Jeffrey Prescott and Julian Gewirtz
Agreat unanswered question of the second Trump administration has been how its outright rejection of the existing global order would affect China’s international strategy. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called this order both “obsolete” and “a weapon being used against” the United States, and in his speech at the United Nations on September 23, President Donald Trump pilloried the “globalist” institution for “creating new problems for us to solve.” In the early months of this year, Beijing’s response to Washington’s attacks on the international order seemed mostly cautious and measured. China traded tit-for-tat tariffs with the United States, but it otherwise remained content to sit back and accrue benefits from Trump’s alienation of U.S. allies and withdrawal from international institutions.
That period of caution is now over. Beijing has decided on a much more ambitious course, putting its plans on vivid display at a September meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Hosting the once sleepy regional economic and security body, Chinese leader Xi Jinping clasped hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and met with 18 other leaders from across the Eurasian continent. A few days later, flanked by Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Xi presided over a massive military parade in Beijing to show off China’s fast-growing arsenal. Trump’s comment about seeing the summitry on TV—“They were hoping I was watching, and I was watching”—inadvertently revealed the precise position in which China hoped to place the United States: the American president, so often the prime mover of global politics, had become a spectator on the sidelines of a changing world.
Xi aims to establish China as the fulcrum of an emerging multipolar world, and he is advancing a new, more active diplomatic strategy to realize that goal. Rather than force the United States out of its leading position in the international system or overturn the existing order, China is exploiting Trump’s rapid, willing abdication of Washington’s role. And China is building up its own power and prestige within existing institutions, seeking to shift their centers of gravity irrevocably toward Beijing. If this gambit succeeds, it will transform the international order from the inside out, placing China at center stage and undermining U.S. influence in ways that future American administrations may find difficult to reverse.
WORLD BUILDING
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