US-China Conflict

US President Joe Biden’s biggest promise on foreign policy during the campaign trail
was to revive the liberal international order. Biden has so far taken a few steps in this
direction. He has brought the US back into the Paris Agreement. He has restored his
country’s membership in the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Human
Rights Council. On the other hand, he has made some important moves toward
establishing closer relations with Asian and European allies. This resurgence of
institutionalism, however, is not limited to the fulfilment of US commitments to Asian
and European allies that were broken during Trump’s presidency, nor to the country’s
reconnection with international institutions. It also includes integrating powers
capable of competing with the US, and especially China, into the liberal institutional
order. This would obviously be a strategic move and would not mark the end of the
US-China rivalry. The US needs to cut China in on the rewards of the liberal
international order, and China, in exchange, must accept US leadership and obey the
norms and rules that constitute this order. The US, understandably, wants to wage its
(now inevitable) hegemonic struggle with China on its own terms. The US reckons
that it could thus fend off China’s rise before it becomes an open challenge or without
triggering a cold/hot conflict, or at the very least that it could avoid a sharp and rapid
downfall by protracting its relative decline against China. And, most fundamentally,
the US is expected to maintain its leadership status in international politics for a little
while longer.

Realism, liberalism, and grand strategy

This fundamental divide naturally results in the US employing various strategies

against China, a state with the potential to pose a threat and a challenge to US
leadership. A US president with liberal views, such as Biden, is expected to employ a
strategy that not only seeks to incorporate China into the liberal institutional order but
in the meantime offers its adversary some leeway and flexibility commensurate with
its strength. It would be appropriate to call this a “win-win” formula focused on
emphasizing common interests. Realists like Trump, however, do not like this
formula. They are more concerned with relative gains. They care about differences,
not commonalities. They consider even the slightest gain obtained by an opponent to
be a loss. Accordingly, the US strategy towards China is to disrupt the international
institutional order that enabled China to thrive in the first place and to contain China
by a variety of means, including the use of force.

Trump remained true to his principles and, despite all the criticism, followed this
realist strategy to a large extent. Biden came to power by criticizing Trump’s realist
strategy, especially towards China. He vowed to alleviate the tensions heightened by
the Trump administration against China (and also Iran) and to find non-military ways
to resolve the disputes with these countries. However, the strained relations with
China recently show that Biden will follow Trump’s course, which he had criticized
heavily. In fact, considering the statements and moves made so far, it could even be
said that the Biden administration will pursue an even more confrontational and
exclusionary strategy against China than the Trump administration.

The March 12 meeting of the “Quadrilateral Security Dialogue” (QUAD), which

consists of the US, India, Australia, and Japan and is regarded by some experts as an
“Asian NATO”, was a good example of this. The most striking part of the statement
made following the summit was that the “vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific” had
brought these four countries together. This vision first emerged at the October 2020
summit hosted by Japan. This time, however, it was expressed more forcefully. In
addition, the closing statement of the summit promised to fight for a regional order
that was “free, transparent, inclusive, healthy, rooted in democratic values, and
unconstrained by coercion”. One can easily see that China is being intimidated here.
The QUAD, which could be traced back to the early 2000s, was revitalized during
Trump’s term, beginning in 2017. The leaders of these four countries met a total of
five times between 2017 and 2019. Joint military exercises have also been held within
the scope of this initiative. Military drills conducted initially between the US and India
developed by 2020 into a demonstration of military strength against China involving
all four countries.

A war of words occurred, yet again, between the foreign ministry officials of the US
and China who met in Alaska two weeks ago. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken
expressed concern about human rights violations against Uyghur Turks in China’s
Xinjiang region, anti-democratic activities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, cyber-attacks
targeting the US, and economic pressures on US allies. Blinken emphasized that all of
these practices were threatening the rules-based international order, that is, the liberal
international order. Chinese Foreign Ministry officials, on the other hand, replied by
saying that the US could no longer lecture China arrogantly and that those days were
long gone. It was quite meaningful that, among the Chinese public, the Alaska
meetings were compared to the humiliating Boxer Protocol signed in 1901 between
China and the Eight-Nation Alliance, which was made up of the US and some
prominent European countries. It was indicative of how the progress made by China in
international politics was received by the Chinese population and how the increasing
material capacity has strongly boosted the psychological confidence. In addition,
Chinese officials stated that the US was trying to disrupt China’s lawful trade relations
with third countries by portraying them differently through the rhetoric of national
security and to get certain countries to attack China, and expressed concern about the
situation.

