Diplomatic relations have never been worse with China, the destination of half of Australia’s exports. John West reviews the new book, China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New Global Order, in which Geoff Raby provides hard-hitting analysis and sharp proposals for getting this crucial relationship back on track.
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Something refreshing in the plethora of articles exploring the different dimensions of the current US-China tensions, Harvard Business School’s Andy Zelleke asks, “What ‘yesable proposition,’ fundamentally, is the United States offering China?” What might be the terms of a plausible U.S.-China equilibrium state?
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The fifth plenum of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s 19th Central Committee concluded on 29 October 2020. The gathering of China’s top leaders finalized the blueprint for China’s 14th Five-Year Plan, which will set China’s economic and social policy vision for the period from 2021-2025.
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The inability of the major powers to set new global rules has had a detrimental impact on an international system under significant strain. Linda Yueh argues for a new approach to economic diplomacy that considers not just economic considerations, but also broader foreign policy aims, greater transparency, and a pluralistic approach to global rules to strengthen the multilateral system.
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Serious calls for reform at the World Bank and the IMF first emerged 50 years ago. After 50 years, the absence of change in either policy or intellectual paradigm has been paralleled by the glaring lack of reform in the governing structures of the Bretton Woods twins. Perhaps this is the time for developing country governments to begin exploring an exit strategy? The IMF and the Bank would like the global South to believe that they are indispensable. They are not.
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Whether it is the West’s relative decline or the “rise of the rest,” the Eastward shift of geostrategic gravity is a reality. That reality presents major ideational and institutional challenges to the West’s domination of the international order. The challenge for international relations theorists and policy-makers is to demonstrate that Western-framed status quo versus revisionist analysis provides a disinterested assessment of “non-Western” institutional initiatives.
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Adam Tooze’s reflections on the significance of President Xi’s announced intention to take China to carbon neutrality by 2060 are replete with acute observations and valuable insights. The enormity of the climate challenge, and the looming titanic struggle over who will bear the costs, is clear from Tooze’s analysis.
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A victory for the incumbent will represent crossing a “tipping point”, beyond which “alliances may come to an end, the global economy could close, and democracy could go into rapid retreat”, Thomas Wright writes in a comprehensive analysis of the likely future foreign policy direction under either a Joe Biden or Donald Trump presidency. This is an important and informative analysis by a well-credentialled and intelligent observer of the contending camps struggling over foreign policy in the US.
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The coronavirus pandemic has thrown a harsh spotlight on the state of global governance. Faced with the greatest emergency since the Second World War, nations have regressed into narrow self-interest. The concept of a rules-based international order has been stripped of meaning, while liberalism faces its greatest crisis in decades. In this Lowy Institute publication, the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI)’s Bobo Lo argues that it’s time to rethink global governance and its priorities.
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Volker Perthes contemplates what might be the legacy of Donald Trump if he were to lose the November election. Should Joe Biden win the election, Perthes suggests, he will not be able to turn the wheel of history back to the Obama era. Instead, he would have to deal with – and have his presidency shaped by – a lingering Trump legacy.
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As a contiguous big country, China is always going to enjoy significant influence in Southeast Asia. But for precisely the same reasons, China is also always going to evoke anxieties. Countries on China’s periphery will therefore not allow themselves to be hemmed into an exclusive relationship no matter how dependent they are on China. Having lived in the midst of great power competition for centuries, the strategic instinct of Southeast Asia is not to align with any major power across all domains.
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The Trump administration’s China policies are explored clearly and succinctly in this working paper by the Brookings Institution’s Ryan Hass. While Hass describes the approach to China over the past four years as a Trump Administration (failed) experiment, he leaves no doubt that the nature and trajectory of US-China relations has now been reset, irrespective of who is the next president.
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An inconvenient truth often ignored or denied is that Chinese economic activities on the African continent are not worse than (and often not even as bad as) US or European activities in Africa. Clingendael Research Associate Sanne van der Lugt presents six persistent myths about China-Africa relations based on her own research experiences.
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Governments around the world are planning to produce about 50% more fossil fuels by 2030 than would be consistent with the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement pathways. What can be done?
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The U.S. has dominated the Pacific Ocean — sometimes called an “American lake” — since the end of World War II. Suddenly Americans have a competitor, although it is a rivalry that routinely gets overblown. China’s major thrust is economic, through its massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), not military.
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“The coronavirus pandemic won’t automatically lead to reforms. Great upheavals only bring systemic change when reformers have a plan—and the power to implement it”. In this essay, Sheri Berman analyses historical crises and suggests why they may produce or fail to produce transformational change. The essay has a US focus and deals with the potential for systemic change to follow the coronavirus pandemic crisis, but the analysis could also help in understanding why the global warming crisis is failing to produce transformative change on the scale that is needed.
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Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere are at record levels, and emissions that saw a temporary decline due to the pandemic are heading towards pre-COVID levels, while global temperatures continue to hit new highs, according to a major new UN report. UN Secretary-General António Guterres emphasized that there is “no time to delay” if the world is to slow the trend of the devastating impacts of climate change.
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The current European Commission has set the defence and reform of multilateralism as one of its key priorities. In this ideas paper from the EU Parliament’s Research Service, Elena Lazarou tackles the question of how to achieve the EU’s objective in an environment where coronavirus has exacerbated the struggle to uphold multilateralism in a climate of growing nationalism, protectionism and rising great power competition.
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Xi Jinping’s Leninist calculus has contributed to China exhibiting both reformist and positionalist forms of revisionism simultaneously, both of which contain pathways toward revolutionary revisionism. The combination of reformist and positionalist forms of revisionism has significant implications for thinking about the future trajectory of Sino-US competition.
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Revisionism as a strategy in international politics, and China’s revisionism in particular, however is not the “all-or-nothing” proposition portrayed by US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. A more accurate understanding of the factors that have driven Beijing’s transition between different types of revisionist behaviour suggests that rhetoric such as Pompeo’s will merely reinforce China’s move toward more problematic revisionist behaviours.
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