HS Analysis | There is almost nothing left of the hopeful atmosphere between the great powers

Australia, Last Monday, the United States and Great Britain announced that they had reached an agreement whereby Australia, for example, will acquire nuclear submarines from the United States costing tens of billions of dollars.

They are much more powerful and longer-range weapon systems than Australia’s current diesel-powered submarines. The new submarines are powered by nuclear power, but no nuclear weapons are installed on them.

The agreement was created within the framework of the Aukus cooperation between the three countries.

“Atomic power is the power of peace”, states the song of the comedy group Punatähti, which pokes fun at Soviet nostalgia. In the same spirit, the United States justified the agreement on nuclear submarines and the Aukus cooperation.

“Aukus demonstrates a shared commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific maritime region and an international system that respects the rule of law, sovereignty, human rights and peaceful solutions,” the White House announced.

In the bulletin China was not mentioned, but Aukus cooperation and submarines are related to it.

There is a fear of a third world war, which would start accidentally, for example, from the ever-growing sabre-rattling of the Pacific region or from the attempt of China, which is rapidly developing its military power, to take over the island of Taiwan, which China considers its own.

The announcement about the submarines is a hugely expensive reminder in monetary terms of how dark the world has gone in the last year – or two decades.

In the shorter term, we have had to testify Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. In the broader tip, it has become clear that it is not The “peaceful rise” promised by China itself is not a self-evident development direction at all.

If let’s rewind in time 20 years ago, there were still pretty good reasons to think things would be different. This is evidenced, for example, by the lazy investments of many European countries in their defense.

Russia was uncertain, its steps to undermine its democracy were only tentative. The Russian economy was still too unstable to dreaming of a great war, although it certainly didn’t feel that way in Chechnya.

After Monday’s submarine news, I remembered a couple of state visits to Australia in October 2003. The President of the United States went to the country first George W. Bush, whose speech in the Australian parliament was interrupted by the disruption of two senators. Bush was shouted at because he had launched a war against Iraq that angered many allies.

In Bush’s wake, the new president of China traveled to the country Hu Jintao. Australian MPs gave him a long standing ovation as Hu was seen manifesting a new China, with which Western countries can also cooperate and whose wise economic policy would benefit the whole world.

The Australian parliament’s behavior raised concerns in the United States about whether it is losing the hearts and minds of its close allies to China.

Power transition to Hu Jintao who served two terms as president From Jiang Zemin at the turn of 2002 and 2003, hopes were raised that a stable and institutionalized way of softening its internal dictatorship had emerged in China. The bravest dreamed of the democratization of China.

Russia at that time fresh manager Vladimir Putin on the other hand, had even toyed with the idea that Russia could also become a member of the military alliance NATO. The United States, China, and Russia had many schisms, but also a seemingly common enemy, terrorism, as it seemed for a while after September 11, 2001.

There is nothing left of these moods.

Today, it is feared that China is considering armed support for Russia, which would turn the war in Ukraine into a proxy war of the great powers, more and more reminiscent of the tragedies in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

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Xi unabashedly followed in Putin’s footsteps.

Russia’s aggressiveness has made Europe’s allies realize that military spending needs to be increased, quickly and far-reaching, in addition to which the United States is expanding its tentacles in the direction of the Pacific Ocean as soon as it has time.

Even before The Russian Invasion Peace Research Institute Sipri did the statistics seven consecutive years of growth in world military spending. In 2021, the two trillion or 2,000 billion dollar mark was broken for the first time.

Military spending has grown in the opposite direction to the democratization of the world. In the latter trend, 17 consecutive years of backwardness have already been observed, as is the case being mapped Freedom House organization last week told.

Three days before the announcement of the Aukus submarine project, the rubber stamp parliament known as the Chinese People’s Congress approved Xi Jiping’s for a third term as president.

The idea of ​​Chinese leaders serving at most ten years at a time was rubbish. Xi unabashedly followed in Putin’s footsteps.

In recent years, it has been possible to witness how dark Xi’s worldview is in domestic matters as well. The cultural genocide of the Uyghur minority has been carried out in Xinjiang, democracy in Hong Kong has been put to death and accelerated by the corona pandemic digital the driving system has been refined to dystopian.

But dystopian is the worldview of the United States as well, if you look at it from the perspective of the Chinese. The United States has harnessed its four English-speaking partners—Australia, Britain, New Zealand, and Canada—in the ever-deepening techno-espionage “Five Eyes” collaboration.

It’s been a decade since Edward Snowden revealed that the group of five countries and “five eyes” had targeted, in addition to the Chinese and Russians, the UN headquarters, the Brazilian oil company and Angela Merkel cell phone.

In addition, the United States is involved in the more recent Quad cooperation, which China suspects is an outright encirclement project. Along with the United States, Japan, India and Australia are in the discussion club of the “strategic security dialogue” called the Quad.

“The United States obviously wants to create Asia through NATO’s bilateral alliances, the tripartite Aukus agreement, the Quad and the Five Eyes alliance. All of them are actually directed against China.” stated a professor familiar with security matters Zheng Yongnian in an interview with the Chinese Global Times magazine last year.

President Xi, on the other hand, stated at the beginning of March that “the Western countries, under the leadership of the United States, have carried out an all-encompassing isolation, siege and suppression of China, which has brought unprecedented serious challenges to the development of our country”.

of the United States the goal of China, which has pulsated to the size of its economy, is to revolutionize the international system created by Western countries, whether it is about security policy, increasing economic power or global decision-making. The United States, on the other hand, is trying to prevent it or at least slow it down.

Many in Europe think that Russia’s attack on Ukraine has turned everything upside down. In the rest of the world, the war in Ukraine appears to many as a rather distant and marginal event – and perhaps just a prelude to a bigger disaster.