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The New York Times
It was quick: explosions with China and Russia in Biden’s first 60 days
WASHINGTON – Sixty days into his administration, President Joe Biden got a taste of what the next four years could look like: a new era of fierce competition between the superpowers, marked by perhaps the worst relationship that Washington has had with Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall. and with China since it opened diplomatic relations with the United States. It has been preparing for years, as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have taken a sharp turn towards authoritarianism. But it exploded openly this month after Biden accepted the proposition that Putin is a “killer” and that the Chinese, meeting with the United States for the first time since the new administration took office. , taught the Americans about the mistake of their arrogant. believe that the world wants to reproduce their freedoms. Much of it was for show on both sides, with whirring cameras. All of the participants were playing in front of their home crowd, including Biden’s team. But it was not entirely an act. Sign up for The Morning New York Times newsletter Although the Cold War has not resumed – there is little nuclear threat from this era and the competition today is in technology, cyberconflict and influence operations – the scenes that take place now have echoes of the bad old days. As a moment of theatrical diplomacy, the meeting Thursday and Friday in Anchorage, Alaska, between the Americans and the Chinese was reminiscent of when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev made headlines around the world ago. 60 years old, banging his shoe on a United Nations desk and shouting against the US imperialists. But as old Cold War veterans will suggest, today’s superpower rivalries are hardly like the past. Putin himself lamented that early 21st century Russia was a shadow of the Soviet Union which trained him to be a KGB agent. Russia’s economy is about the size of Italy’s. His greatest power now is to disrupt and instill fear, using nerve agents like Novichok to silence dissidents around the world or deploying his cyber ability to penetrate deep into the networks that rock the United States. . Yet despite all of his country’s economic weakness, Putin has been very resilient in the face of escalating international sanctions imposed since he took control of Crimea in 2014, which accelerated after turned to nerve agents and cyberattacks. It’s hard to say that they held back his behavior. Sanctions “aren’t going to do much good,” Robert Gates, former CIA director and defense secretary, said recently in a public interview with David Ignatius of the Washington Post. “Russia is going to be a challenge for the United States, a national security challenge for the United States, and perhaps, in some ways, the most dangerous, as long as Putin is there. For the Chinese, who still faced the failures of the Great Leap Forward when Khrushchev kicked shoes and intimidated President John F. Kennedy at a first meeting in Vienna, the story is radically different. His path to power is to build new networks rather than disrupt old ones. Economists are debating when the Chinese will have the world’s largest gross domestic product – perhaps by the end of this decade – and whether they can meet their other two great national goals: to build the world’s most powerful military. and dominate the race for key technologies by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the revolution of former Communist Chairman Mao Zedong. Their power does not derive from their relatively small nuclear arsenal or their growing stockpile of conventional weapons. Instead, it stems from their growing economic power and the way they use their government-sponsored technology to wire countries – whether it’s Latin America or the Middle East, Africa or Europe. from the East – with 5G wireless networks intended to link them ever closer to Beijing. It comes from the submarine cables that they wind around the world to make these networks work on circuits owned by the Chinese. Ultimately, that will come from how they use these networks to make other countries dependent on Chinese technology. Once that happens, the Chinese could export some of their authoritarianism, for example by selling facial recognition software to other countries that have allowed them to quell dissent at home. This is why Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, who was with Secretary of State Antony Blinken for the meeting with their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage, has warned in a series of writings in recent years that it could It would be a mistake to assume that China plans to win by directly facing the US military in the Pacific. “The central premises of this alternative approach would be that economic and technological might is fundamentally more important than traditional military might in establishing global leadership,” he wrote, “and than a physical sphere of influence in Asia. East is not a necessary precondition for maintenance. such leadership. The Trump administration came to similar conclusions, even though it only released a real strategy for dealing with China weeks before stepping down. His attempts to strangle Huawei, China’s national telecommunications champion, and wrest control of social media apps like TikTok ended in a disorganized effort that often involved threatening and angry allies considering buying the technology. Chinese. Part of the purpose of the Alaska meeting was to convince the Chinese that the Biden administration is determined to compete with Beijing at all levels to deliver competitive technology, such as semiconductor manufacturing and artificial intelligence. , even if that means spending billions on government-led research and development projects and new industrial partnerships with Europe, India, Japan and Australia. Biden alluded to this last month during his two-hour conversation with Xi, telling him, according to assistants, that the Chinese account of the US decline was gravely flawed. But it will take months at best to release a new broad strategy, and it’s unclear whether U.S. companies or key allies will back it. “It won’t happen in a day, a week or a month,” said Kurt Campbell, the president’s senior advisor for Asia, who heads the strategic review. “This is probably a multi-administrative effort.” Campbell was at the Anchorage table, seated next to Sullivan and Blinken, when the Chinese began their efforts to put the US delegation on the defensive. They accused the United States of a “condescending” approach and argued that the country’s leaders have no right to lecture others about human rights violations or preserving democracy. . They talked about Black Lives Matter and the contradictions in an American democratic system that leaves so many people behind. “I don’t think the overwhelming majority of countries in the world would recognize that the universal values advocated by the United States or that the opinion of the United States could represent international public opinion,” said Yang Jiechi, the highest Chinese diplomat, in a lengthy statement at the opening of the session. He added: “These countries would not recognize that rules made by a small number of people serve as the basis for the international order.” The subtext of his post was that China would speed up its efforts to dominate the forums that set the rules, whether it be the World Trade Organization or lesser-known groups that set technology standards. In some of these forums, the Chinese have a new ally: the Russians, who are also keen to decrease American influence and strengthen authoritarianism. Increasingly, the two nations share an affinity for a short-of-war weapon to which the United States is particularly vulnerable: cyber intrusions into the complex networks that are the backbone of the United States government and private industry. The two big breaches in recent months, one presumed to be led by the Russians and the other by the Chinese, are examples of how the two countries have become much more sophisticated over the past 10 years using their digital skills for political purposes. . They learn how to hack on an industrial scale, to prove that they can insert malware into systems that the United States depends on for everyday life. The Russian intrusion into network management software created by a company called SolarWinds took them into about 18,000 private and government networks, from which they chose only a few hundred to extract data. Microsoft says it was a Chinese state-sanctioned group that gained access to its Exchange servers, which are also used by tens of thousands of businesses and government entities. The question is whether the two countries were simply stealing secrets or whether they had another agenda: to remind America’s leaders of their power to bring down these systems and cripple the country. It’s a mind game, much like moving missiles across the country during the Cold War. But it can also get out of hand. In the next few days or weeks, say Biden collaborators, the United States will respond. Part of that response will involve more penalties. But Gates recently said, “I think we need to be more aggressive with our own cyber capabilities” and find creative ways to increase costs for American adversaries. Biden expressed similar sentiments during the transition. The risk, of course, is a known cold war risk: escalation. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company
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