Missionary liberalism

The current situation clearly contradicts hopes of a softening in the run-up to the 2020
US presidential elections. This leads to debates over whether the US-China relations
would devolve into a new cold war. So, we must ask, what happened to cause the
Biden administration to abandon the liberal institutionalise strategy toward China that
it had vowed to pursue before the election? There are two possible explanations for
this. The first is liberalism’s hypocrisy in international politics. Liberalism, on the one
hand, has a pragmatist, soft and inclusive side that emphasizes international
institutions and cooperation, and on the other, an ideological, harsh, and exclusionary
side that does not shy away from shaping the world in its own image. The missionary
viewpoint of the latter portrays politics as the clash of morally unequal political actors,
that is, a clash between the good and the evil. In this regard, they moralize the image
of realists’ power relations and confrontational international politics and carry them
into the existentialist dimension, closing the doors to pluralism. The US’ attitude
towards China (and all other states), as well as its patronizing, moralizing, and
peremptory language, stems from liberalism, the country’s founding ideology. Hence,
as the ideological dimension of liberalism gains clout, the Biden administration
distances itself from the liberal institutional strategy.

So, how is the dark and ideological dimension of liberalism increasing its influence?
The second statement would answer this: It is not possible for the US to restrain China
by integrating it into its institutional order. As China grows stronger and the US
leadership is called into question, the use of exclusionary language associated with
liberal ideology becomes more prevalent. Trump realized this and did not pursue a
liberal institutionalist strategy. He went for a realistic one. Biden, on the other hand,
portrayed this as a weakness during his election campaign and used it against Trump.
However, since the same political realities prevail, the Biden administration had to
employ a similar strategy, but certainly with a significant difference: Trump’s anti-
China language made sense on the axis of nationalism, and a hierarchical relationship
was not envisaged because China was being portrayed as a threat. The Biden
administration, on the other hand, adopts a hierarchical attitude that attempts to
discipline China while being anti-China. Neither of these courses of action is quite
acceptable or rational in international politics. However, the discourteous attitude of
the Biden administration has the potential to escalate international competition to
dangerous levels. It is no coincidence that people are speculating about a new cold
war. Beyond global bipolarity, the most distinctive feature of the Cold War was the
intense ideological division and mutual marginalization. This situation brought the
competition to an existential level, and the threats coming from the competitors began
to appear more dangerous than they actually were, resulting in a harsh security
dilemma. These events demonstrate an inconsistency and conflict on the part of the
Biden administration. Nowadays, newspapers are rife with criticism from leftist
groups as well as public intellectuals -- who we might call liberals in the American
context -- resented by the Biden administration reneging on its election promises.

Future of US leadership

But, can the Biden administration smoothly sustain its current policy against China,
which combines realism and liberal ideological strategies? The answer to this question
depends on how other states in the international system will view and respond to the
US-China power balance in the long run. In international politics, just as states can
form an alliance that would balance out the state that wants to reform the existing
order, that is, to revise the system as the underdog, they can also choose to partner
with the revisionist state in order to reap the benefits of the new order. It is impossible
to predict whether states will favour maintaining the status quo or a revision.

Today, we see that some states in East and Southeast Asia are attempting to
counterbalance China by containing it with the US. The revival of the QUAD and
attempts to turn it into a more serious platform is a sign of this. However, we also see
that European countries are not necessarily responding positively to the US calls to
strengthen their alliance relations. On the one hand, the view that acting together with
China would create more economic opportunities is gaining momentum in Europe,
while, on the other, that a rapprochement with the US would inevitably lead to a more
confrontational relationship with Russia.

Considering Europe’s dependence on Russia, especially for natural gas, US calls for
strengthening their alliance are not receiving a robust response. In addition to these
two reasons, the actual deciding factor is that the decline in US power is recognized
by European states, which then think that administrations akin to Trump’s, which are
more likely to leave Europe alone, will come to power in the US in the future. In this
case, it is understandable why European states are reluctant to take a clear stance in
the US-China conflict. In addition, it also causes other states within the system to steer
a more cautious course in their dealings with the US, since a bipolar international
system would provide them with more advantages and latitude. It also whets their
appetite for Chinese overtures to them.