductor manufacturing and artificial intelligence, though it means spending billions on government-led research and development projects and new industrial partnerships with Europe, India, Japan and Australia.
Biden alluded to this last month in his two-hour conversation with Xi and told him, paying tribute, that the Chinese story of the U.S. decline was badly wrong. But it will take at most months to publish a broad new strategy, and it is unclear whether the US or major allies will agree. “It’s not going to play out in a day or a week or a month,” said Kurt Campbell, the president’s largest Asia adviser, who is leading the strategic review. “It’s probably an attempt at multi-administration.”
Campbell was at the table in Anchorage, and was sitting next to Sullivan and Blinken, when the Chinese began to place the U.S. delegation in defense. They accused the United States of a ‘condescending’ approach, arguing that the country’s leaders have no right to teach others about human rights violations or the preservation of democracy. They talked about Black Lives Matter and the contradictions in an American democratic system that leaves so much behind.
“I do not think the vast majority of countries in the world will recognize that the universal values espoused by the United States or that the opinion of the United States can represent international opinion,” said Yang Jiechi, China’s most senior. diplomat, said in a lengthy statement during the opening of the session.
He added: “Those countries will not recognize that the rules made by a small number of people would serve as the basis for international order.”
The subtext of his message was that China would accelerate its efforts to dominate the forums that set the rules, whether the World Trade Organization or lesser-known groups that set technological standards.
In some of the forums, the Chinese have a new ally: the Russians, who are equally eager to reduce American influence and strengthen authoritarianism. The two countries increasingly share an affinity for a short-lived weapon of war that the United States is particularly vulnerable to: cyber-intrusions into the complex networks that are the lifeblood of the U.S. government and private industry.
The two major offenses in recent months, one of which is believed to be led by the Russians and the other by the Chinese, are examples of how the two countries have become much more sophisticated over the past ten years to use their digital skills for political purposes. .
They are learning to hack on an industrial scale, to prove that they can insert malware into systems on which the United States depends for daily living. The Russian hack into network management software made by a company called SolarWinds got them into about 18,000 private and government networks, of which they chose only a few hundred to extract data. Microsoft says it was a Chinese sanctions group that gained access to its Exchange servers, which are also used by tens of thousands of companies and government agencies.
The question is whether the two countries merely stole secrets and whether they had a different agenda: reminding US leaders to undermine their power and paralyze the country.
It is a mental race, just like the transport of missiles in the country during the Cold War. But it can also get out of hand.
Sometimes in the next few days to weeks, Biden’s assistants say, the United States will respond. Some of the answers will involve more sanctions. But Gates recently said, “I think we need to be more aggressive with our own cyber capabilities” and find creative ways to increase costs for U.S. opponents. Biden expressed similar sentiments during the transition.
The risk is, of course, known from the Cold War: escalation.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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