December 31, 2020 - 12:00pm
While we finally concluded our painful and excessively drawn-out withdrawal from the EU this week, a vastly more significant milestone, in geopolitical terms, was marked by the EU’s announcement of the conclusion of its long-negotiated investment agreement with China. The deal saw none of the back and forth with Europe’s geopolitical minnows like Ireland that made Brexit so tortuous. As Johnson attempted (and was roundly mocked for), Xi dealt directly with Merkel and Macron, and beneath them with Europe’s most senior diplomats Charles Michel and Ursula Von der Leyen. This was Europe’s Franco-German engine back to working at full throttle.
Rushed through by Merkel before the Biden administration takes office, the agreement aims to establish a level playing field for European and Chinese investment in each other’s markets. The likelihood of an increasingly assertive China being held to any of its commitments is of course dubious in the extreme, but perhaps that isn’t the point: it is a significant statement of geopolitical intent.
Simply put, the EU-China agreement is a far more meaningful expression of European strategic autonomy than anything seen so far in the heated debate over the concept, outclassing even Macron’s most headline-grabbing interviews. The indignant cries of American commentators that Europe should have waited to consult with the Biden administration miss the point: the lack of consultation is the message.
Of course, the US doesn’t defer to Europe when concluding its own equivalent agreements, and why would it? Similarly, it’s absurd to claim that the European bloc should subordinate its trade and foreign policy to the whims of an erratic and dysfunctional American political system: Europe may be vastly subordinate to the US in defence, but in trade the bloc remains a superpower, willing and capable of securing its own interests.
The moral arguments against the deal, particularly those focussing on China’s treatment of its Uighur Muslim minority, are stronger, but it’s not as if America’s mega-corporations have divested from China — they don’t even refrain from using Uighur slave labour to produce the shiny electronic trinkets whose consumption shores up the West’s economy.
The temptation is nevertheless strong for British commentators, particularly Brexiteers, to point at the deal as evidence of Europe’s and Germany’s hypocrisy, endlessly making high-sounding noises about liberal democracy and human rights while inking lucrative deals with an authoritarian dictatorship — but this shouldn’t be taken too far. The issue isn’t so much whether the deal is ethically praiseworthy — of course it isn’t — but whether it’s sensible: and as an example of realpolitik it’s surely hard to fault.
After all, the agreement accords well with the seeming European policy of neutrality in the coming great power confrontation between China and the United States. As recent pronouncements demonstrate, Europe’s leaders have decided that China’s rise — which is of course concomitant with America’s decline — is most likely unstoppable, and that it’s better to reach a modus vivendi with the new economic hegemon than become embroiled in a titanic clash to preserve America’s faltering position.
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SubscribeAny economic power, how vast soever, which is very little equipped to wield military might, is a sitting duck and can reasonably be termed Bait.
That is the reality of the EU’s ability to defend itself or threaten others.
Germany’s armed forces are particularly lamentable (in training, competence, and equipment), but many other EU countries’ are not much better. France indeed has her nuclear weapon – but the likelihood of the 27 members of the EU ever agreeing any common foreign policy in point of defence or attack hovers near zero.
This has been demonstrated time and again. The Dutch peacekeeping soldiers looked on at the massacre of Srebrenica. The nightmare civil wars into which Serbia, Kossovo and neighbouring Balkan states descended in the 1990s were resolved only when NATO intervened.
On these grounds I have never perceived the European Union as any kind of superpower.
A superpower is one which can assert itself against the wishes of others and prevail by sheer control or force.
Inside its borders the EU’s leadership has just such power; outside them, Liechtenstein or Monaco are probably more powerful; Liechtenstein as banker to corrupt foreign rulers, Monaco as a playground that the gamblers among them particularly delight in.
Hard to deny that any Chinese infractions will likely be met with the full force of EU dysfunction. Talk softly and carry a spectrum of opinions… not really going to work against a monolithic authoritarian government. The EU should ensure that their commercial agreements are in sync with US objectives so as to be sure to get assistance after crying that the mean Chinese bully needs a lesson. This is no time for the first world Democracies to go it alone, there should be an alliance of the English speakers, plus Korea, Taiwan, India etc with the EU (if they promise to behave, otherwise Foxtrot them)
What’s China going to do to bully the EU being as it is on the other side of the world? Why should Europe care about the US “objectives”. As far as I can see that means destabilising the world, particularly Europe’s near abroad, for twenty years, and spewing anti European ( anti Eurocentric) rhetoric from the fever swamps of the US university system all the live long day.
