For two years, the United States has been engaged in a global confrontation with China, based on the Trump administration’s assessment that the policy of engagement pursued for decades has failed; that the growing assertiveness of China’s authoritarian regime is driving a policy disrespectful of international law, with revisionist designs for the international order; and that China’s government is coercive both toward its own population as well as countries daring to oppose or criticize its policy, like Australia is experiencing today.
The speech of Vice President Mike Pence at the Hudson Institute in October 2018 was a marker of the radical turning point in American posture, adding crude words to a more polished December 2017 National Security Strategy. Pence spoke of an “Orwellian system” of population control, the desire for Chinese domination of the technologies that will be at the heart of tomorrow’s global economy, massive industrial espionage, and a China aimed at “pushing the United States out of the West Pacific” and breaking the system of alliances in the region. The “United States Strategic Approach Towards the People’s Republic of China,” issued by the White House on May 20, detailed the nature of the challenges posed by China in terms of values, security, and economics, and presents the guidelines of American policy aimed at taking them up.
For its part, Europe has lost its “naïvety,” as the EU High Representative and Vice-President Josep Borrell puts it, and the EU, after having designated China as a “systemic rival” in 2019, seems det ..
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