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One more word on Beijing’s plans leading up to, and during, the 2020 crisis. This crisis was to be the pivotal point for the Communist Party of China. If the People’s Republic of China (PRC) could not compete economically with the U.S. under the terms of the existing, Western-created, “rules-based world order”, then those terms of engagement would have to be changed.
If the PRC economy could not grow in terms defined by the West, then the West’s economies would have to be reduced. The 2020 crisis would potentially “level the playing field”: flattening the terrain of strategic engagement.
An integral byproduct of this was the reality that the 2020 crisis also lowered an already depressed global demand for energy, particularly fossil fuels which had come to be the primary energy driver of global economic growth. Oil, in particular, had been the great underpinning of 20th Century growth.
As a result of the lowered demand for oil and gas, those states which were primarily dependent upon the export of fossil fuels would see — as 2020 proved — a catastrophic reduction in market demand and therefore a reduction in the value of their exports. This meant that the first casualty of the crisis would be those states the wealth and power of which depended on the sale of oil and gas.
That included most of the state members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). But not all. And for as long as Beijing was able to halt or change the Western-defined “rules-based world order” those affected states would see their golden ages eclipsed.
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The question, then, is whether the U.S. and its allies allow themselves to be reduced on this occasion because of the adoption of strategies which embrace reduced energy use. Clearly, the PRC has a strong vested interest in ensuring that the world adheres to the Paris Accords, which effectively limit fossil fuel use. All the while the PRC clearly does not adhere to those Accords, which it champions for everyone but itself. Which is why Beijing claims exemption from the Paris Accords because the PRC, in its own words, is not yet a “developed nation”.
What, then, does Beijing’s “new rules-based world order” promise to us if its first order of effect is to ensure a decline in the economic levels of the world merely so that Beijing can emerge at the top of the heap — not even a soaring mountain — of human growth?
Beijing’s maxim as it entered and passed through the crisis of 2020 was that to succeed all others must fail.
By Gregory R. Copley via Defense and Foreign Affairs
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