The alliance of “English speakers” is a myth, the US knows nothing about the special alliance – the phrase is entirely British. The last 2 presidents didn’t like the UK, and the next one is plastic Irish. India does not look fondly on the Empire, although it is anti Chinese. These are unstable alliances.
America is no longer part of the solution. It has become the problem.
Absolutely. People on here fighting the Cold War on their head don’t seem to realise that.
Luckily this is a trade agreement with China, which is on the other side of the world. Not a military pact with enemies of China.
The EU does need an army though.
We are well out of this.
China will eat them alive.
Exactly. There will be infinitely more Chinese investment in the EU than vice versa. As I have said for some years, Europe is sliding into the pauper’s grave of history. And now China is coming to rob the grave.
And yet on another thread you would be getting all excited about the fact that Britain can now trade with the non-EU sector where 90% of the growth is.
Except much if not most of that growth is in China.
It wasn’t that long ago that Britain was championing itself as the biggest friend of China. Now, having locked itself out of the EU to get more trade deals with the rest of the world, the EU gets the trade deals with the rest of the world.
If this trade/investment deal was with Britain you would be proclaiming it from the roof tops as a success.
This article, like others, greatly overestimates the future power of China. !.4 billion people sounds vast until you remember it is only one third of Asia’s population, and the next three most populous powers, India, the EU, and the US, total over 2 billion people and are all democracies. Europeans need to remember that huge distinction. They thought they could handle Nazism and Communism too, until they couldn’t and had to rely on the US to defeat them. So-called “Realpolitik” has always been peculiarly unrealistic about the difference between democracy and autocracy.
Not only that, but the One Child policy means that the number of military aged men in China is dropping quite fast. They have almost twice as many 30-year-olds as they do 15-year-olds. I suspect that their current, more active behaviour, both in military and in commercial policy is a matter of making hay while the sun shines.
They are running out of soldiers and they are running out of workers. Now is their time to act, twenty years down the line will be too late.
You got a link for that statistic. From what I can see the Chinese have a TFR about the same as the US, and more than Europe.
They aren’t really running out of soldiers or workers either, they have huge reserves in their rural hinterland, where the fertility rate is quite high. If China wanted to increase their fertility it would be fairly easy to do. Not so much the west.
They will be vaporised by the USN in about 30 minutes.
Wake up young man!
Sorry about the delay, here you go: https://www.worldlifeexpect….
Europe’s leaders have decided that China’s rise ” which is of course concomitant with America’s decline ” is most likely unstoppable, and that it’s better to reach a modus vivendi with the new economic hegemon than become embroiled in a titanic clash to preserve America’s faltering position.
This, above, is the point. A major, perhaps THE major theme of the next decade is going to be Western countries, like Britain, deciding that they need to learn to live with a globally powerful China which ignores Western lectures on human rights and democracy. America has a simple choice: go to war with China, or find a “modus vivendi”. I think the second option is the one that will be chosen, but only after several years of back and forth. I may be wrong, though. The alternative – war – is possible, and a deeply worrying one.
The US Navy is quite capable of destroying China now. This advantage will last for at least the next five years.
Full scale Nuclear War, is certainly winnable, perhaps unspeakable, but certainly not MAD.
Time to do as the Roman Republic did to Carthage and Corinth in 146BC/607AUC.
Vae victis!
I think you may be a bit behind the wave there. Naval (and space) power mostly depend on having more stuff than the other guy and using it in a coherent manner. But the US has been trying to run the world for 75 years, and has gotten spread out and played out. Meanwhile, it managed to push Russia into an alliance with China, while keeping Europe in the position of a powerless, dependent satellite. One can see why people like Merkel are hedging their bets.
You maybe correct, but why are the Chinese scrambling to produce a credible Nuclear Ballistic Submarine?
They have nothing in their inventory to match the USN’s Ohio class subs, which alone could do the job.
I agree US Foreign Policy seems muddled as it appears to be predicated solely on the survival of Israel.
However, I am led to believe they have not lost sight of the clear and present danger to civilisation that China represents.
Besides the USN’s subs, there are as you might expect ‘other’ weapons, too sensitive to discuss here.
