The Chinese Shadow and the Need for America

“Can you please become a muscular superpower again?” While the gigantic shadow of the Chinese president darkens the horizon, the Korean, Japanese, Indian and Indonesian leaders plead with a soft and passive Barack Obama. This noteworthy cartoon was published last week in a major Anglo-Saxon newspaper. While the Americans have expressed a vote of no confidence in their president, the Asian continent is looking toward America as a counterweight to China. The Japanese and the South Koreans are no longer the only ones concerned by their neighbor’s rise to power. Even Singaporeans, who served as a model to Beijing, now worry about their pupil’s ambitions.

Thanks to China’s shadow, the American president’s Asian tour has turned into a positive referendum on the international role of his country. India itself, still almost nostalgic for the Bush era, found in Barack Obama a privileged partner who firmly supports the legitimacy of its candidacy for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. Indonesia welcomed the president not only as the man who, as a little boy, studied in its schools, but as the man who recognized its new status as an emerging power — symbolizing, like Turkey, the possible reconciliation between Islam and modernity, religious tolerance and economic progress.

Will China become for the Asian continent what the USSR was for Western Europe, the cement to its unity [against] America? The comparison is probably excessive and premature to say the least. But China, in abandoning its previously held low profile, is in the process of confirming its status with America as an Asian power, just as Moscow used to be a European power to the United States.

Does China, like Germany after its unification, need the moderating influence of a Bismarck, a statesman who knows how to impose limits on the hubris of a nation that, humiliated for nearly two centuries, yields to the temptation of nationalism and quickens the pace of its ambitions? “Unhappy China,” the title of an ultranationalist pamphlet published in 2009, urged the Chinese to leave their reserves behind and to behave “heroically,” not to retreat in the face of a possible confrontation with the West. Will the proponents of this “revenge” nationalism be the representatives of a changing Chinese reality? Is the South China Sea in the process of becoming, like Tibet and Taiwan, a nonnegotiable issue for Beijing? The currency war between the dollar and the renminbi will probably not occur. But the need to balance China is being transformed for Asia, if not for the world, into a strategic priority, with the first step being the strengthening of America’s international role.

America previously embarked on the madcap project of exporting democracy to the Middle and Near East, resulting in a strategic stalemate that accelerated China’s irresistible rise to power. Today, the opposite is occurring: China is pulling America back from the front of the world stage.

At a time when Beijing vividly demonstrates that capitalism can thrive without democracy, the character of its increasingly forceful diplomatic behavior highlights the authoritarian nature of the regime and the dangers faced by a country in the absence of democratic counterweights.

Given that China no longer obeys the prudent advice of Deng Xiaoping, an attitude of firmness without provocation is needed. All the European Union ambassadors without exception should be present in Oslo in early December for the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, a presence that simply reflects the respect that we give to our values.

America is certainly not what it used to be, but China is, by its conduct, making it — in Asia at least — an “indispensable” and unavoidable power.