Tuesday, July 27, 2021

Fwd: The rules-based order meets its end

meanwhile, here's a dissenting opinion. this is biden (or, to be more precise, his staff) kowtowing like mad.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: "Bruno Maçães " <brunomacaes@substack.com>
Date: Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 6:34 PM
Subject: The rules-based order meets its end
To: <rajeev.srinivasan@gmail.com>

The rules-based order meets its end

Bruno Maçães

Jul 26

Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman meets her Chinese counterpart today in Beijing and her main message is, rather surprisingly, that the United States and China can avoid falling into a spiral of competition and conflict if only they accept the common rules governing their relationship. "The U.S. wants to ensure that there are guardrails and parameters in place to responsibly manage the relationship," a senior American diplomat told Reuters. "Everyone needs to play by the same rules and on a level playing field."

I say the message is surprising not so much because it is a lot more dovish that anything we had been told to expect from the Biden administration, but because it flies in the face of everything we have been hearing from Washington in recent years. "Play by the same rules"? How can that be if the priority of our China policy is to write the rules governing world politics and to do that before China has any chance to do the same?

"We need to write the rules of the road," repeated Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, echoing a phrase her boss is particularly fond of:

We would do well, then, to drop the pablum of "playing by the same rules." That is not what world politics is about. The game is considerably more complex, as the main players compete not under a common set of rules but in order to define what the rules are.

I call it the "world game."