Let’s face it China is a giant carbuncle on the backside of humanity, which has been indulged and nurtured by cretins such as Merkel and others for far too long. It is time it was ‘lanced’.
Think Hitler, think China. There will not be a second chance.
The whole point, which much of the world has yet to grasp, is that China is NOT a giant carbuncle on the backside of humanity. Such a statement reveals a shocking assortment of myths and prejudices, mixed with a good dose of arrogance.
I certainly plead guilty to arrogance, but does not China’s record in Tibet, Hong Kong and elsewhere speak for itself?
Perhaps even more to the point, the record of the CCP in relation to the people of China itself.
Yes, truly horrific as I recall.
Wasn’t it about 40 million dead in the Great Leap Forward alone?
Iraq, Afghanistan, Agent Orange in Cambodia, the first concentration camps in the Boer War, Algeria, ….the list is a very long one. Meanwhile, I repeat; find a modus vivendi, or go to war. Merkel has already done the maths, and I agree with her.
Come of it! All those events pale into insignificance in comparison with the horrors wrought by the Chinese, in the short period from 1949, and you must know that?
Merkel may have done the maths, but so had Kaiser Bill and Adolph and look where it got them.
Their time in Chinese Turkestan has been spectacularly brutal. Then their policy of genocide through moving Chinese into any conquered lands is pretty wicked. Stalin was of their ilk, he ‘destroyed the Kulaks as a people’ by basically exterminating them.
Couldn’t agree more. When it comes to the ‘Olympics’ of Barbarism and Extermination:Gold must go to the revolting Mao, Silver to the loathsome Stalin, and Bronze to “that stinker Hitler” .
You probably recall Stalin’s cynical comment ” one death is a tragedy, a million, a statistic”.
What have you said there? Whilst China works to death slaves so that you can a have a cheap ‘phone, you only worry about some “myths and prejudices”? Given half a chance, the Chinese (government) will make us into slaves. Maybe you believe Diane Abbot and her pro China group, but I think most people believe China is a menace to world peace.
So, have you visited China? Do you speak Chinese? How much Chinese literature have you read? I think the answer is: NO, NO and NONE. Am I correct? If yes, how can you talk about a country which you know nothing about ? Let us be realistic. China is a great power It is not going to go away (although many people wish that it would). It will continue to grow, and will surpass the US as the world’s largest economy (using market prices) in about a decade, or less. We all enjoy the economic dividend of China emerging into the global system. Put it another way: no China, your phone, most of your clothes, and many other household and everyday items cost much more. Ask Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, Peru, the Congo, Canada, Russia, Argentina, what difference China has made to their balance of payments and economic wellbeing.
The article recognises these realities and is a good article. All I am saying is: Western countries face a choice: war, or co-operation. I know which it will be. By the way, co-operation does not mean slavery.
Change the country and the year and you could be any number of business spokesmen discussing Germany in 1938/9. China is openly committing genocide and all you’re bothered about is cheap phones. As for you suggesting that China’s influence in places like the Congo is benign, I suggest you speak to the Congolese or any other Africans. The Chinese are no more interested in being benevolent than any other empire. No-one wants war but we need to recognise they are a political and economic rival with a vile system of government and should be opposed, blocked or thwarted wherever possible
I’d rather pay more for consumer goods than buy those produced by slave labour and which would help enrich an corrupt authoritarian state that controls all the thoughts and words of its citizens.
I would prefer to do with out stuff made through the use of slave labour.
You don’t remember how China’s Communist Party brutally crushed the peaceful demonstrators for democracy in Tiananmen Square with tanks and bullets? Or the genocide of the Tibetans after launching an unprovoked war on that defenceless country? Shame on you comrade.
Canada’s Trudeau is China’s sock puppet.
Yes, a ” complete waste of rations” as we used to say.
Aren’t you forgetting, that in a war of China against the US or Europe it would be be joined by its ally Russia and N. Korea? Look what happened in WW2 and the Axis powers.
I wouldn’t loose any sleep over Russia, it’s a near bankrupt “Paper Teddy Bear”. It would also be idiotic to back China, as it almost certainly on the Chinese menu itself.
As to North Korea and ‘Little Rocket Man’, a pathetic joke, which anyway is a Client State of the CCP.
What happened in WW II is irrelevant. This is going to be a new war, perhaps the penultimate one, and looking backwards is pointless, despite the fact that such retrograde behaviour has been quite popular with some of the military in the past
Not so re Russian finances. From Worldpopulationreview dot com “Russia’s
debt ratio is one of the lowest in the world at 19.48% of its GDP.
