In the summit between American President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, digitally on the Italian night, two strategic results were at stake. On the one hand, it was necessary to consolidate the COP26 result on the climate, when China and the United States avoided a head-on collision, producing a positive agreement, to the surprise of the hawks in Washington and Beijing. Biden and Xi also wanted to reproduce the pattern at the top, their third since Donald Trump’s farewell and, on the friction points, the Chinese threats against Taiwan, the pressure in the South China Sea, the competition over technology and artificial intelligence, the race to nuclear weapons, to make common interests prevail, trade, economy, debt, preventing instability from degenerating into chaos. In 2022 Biden faces, in November, the Midterm elections that will decide the fate of his administration, while Xi faces the XX Congress of the Communist Party in October, which he is asking for an unprecedented third term.
Biden and Xi must prove to their citizens that they have not succumbed to the opponent, without however, this is the difficulty of the meeting, falling into a Cold War II that paralyzes economic development. Xi is certain he is still in government in 2024, when Biden could leave the White House instead, and therefore tries to consolidate the situation.
An active faction in the Chinese Communist Party is convinced that the United States is a power in decline, divided and unable to bear the efforts of world hegemony, even military, to be pressed on all fronts, starting with the escalation against Taiwan. Xi seems more cautious, he fears – correctly – that underestimating US unity and the ability to make alliances in the Pacific with Australia, India, Japan, could cost him dearly.
Avoiding accidents on the way, always a gamble in our tumultuous time, is the priority: Xi invites Biden to the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games next year, a showcase of the new China, but the White House has delegated to First Lady Jill Biden has the task of representing the stars and stripes at the Tokyo Summer Games, and it seems difficult to change pace, while awaiting the first US visit of the new Japanese premier Kishida Fumio. However, voices calling for a US boycott of the Olympics, after Biden denounced the genocide of the Uighur minority at the hands of China, are silenced.
Tema centers trade, with Trump-era tariffs and tariffs burning in Beijing and inflation eroding Biden’s consensus to dangerous lows. Scholar Ian Bremmer, of the Eurasia think tank, calculates that a move similar to the elimination of the anti-EU tariffs on steel and aluminum, just approved by Biden, if relaunched on the scale of trade with China, could contract inflation by 1 %, political balm for the White House.
The resumption of semiconductor and high technology production, with logistics relaunched in full swing, would also be a relief for the two leaders, eliminating the dead ends of recent months. Biden knows that Xi, on artificial intelligence and quantum computers, opposes the US elite laboratories a generation of engineers and scientists, who may not have the excellent college laboratories, but mobilize an endless lever of scholars, capable of brilliant research .
Lastly, the military confrontation, with the thousand nuclear warheads that Xi wants in the arsenal by 2030, five times more than today. Biden would keep us in strategic agreements, but the Chinese first intend to reduce the distance with the Americans, which is too conspicuous. Taiwan remains the test case, if Beijing raises the pressure, it will surround it with ships and planes, if common sense prevails, it will be content to raise the tone of anti-Taipei propaganda at the 20th Congress.
There were two numbers on the digital table that united Joe Biden and Xi Jinping: at the end of the US-USSR Cold War in 1989, Washington exported $ 9 billion worth of goods to the Soviet Union, at today’s value, and imported $ 1 billion worth of goods. 5 billion. The US-China trade exchange, even in the pandemic, is equal to 124 billion in Made in USA goods and 434 billion in Made in China manufacturing. The whole world depends on this colossal market that forces the two presidents to dialogue, despite the winds of war in Taiwan.
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