So there will be no American, British or Australian diplomats in Beijing for the Winter Olympics in February. You can almost smell the panic in the upper reaches of the Chinese Communist Party. No under-secretaries for cultural affairs clinking glasses in the executive boxes at the luge course? No smiling selfies for Instagram at the Great Wall with State Department and Foreign Office functionaries?
The newly fledged Aukus bird has taken flight and is hitting China right where it hurts. It must be only a matter of time before this muscular demarche forces Beijing to rethink, free the Uighurs, call off the Taiwan invasion force and reinstate the rule of law in Hong Kong.
It’s easy to laugh at the “diplomatic boycott” of the Olympics announced this week, and that’s more or less what China did. The US had so heavily previewed its decision that by the time it came Beijing had had time to pre-emptively withdraw the formal invitations. You can’t boycott something you’re not invited to. For Britain, the Chinese government said it hadn’t even invited its diplomats in the first place. As for Australia, a very special object of China’s contempt these days, the official spokesman simply said, with withering derision and 100 per cent accuracy: “Nobody cares.”
It does seem an especially limp-wristed sort of sanction, an oddly underproportioned response to what the White House spokesman called, in explaining the decision, the Chinese government’s ”ongoing genocide”, “crimes against humanity”, “atrocities” and “egregious human rights abuses”. If this litany of infamy draws merely a diplomatic boycott of the Olympics, what exactly do you have to do to merit, say, a recall of an ambassador or an actual boycott of a sporting event, let alone something more robust?
It’s so lame, in fact, you wonder whether it might have exactly the opposite effect on Chinese behaviour to the one intended. If this is all the timorous leaders of the West can manage, it may amount to a green light to autocrats everywhere to have their way.
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Meanwhile, in a two-hour video conversation with Vladimir Putin this week, Joe Biden was trying to convey a little more brawn as Russia stepped up its preparations for a possible invasion of Ukraine. At a briefing later, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters that the US response would be more forceful this time if Russia took military action than it was when Putin seized Crimea seven years ago. “I will look you in the eye and tell you, as President Biden looked President Putin in the eye and told him today, that things we did not do in 2014 we are prepared to do now,” Sullivan said.
Since the US response in 2014 amounted essentially to requiring a few oligarchs to reroute their ill-gotten gains through financial channels other than their favoured US ones, this leaves an awful lot of space for Washington to still do essentially nothing if the Russian tanks start rolling through the Donbas.
America, it seems, is a superpower no more. Where once foreign dictators quailed at the prospect of a firm US response to the exercise of their territorial ambitions, now they mock the declining, ageing ex-imperial power. Months after US and British forces abandoned Afghanistan so hastily and chaotically to a triumphant Taliban, leaders in China, Russia and even Iran sense terminal American weakness, an internally divided country retreating to its own shores, its allies in Europe sheltering behind their broomstick armies and its friends in Asia bowing to the inevitabilities of the Chinese century.
But this is too harsh and too premature a judgment. For all its well-displayed internal political strife, America is actually fumbling towards a sensible bipartisan global policy of strategic realism. After two disastrous decades of neoconservative efforts to remake the world in America’s image, we now have a war-weary, harder-headed approach to identifying American interests and matching its objectives to its capabilities.
Barack Obama received much criticism in 2014 for his assessment that in the end Ukraine was always a more important strategic priority for Russia than it would ever be for the US. But he was right, as his Republican successor tacitly acknowledged and as the current incumbent is also aware.
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There’s an asymmetry rooted in history and geography to the brewing crises in eastern Europe and the Taiwan Strait that it’s pointless to deny. Americans aren’t going to go to war for Ukrainian sovereignty, and despite the “strategic ambiguity” with which it continues to promise a defence of Taiwan, the US is highly unlikely to get into a shooting war with the People’s Liberation Army to prevent the reunification of the country.
To state that is not a counsel of despair, or an invitation to the autocrats to help themselves, or a free pass for them to trample all over international law and national sovereignty. The aim of US diplomacy is to signal to these potential adversaries that any aggression will bear a cost somewhat greater than the absence of diplomats at the ice hockey.
As Biden communicated to Putin this week, Washington can, if there’s a European will to match, cut off Russia’s planned gas exports, arm Ukrainians to the hilt and essentially disconnect Moscow from the global financial system. For Beijing the price of force against Taiwan could well be precisely the strengthening of US alliances in Asia that it most objects to, as the US swallows its own reservations about closer economic and political co-operation with China’s neighbours.
Above all, there’s a realisation in the US — again on both sides of the political aisle, and after much self-delusion and military overreach — that the long strategic struggle it must conduct with the rising superpower in Asia demands sacrifices and even tactical retreats, even at the cost of a little diplomatic embarrassment.