Russia is the ninth least indebted country in the world. Russia’s debt
is currently at a total of over 14 billion руб ($216 billion USD). Most
of Russia’s external debt is private.” They also own ALOT of gold and have a sizeable domestic gold mining industry. When this global debt bubble and the USD collapses and all fiat currencies devalue with it, gold backed currencies – either national or international reserve currencies – will be crucial.
I stand corrected, thank you.
However hasn’t its GDP slumped rather dramatically over recent years ? Given its size it is hardly an economic power house is it?
That gold (and other resources) you mention cannot have escaped the attention of the envious Chinese, obsessed as they are by the ‘Unequal Treaties’ of the 19th century.
I had a look at a few more facts not being an expert. Of course they have been under sanctions for quite a while which includes slowing down that Nordstream pipeline to Germany which will be a big earner presumably, now that Germany has realised they can’t make do without fossil fuels after all…I think what is interesting is Russia are a huge net exporter and pretty self sufficient. A winning combination. Yes, China is also a massive state gold buyer! I found Mike Mahoney’s 7 part “Hidden Secrets of Money” a fantastic YouTube series on why financial systems always fail. It is a bit American but very watchable and incredibly relevant. I recommend if you are short of intelligent entertainment 🙂
Many thanks.
I think Mrs Merkel nuclear policy is like to prove a catastrophic blunder.
However the Fatherland is probably inured to catastrophic blunders, as it does rather tend to specialise in them.
Many thanks.
I think Mrs Merkel nuclear policy is like to prove a catastrophic blunder.
However the Fatherland is probably inured to catastrophic blunders, as it does rather tend to specialise in them.
“Two World Wars and a World Cup” as we used joke in the 60’s.
Stop trying to destroy the world old man, just because you are leaving it.
What a bitchy remark from what
I naively took to be a civilised human being.
You should be as ashamed of yourself.
What an unpleasant remark from
what I naively took to be a civilised human being.
You should be as ashamed of yourself .
This is not twitter, grow up
lol. The guy who wants millions of people dead is ok though?
Nice photo of former German defence minister von der Layen reviewing Chinese troops. Wonder if Sun Tzu’s precept that the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting passed through her mind as she did so? I have no doubt that the Chinese leadership have much more than passing thoughts on this.
I gather she was absolutely useless when she held the Defence brief, all mouth and no action.
I imagine that Chinese Honour Guard in the photo, are wondering if she would taste better with noodles or bean sprouts.
It is surely worth considering the total responsibility for the Wuhan virus lies 100% with the Chinese Communist Party. China lied to its own people in January, claiming the virus was not infectious. Then it silenced doctors in Wuhan from telling the truth about the virus and Chinese Communist Party officials then ordered the destruction of laboratory samples, while insisting there was no contagion. (The Sunday Times Nov 15 2020). Following all this the CCP pressurised the WHO into
agreeing it was not a dangerous epidemic. Knowing all this it allowed thousands of Chinese to return after the New Year to work and study in Europe and elsewhere, thus unleashing a global epidemic.
Whether this was all by accident or design, you have to ask yourselves this: Who profits? The economies of the Western world are seriously damaged, confidence in governments shaken, there’s social instability, health systems at breaking point in many countries and there have been thousands of unavoidable deaths. And all without one bullet
having been fired.
Sun Tzu the Chinese general, military strategist, author of
The Art of War, would have been impressed.
Design.
Nazis killed, causation, 27 million people. Black Book of Nazi crime
Using above metrics the Black Book of Communists/Socialist crime calculate that 100 million deaths, AND still counting. A lot of people in the UK are are of that same mind, (Corbyn and his gang) but if you pull them up, or argue they call you a Nazi. Strange that a Nazi is VERY BAD and Communist is VERY GOOD when the death ratio is so different.
Seems to me that the Europeans are smart enough to understand that the Chinese (unlike the Russians) don’t want to invade them, they want to be respected as a world power. That’s not such a hard thing to do if you’re French or German. It’s harder for the British given the history of the Opium War etc., but the Europeans don’t have to worry about them anymore.
Well to be fair the UK does have a land border with Ireland ( and thus the EU) and thus something had to be decided there. Not that it was mentioned much during the referendum debate but there it was.