The New York Times
That was fast: explosions with China and Russia in Biden’s first 60 days
WASHINGTON – Sixty days after the start of his administration, President Joe Biden had a taste of what the next four years will look like: a new era of fierce competition from the superpowers, marked perhaps by the worst relationship Washington has had with Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall and China since opening diplomatic relations with the United States. This has been brewing for years, when President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China took a sharp turn towards authoritarianism. But it exploded openly this month after Biden agreed to the proposition that Putin is a “killer” and the Chinese, meeting with the United States for the first time since the new government took office, taught Americans the error of their arrogant view that the world wants to replicate its freedoms. Much of this was to be shown on both sides, with cameras buzzing. All participants were playing for their home audiences, including Biden’s team. But it was not entirely an act. Subscribe to the New York Times newsletter The Morning Although the Cold War did not start again – just after the nuclear threat of that time, and the current competition is about technology, cyber conflict and influence operations – the scenes that unfold now have echoes bad old days. As a moment in theatrical diplomacy, the Thursday and Friday meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, between Americans and Chinese recalled when Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev made headlines around the world 60 years ago by slamming his shoe on a United Nations table and shouting about American imperialists. But, as the veterans of the old Cold War will suggest, the rivalries of the superpowers today bear little resemblance to the past. Putin himself lamented that Russia in the early 21st century is a shadow of the Soviet Union that trained him to be a KGB agent. Russia’s economy is almost the size of Italy. Its greatest power now is to interrupt and instill fear, using nerve agents like Novichok to silence dissidents around the world or employing its cyber capability to deeply pierce the networks that keep the United States functioning. Even so, despite all his country’s economic fragility, Putin has shown himself to be highly resilient in the face of escalating international sanctions imposed since he took control of Crimea in 2014, which accelerated after he resorted to nervous agents and cyber attacks. . It is difficult to argue that they controlled their behavior. Sanctions “won’t do much good,” said Robert Gates, a former CIA director and secretary of defense, recently in a public interview with David Ignatius of The Washington Post. “Russia will be a challenge for the United States, a national security challenge for the United States and perhaps, in some ways, the most dangerous, while Putin is there.” For the Chinese, who were still facing the failures of the Great Leap Forward when Khrushchev was kicking his shoes and intimidating President John F. Kennedy at a first meeting in Vienna, the story is drastically different. Your way to power is to build new networks, instead of interrupting the old ones. Economists debate when the Chinese will have the world’s largest gross domestic product – perhaps at the end of this decade – and whether they will be able to fulfill their other two major national goals: building the world’s most powerful armed forces and dominating the race for key technologies until 2049, the 100th anniversary of the revolution of former communist president Mao Zedong. Its power does not come from its relatively small nuclear arsenal or its growing stockpile of conventional weapons. Rather, it arises from their expanding economic power and how they use their government-subsidized technology to connect nations – whether Latin America or the Middle East, Africa or Eastern Europe – with 5G wireless networks designed to unite them more and more. Beijing. It comes from the submarine cables they are wrapping around the world to make these networks work on Chinese-owned circuits. Ultimately, it will come from how they use these networks to make other nations dependent on Chinese technology. As soon as this happens, the Chinese will be able to export part of their authoritarianism, for example, by selling facial recognition software to other nations that has enabled them to repress dissent at home. That is why Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, who was with Secretary of State Antony Blinken for the meeting with his Chinese colleagues in Anchorage, has warned in a series of writings in recent years that it may be a mistake to assume that the China plans to prevail by directly confronting the US military in the Pacific. “The central premises of this alternative approach would be that economic and technological power is fundamentally more important than traditional military power in establishing global leadership,” he wrote, “and that a physical sphere of influence in East Asia is not a pre- necessary condition to sustain such leadership. The Trump administration reached similar conclusions, although it did not publish a real strategy to deal with China until weeks before leaving office. His attempts to strangle China, China’s national telecommunications champion, and take control of social media applications like TikTok ended in a disorganized effort that often involved threatening and angering allies who were considering buying Chinese technology. Part of the aim of the Alaskan meeting was to convince the Chinese that the Biden government is determined to compete with Beijing in all areas to offer competitive technology, such as semiconductor manufacturing and artificial intelligence, even if it 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 in his two-hour conversation with Xi, telling him, aides said, that the Chinese narrative of the US decline was very wrong. But it will take months, at best, to publish a broad new strategy, and it is unclear whether corporate America or its main allies will support it. “It won’t happen in a day, a week or a month,” said Kurt Campbell, the president’s chief advisor for Asia, who is leading the strategic review. “This is probably a multi-management effort.” Campbell was at the table in Anchorage, sitting next to Sullivan and Blinken, when the Chinese began their effort to put the US delegation on the defensive. They accused the United States of a “condescending” approach and argued that the country’s leaders had no right to lecture on human rights abuses or the preservation of democracy. They talked about Black Lives Matter and the contradictions in a democratic US system that leaves so many behind. “I don’t think the overwhelming majority of countries in the world would recognize that the universal values defended by the United States or that the opinion of the United States could represent international public opinion,” said Yang Jiechi, China’s most senior diplomat, in a long statement at the opening of the session. He added: “These countries would not recognize that the rules made by a small number of people would serve as a basis for the international order.” The subtext of his message was that China would accelerate its efforts to dominate the forums that set the rules, be it the World Trade Organization or lesser-known groups that set technological standards. In some of these forums, the Chinese have a new ally: the Russians, who are equally eager to lessen US influence and reinforce authoritarianism. Increasingly, the two nations share an affinity for an insufficient weapon of war to which the United States is particularly vulnerable: cyber-intrusions into the complex networks that are the lifeblood of the US government and private industry. The two major breaches in recent months, one believed to be administered by the Russians and the other by the Chinese, are examples of how the two countries have become much more sophisticated in the past 10 years in using their digital skills for political purposes. They are learning to hack on an industrial scale, to prove that they can insert malware into systems on which the United States depends on day-to-day life. The Russian intrusion into network management software by a company called SolarWinds led them to some 18,000 private and government networks, of 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, also used by tens of thousands of companies and government entities. The question is whether the two countries were simply stealing secrets or whether they had another agenda: reminding US leaders of their power to overthrow these systems and paralyze the country. It is a mental game, as much as moving missiles across the country during the Cold War. But it can also get out of hand. At some point in the next few days or weeks, Biden’s advisers say, the United States will respond. Some of these responses will involve more sanctions. But Gates said recently, “I think we need to be more aggressive with our own cyber capabilities” and find creative ways to increase the cost to US opponents. Biden expressed similar feelings during the transition. The risk, of course, is familiar in the Cold War: escalation. This article was originally published in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company