Obama Laughs, Putin Cries and Xi Shows Off

The APEC summit taught us a great deal. The Russians are marginalized, China is looking for new equilibrium and the Americans are still in charge.

The Chinese media have exploited the APEC summit, which took place in Beijing at the beginning of the week, to display China’s central, if not dominant, role in the world. A little like the good old days of the empire, Chinese President Xi Jinping has the air of a noble, if a tad bored, monarch deigning to welcome the suzerain states which have come to pledge allegiance to his grandeur. The difference is, however, that the emperor would never have appeared in public. In this context, the handshake between Xi Jinping and Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister — perhaps the frostiest handshake in the history of diplomacy — was a model of its kind. At the potential cost of lasting humiliation, the Japanese premier needed to prompt his host to afford him this gesture.

While two world powers are currently carrying out strategic movements in the Pacific — the Americans of their own free will, the Russians by default — Xi Jinping was, in fact, caught in the middle. Here, the lessons of this past week are convincing.

Vladimir Putin came to Beijing almost to play the role of big brother. His years of experience in power and his authoritarian, anti-Western attitude make him eminently sympathetic in the eyes of a large proportion of the conservative elite in China. For the benefit of the cameras, Putin congratulated Xi Jinping in a markedly insincere manner while signing a new gas contract. In reality, this signing was quite an anticlimax, with the Chinese contingent raising their bids on the gas prices and informing the Kremlin that they are not prepared to pay to build the gas pipelines necessary for pumping the gas into Russia. For Moscow, which had been looking for alternatives to the European market, this is quite a blow.

Russia’s swing policy toward Asia — to use an expression coined by the White House — remains very much in limbo. China is the only country in the Far East which has shown willingness to support Putin’s dictatorship… apart from North Korea.

On the other hand, Barack Obama arrived in Beijing having been dubbed “insignificant” by the American nationalist press after the debacle of the midterm elections. The clash of values between the United States and China, furthermore, is more and more apparent, with Xi Jinping making no effort to hide the fact that the inherited “Pax Americana” world order, imposed after the Second World War, is no longer relevant. One would be excused, therefore, for being concerned about more marked tensions between these two superpowers.

But even there, by and large, events did not pan out as forecast. The American and Chinese presidents have either signed or announced a battery of economic, military, technological, energy and environmental agreements which should breathe life into a new dynamic between these two nations, which have been looking for new common ground. This is an undeniable victory for Barack Obama, whose re-balancing policies where the Far East is concerned will now be fully realized.

What was announced in the commercial domain and the promise of new free trade areas, with China locking itself into this for a second time, are the most likely to influence the course of international affairs. Undeniably, this was not altogether an accident, because India approached the World Trade Organization looking to loosen the terms of the “Bali Package” by announcing an accord on agricultural grants with Washington two days later.

Beyond these announcements, in particular the historic agreement on climate change, Barack Obama’s true success is in having managed to consolidate the position of the Chinese, who have, along with the Russians, already been tempted to create a competing power bloc, as Elizabeth C. Economy, of the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think tank, highlights.

In Beijing, Xi Jinping was very much the center of attention, yet it was the American president who stayed in control of the game. If he can remain so, it will be because his country’s economy is picking up and that he has avoided, until now, becoming embroiled in a Middle Eastern adventure. The marginalization of Putin is likely to be consolidated this weekend at the G20 summit.