A NEW world order is shaping up post the recent Alaska meeting between American and Chinese senior officials. What shape it will eventually take is, of course, open to wide conjecture at this stage.
The battle lines, however, are being clearly drawn, and gone, it seems, are the days of open comity between the reigning superpower (America) and the upcoming one (China). Ill-tempered verbal sparring has given way to tit-for-tat sanctions between the two.
The trans-Pacific tensions dialled up several notches this week with further coordinated sanctions by Western allies and a swift response in kind from Beijing. The ideological chasm at the root of it all seems to be widening.
China will want to reserve all its sovereign rights and prerogatives within its own increasingly expansive borders and to exercise them as it sees fit, no matter the consequences internally or externally. The West under a new American president is showing renewed resolve that there are existing rules which govern behaviour of all nations; rules which, for better or worse, America has been enforcing since the end of the last world war.
The role of global policeman has been a contentious one, both within the US and globally. Criticisms about this mostly thankless US role are aplenty but still, it goes without saying that the world would have been and will be far less stable without it. Like many things we take for granted, that role will only be appreciated and maybe even missed when it is gone.
Yet, given its growing global heft and new-found assertiveness, China shows few signs it is willing or even want to take on that role, despite a growing involvement in United Nations peacekeeping operations.
This new Cold War between the West on the one hand and China and Russia, on the other, therefore serves nobody's interests, those of the contending big powers included.
Both the US and China, with extensive commercial and economic interests spanning the globe, have little to gain from rocking the international status quo. That said, precisely because this geopolitical spat has some ideological basis, it may prove difficult to resolve unless one or the other backs away.
China has to reflect on whether, as its global might grows, with growth in tandem of admiration — particularly in the developing world — for how its economic modernisation has spectacularly leapt forward, that admiration has not been tempered with a certain tentativeness, even unease, at its increasing assertiveness politically, militarily and diplomatically worldwide, not just in the West.
There needs to be a clearer recognition by China that closer scrutiny of what it does and how it is done domestically just comes with the territory of being an emerging superpower. Those outside may even increasingly criticise it as they have the US. Since we live in a global village and whatever happens in the US and increasingly in China will never stay within their borders for long, we sooner or later all feel their global impact.
For all China's proven economic success in the last few decades, the political construct underpinning that achievement is mostly untested. Good times will, inevitably, come to an end or at least a marked slowdown occurs. Can a governance system that stakes almost all its political legitimacy on economic competence cope well in the face of even relatively mild economic headwinds? What will be the implications for China and the rest of us if or when such challenges arise?
China's main argument against the US today is that in its current state of social, political and economic disarray, the US is hardly competent to teach anything to the world, much less China. The counter-argument to that would be that America's challenges are well-known, publicly aired and vigorously debated on, and, as Americans will say, while democratic discourse is sometimes messy, its redeeming quality is often that the right thing eventually gets done.
With its catch-up economic growth drawing to a close, the toughest act may lay ahead for China. As Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong recently reminded, the current great-power rivalry serves nobody, least of all China.
The writer views developments in the nation, region and wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times