N. Peter Kramer’s Weekly Column
Last week all eyes were on the White House and US President Trump receiving China’s President Xi Jinping. The latter went to the US with more self-confidence than ever and with two goals: to manage Trump and to keep the peace. It became quite clear, the time when a Chinese president had to give way to his American counterpart was a thing of the past.
President Xi Jinping might have briefly reflected on his previous visit to the White House in September 2015. He was received by President Barack Obama in a joint effort to define China’s place in the American world order. A decade later, little remains of that world order, China has placed its mark alongside that of the US.
Since the meeting between Trump and Xi in Busan, South Korea in October of last year the dynamics of war have cooled. Trump’s visit to Beijing in May confirmed the new phase in the relationship between the two countries. In exchange for lower American import tariffs on non-strategic goods, the US gained access to a range of rare earth metals.
But the ‘strategic stability’ is fragile. Is China preparing for a future confrontation? The American support of Taiwan is a growing bone of contention; and remember Xi Jin Ping has warned Donald Trump a number of times about ‘the Thucydides trap’.
Xi refers to the Greek historian Thucydides with his ‘History of the Peloponnesian War’, a war between Sparta and Athens for decades. The most famous sentence in this work reads: ‘It was the rise of Athens and the fear this instilled in Sparta that made the war inevitable’. Is in the eyes of Xi a war almost inevitable when a declining world power feels threatened by a rising power?
