This week, President Biden raised the possibility of an American boycott of the upcoming Olympic Games, scheduled for Beijing, in connection with human rights violations in Chinese territory. Even if this decision would have consequences only on political representation, and not for the delegation of athletes, the fact remains that this episode adds to the growing Sino-American tensions.
In 2012, Professor Graham Allison released a concept from “the Peloponnesian War”: “Thucydides’ trap”, that of war made inevitable due to the rise to power of Athens and the fear it instilled in Sparta. Thus, the risk of conflict would increase substantially when an emerging power threatens to supplant a hegemon. The acuteness of Thucydides’ point did not escape Allison’s notice.
The Biden presidency is a continuation of its predecessor. China and the United States oppose trade issues and the application of tariffs, control of 5G networks and the place of Huawei, respect for human rights (on the treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang) and democratic gains (such as the special status of Hong Kong). At the strategic level, the operations of influence on a global scale (described moreover by the Strategic Research Institute of the Military School, in France, in a report published online in October) and the Chinese cybernetic activities in US territory have been identified as a real threat (such as the massive attacks carried out by the Hafnium group against Microsoft in March 2021). China now has the capacity to wage a true hybrid war.
However, if tensions are increasing in the world, it is in the South China Sea that the most flammable issues are concentrated – it must be said that 40% of world trade transits there and that underwater resources are considerable there. . As much as Beijing considers these waters to be its own, the United States sees them as international waters. As a result, the military deployment in the region is considerable.
And we cannot dissociate from it the question of Taiwan, this island of almost 24 million inhabitants that mainland China has never administered, but that it considers as one of its provinces … and that it integrates, to do this, in the cartographic representations of its claims on the South China Sea. While Beijing has continued to isolate Taiwan by pushing its New Silk Road partners to sever ties with it, the United States has retained a “strategic ambiguity”: while recognizing only Communist China in 1979, it maintains their support for the Taiwanese defensive military apparatus.
However, during the last weeks, the language of Biden seemed to fork on several occasions… The American president he simply blundered (it is customary of the fact)? Or were his mistakes intentional, a manifestation of a hardening of the American position in the region – which would be confirmed by information from the Pentagon, which this week points to an increase in the American presence on the island? It should be added that last week Secretary of State Blinken asserted that the United States would not leave an attack on Taiwan unanswered. But here it is: as the former commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Davidson, said, the United States cannot afford to wage a war, because it would lose it. now predominant in the region. In addition, China would now have the ability to annex Taiwan, says the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission in its annual report to Congress (tabled this month) on the state of the economic and security relations between the two countries.
In this extraordinarily militarized space, there is therefore on the one hand a player who defines himself as the ascending power (in the words of Xi Jinping during his Tian’anmen speech in July 2021), headed by a man who wants to consolidate its power on the eve of the 20e national congress of the Communist Party. On the other hand, we find a declining superpower whose deterrent power rests on weakened foundations, with at its summit a man whose “congressional” base is precarious. However, writes Graham Allison when he revisits Thucydides’ trap in 2017 (Towards war. America and China in Thucydides’ trap ?, translated into French in 2019), the irrepressible rise of the Chinese state will lead to a head-on collision with the American power, because China is emboldened in a role which it considers to be its rightful place and because of the fears that it inspires in Washington. Under these circumstances, he explains, a skirmish, an otherwise trivial event can become the spark of a large-scale armed conflict … in a context where the potential for hybrid warfare, as well as the risk of use of nuclear weapons, is real. History seems to be accelerating because of the volatility of regional geopolitics, to the point where American strategy is struggling to escape the trap which is thus set for it.