A singular challenge to American hegemony

President Putin’s recent visit to China was aimed at further strengthening the strategic compact between the two nations—the slew of agreements signed do point towards ‘A new era’, but the larger signalling is that of an unprecedented challenge to American hegemony. The prospect of a decline in American power is pushing Russia and China closer in the hope of hastening the latter’s fall. Even as Russia seeks to bring the existing order down, China promises an alluring new one. Three decades after the end of the Cold War, much against Kissinger’s advice, the United States (US) finds itself in a volatile rivalry with Russia and China, all together and all at once. So great is the state of dysfunctionality that there is every possibility of the world getting divided into two sets of rules, economies, and technologies. While the slogan is multi-polarity, other interlocking partnerships are being used to forge a wider Axis—on one hand, Iran and North Korea are supplying weapons to prop up Russia militarily and on the other, we see a growing Eurasian alignment as Russian and Chinese footprints in West Asia enlargens. Resident powers in theatres—China in the Western Pacific, Russia in Europe and Iran in West Asia—are checkmating the foundational precept of American power: the freedom of the American military to roam the globe. Concurrent escalation in all three theatres is fragmenting American power and complicating its strategic military response: Do the Americans fight in three or focus on winning in one?

The prospect of a decline in American power is pushing Russia and China closer in the hope of hastening the latter’s fall. Even as Russia seeks to bring the existing order down, China promises an alluring new one.

The US’s failing deterrence (Afghanistan, Ukraine, West Asia and prospectively in Taiwan) and its eroding power—every time America say don’t, Russia, Israel, Houthis, Hezbollah and Iran seem to comply only in the breach) is quite evident. America’s debt servicing at US$1 trillion annually is larger than its defence budget, making the prospect of resurging the American defence enterprise a difficult proposition. The collective nuclear arsenals of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, in a few years, will be twice the size of the US. The New Axis has not only done far better than the West in the Ukrainian and West Asian theatres but is also shifting the battle for influence, business, and commerce to the Global South as its wider areas of action, with BRICS as a delivery platform. A Chinese commentator, Eric Lee, claims that Chinese ambitions are modest in relation to its weight—‘‘We do not want to run the Asia-Pacific, leave alone the world’’ he states. Aggression and hegemonic ambitions are not Chinese culture he asserts, “We built the Great Wall to keep the barbarians out, not to invade them.” Chairman Mao, back in 1944, had said “China must industrialize, this can only be done through free enterprise. Chinese and American interests fit together, economically and politically. America need not fear that we will not be co-operative. We cannot risk crossing America; we cannot risk any conflict.” Mao’s successors first beat the US at its own game—capitalism, and are now in bed with its bête noire Russia to challenge the American-led order.

So, where do the twin narratives—those of American decline and the Chinese rise and stall—take us?

The US continues to be a formidable entity as also a comeback nation: It accounted for 25 percent of the global GDP in 1980; it still does. The Chinese economy has grown at the expense of Europe and others, not the US. The US has more oil than Iran, and more gas than Qatar; it is demographically vibrant; it still boasts of the top seven Big Tech companies of the world. It is the only country with a global military reach—800 bases, 11 aircraft carriers, and a whopping outlay of US$950 billion.

The US continues to be a formidable entity as also a comeback nation: It accounted for 25 percent of the global GDP in 1980; it still does. The Chinese economy has grown at the expense of Europe and others, not the US.

The Chinese miracle, on the other hand, is now enveloped by malaise. A long period of slowing growth, ballooning debt (287 percent of GDP), rising unemployment (50 percent), a party-market standoff, the taking down of Big Tech, the flight of FDI, and endless bouts of military cleansing have characterised the downward spiral. The number of elderly people in China, exceeds the entire population of US. In the coming decades, China could be more of a nursing home than an economic powerhouse.

China, therefore, is making strategic readjustments and tweaking its domestic and global calculus. Not a return to ‘hide and bide,  but a rollback somewhat, of ‘loud and proud’. Xi’s foremost priority is to kickstart long-term economic growth to arrest the constant predictions of a great fall. A New Development Concept has been formulated to replace the reform and vigorously pro-market model of earlier years. There is also a desire to create a more securitised economy, whereby, while the economic impulse will continue to be market-driven, it will be under a firm political leash. So the role of private firms will be constrained and crucial data and informational flows will be controlled by the government and not by private player s such as Alibaba or Tencent. Chinese companies and youth, it has been decreed, must spend less time on creating world-class video games and focus more intently on achieving breakthroughs in the critical strategic technologies of the future (less TikTok, more quantum and hyper sonics). The CCP knows that there is a compelling need to break chokeholds in strategic domains that will power Globalisation 2.0—AI, robotics, synthetic biology, advanced chips, quantum, EVs, energy, critical minerals, etc. China is also fashioning a new bargain. ‘Small Yard–Big World’ (becoming the lead in futuristic, niche technologies and leveraging them across the world, particularly in the Global South) is China’s new playbook to counter the West’s ‘Small Yard–High Fence’ strategy (prowess in niche technologies to be shared and leveraged only between a few). 

The contest is heating up as the battlelines are being redrawn. In the last phase (hide and bide), China surged ahead, because the US asleep at the wheels. China realizes that in the renewed contest, it faces an awakened and a far more competitive West.

The contest is heating up as the battlelines are being redrawn. In the last phase (hide and bide), China surged ahead, because the US asleep at the wheels. China realizes that in the renewed contest, it faces an awakened and a far more competitive West.

Xi used to say that the ‘Pacific is big enough for both of us.’ At San Fransisco, he said that the ‘Earth was big enough for both of us.’ China’s ambitions are expanding, its desire to transform the international system growing—it is also perhaps giving the Americans a subtler message: ‘We are not the Soviet Union. See our power and call a truce – stick to your part of the Pacific and between us we could slice up the world’. The outcomes in the ensuing contest could only be two: wider war or uneasy peace. The acid test perhaps, will be Taiwan.

India, too, needs to step up its game significantly—if we do not, or cannot, checkmate China in the wider global spaces—BRICS & the Global South—a unipolar Asia may become a likely proposition.

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Lt. Gen Raj Shukla is a recently retired Army Commander.

• International Affairs
• Great Power Dynamics
• America
• China
• India
• Russia and Eurasia
• American Hegemony
• BRICS
• Global South
• Indo-Pacific
• Taiwan
• US-China Relations
• US-Russia Relations

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