A Chinese Shadow over America

The visit of China’s head of state, Hu Jintao, to the United States is going to keep alive the fiction of the “G-2” Summit — this condominium that would spearhead an exit to this crisis and aspire to reshape capitalism. If these two Pacific giants are united from here on out, specialists tell us, it’s only thanks to their mutual dependence: I scratch your back, you scratch mine. This principle is the main determinant of geopolitics in the 21st century. Nonsense, I say.

China is engaged in a gigantic offensive, a war without limits, which makes it clatter simultaneously on economic, strategic and military fronts, pushing its pawns around the chess board of the world. There isn’t a single day in which one of their businesses doesn’t set foot on our shores, in which Beijing doesn’t interfere in the public finances of such and such state strangled by debt, in which a new step isn’t taken towards weakening the American dollar in order to strengthen the Chinese yuan. Is there will of power on the part of these cruel and hardworking Chinese? If candor prevents understanding, paranoia, in turn, is not the best adviser.

We can simply observe that these empires are growing organically, as Robert Kaplan claims, rather than proceeding from a design. As they develop, new needs are cropping up in their countries, as well as new fears, which modify insensibly their relationships with their neighbors. Beijing has thus engaged in a military effort without precedent to secure its sea, the Sea of China, and the maritime routes that feed its growth in oil and natural resources. Let’s also remember that history has been hard on the “Doux-Commerce” theory, which results in peace brought on by economic and financial interdependence. Germany and Japan, in the 19th century, were also integrated in the world economy. When it comes to diplomacy, there’s only one real capital sin: the sin of naivety.