Paris—Flaring tensions between Washington and Beijing are raising the prospect of new global diplomatic and economic fault lines, with consequences that analysts say could pose unfamiliar challenges to world leaders.
From an escalating trade war to an influence struggle in the South China Sea, “we’ve entered a period of strong and long-term rivalry between the United States and China,” said Alice Ekman of the French Institute of International Relations.
President Donald Trump’s combative stance, highlighted by the new round of import tariffs imposed this week, has upended decades of cautious statecraft in the West aimed at coaxing China to join the global order.
“A paradigm shift in America’s China policy is under way, with major implications for the world’s most important bilateral relationship and, more importantly, for global security,” said Brahma Chellaney of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
The fallout could prove long-lasting, requiring countries in Europe, Asia and Africa to rethink how they engage with two diametrically opposed superpowers.
“The profound policy shift under Donald Trump will outlast his presidency because it reflects a bipartisan consensus in Washington that the earlier policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with China had failed,” Chellaney said.
For Trump, “the fatal error was letting China join the World Trade Organisation in 2001,” said Jean-Francois Di Meglio of the Asia Centre research and advisory firm in Paris.
“Before then, we had a Chinese administration that played the game on westernizing, which led the United States and the EU to say, ‘Let’s give them more than the benefit of the doubt, let’s open the door and give them developing country status,’” he said.