Well, we were warned. “A Biden administration will do more than restore our historic partnerships,” the Biden-Harris 2020 campaign website reads, “it will lead the effort to reimagine them for the future.” What dreaming, indeed, President Biden’s administration has been doing. For few could have anticipated the barrage of global shifts now unfolding on its watch.
Mr. Biden, no doubt, is not single-handedly responsible for the state of the international order. Yet his mismanagement of America’s domestic and foreign affairs has so undermined our authority that it has cleared the way for political currents long kept at bay to surface and, it would seem, start to succeed.
At the center of these currents is Communist China. Its efforts to “move toward center stage,” as President Xi said at the 19th National Party Congress, are not a sudden affair. They are the upshot of an ideology and of policies set into motion at the People’s Republic’s founding –– punctuated by Chairman Mao’s declaration that “the Chinese people have stood up.”
In this regard, too, they are, for Communist China, necessary steps along its destined path toward global power and primacy. The Communist Party has long held that China cannot reside in a system led by America. Its drive to reorder the world predates Xi Jinping. Even Deng Xiaoping — the once darling of the West — called for a “new international order” rooted in CCP doctrine and forged against “hegemonism.”
Only America and the West were then too enthralled by the ostensible end of the Cold War to notice. For while we brazenly assumed that our way of seeing the world had become so entrenched in the global system that it would go unchallenged, China and its allies were, indeed, à la Deng, biding their time.
We “must be prepared to face the hegemony of the superpowers and, when the time is right, to challenge them,” Fidel Castro said at the 1983 Non-Aligned Movement summit.
That time, apparently, is now –– and in its desire to refashion the global order, Beijing is not alone. For since at least the Bandung Conference, which in 1955 prefigured the so-called non-aligned movement, it has had the tacit support of a mélange of leftist states united in their hope of a debilitated America and the emergence of a new international order.
Should China be at the center of that order, so be it. It is, after all, a comrade. The current challenge, then, is not one of a singular China. It is one of China in concert with a reinvigorated global left.
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