Opinion | Joe Biden’s ‘decisive decade’ may include a US-China conflict that no one wants
- Washington’s policy shift on China, instigated by Trump, has only grown more pronounced under Biden, who has taken pains to shore up US alliances
- With the US also threatening Beijing’s red line on Taiwan, retaliation is all but inevitable
I used to think otherwise; I figured it would take quite some time for the Sino-American rivalry to produce any tangible results.
After all, there were some 70 years between when the US caught up with the UK in terms of GDP based on purchasing power parity, in the 1870s, and the 1940s, when it effectively took over leadership of the world. When the former Soviet Union locked horns with the US after World War II, it challenged and sometimes seemed poised to topple Washington’s supremacy before collapsing itself four decades later.
So it would be reasonable to assume that China – having overtaken Japan as the world’s second-largest economy in dollar terms and the US in purchasing power parity terms in the early 2010s – would have to continue to labour until at least the middle of this century to arrive at “the centre of the world stage”, or, as America hopes, to become exhausted in its own twilight years.
But things seem to have been moving at an accelerated pace since Biden dislodged Trump from the White House in January 2021.
