President Donald Trump’s second state visit to Beijing—the first of his second term May 13 through 15—produced little of substance. In face-to-face talks with People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping, Trump lavished praise on the Chinese leader, but walked away with only vague outlines of a few commercial deals for the purchase of U.S. farm products and Boeing jet airliners.
There was no agreement to slow down U.S.–Chinese competition in the race for dominance in artificial intelligence and China made no commitment to assist Trump in winning an agreement with Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But Trump’s decision to delay approval of a $14 billion U.S. arms sale to Taiwan, calling it a “good negotiating chip,” was seen as a gift to Xi in his effort to challenge Taiwan’s independence.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Mel Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. Here, Goodman, a former CIA analyst and author, discusses the issues raised in his recent Counterpunch piece, “Sino-American Relations and the ‘Thucydides Trap,’” where he observes that America is losing international influence and credibility, while China is emerging as a serious rival to the U.S., now standing as a leading global power.
MEL GOODMAN: The relationship with China is the most important bilateral relationship that the United States has to conduct. And then I would go further than that and say the Sino-American relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the global community. Then when you figure that Xi Jinping was host to Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin within a short period of time, you realize that both Putin and Trump were coming to China hat in hand looking for favors from the Chinese leader. Putin needs China’s help to build a pipeline, a Siberian pipeline to move gas and oil into China. China’s very dependent on oil and gas, but the Russians need the Chinese to pay for this pipeline. And we’re incredibly dependent on China for rare earth minerals that I think few people really are knowledgeable about that are needed to build all of our strategic weapon systems, whether we’re talking about fighter jets or destroyers, submarines, our missiles.
You can’t build them without a huge number of pounds of rare earth minerals where China has cornered the market and we sort of moved out of this field 20 years ago just as China was moving in. And they’ve had a lot of success particularly in Africa in addition to their own deposits of these rare earth minerals. So Xi is in a commanding position. When you look at the trade figures for China, last year they had a $1.2 trillion surplus. We had a $1.2 trillion deficit. Russia’s involved in a war that they can’t seem to win. They won’t lose it, but they can’t seem to win it. It’s gone on longer than their war with Germany in World War II and it’s now in its fifth year. And the United States is in a war with Iran that it can’t seem to control despite the power preponderance over this smaller country of Iran.
SCOTT HARRIS: Mel, in your recent commentary, “Sino-American Relations and the ‘Thucydides Trap,'” you mentioned that in 2015, Xi Jinping made this historical reference to the Thucydides Trap. I wonder if you’d explain that to our listeners and its significance in the current state of history that we’re living through.
MEL GOODMAN: Yeah. About 11, 12 years ago, there was a Harvard professor, Graham Allison, who wrote widely on the Cuban missile crisis at an earlier time, wrote a book called The Thucydides Trap. And his argument was that if you look at the Peloponnesian War, which in many ways was the first forever war, I think it went on for about 27 years. It was caused by a rival power threatening the predominant position of Sparta. And of course, the rival power was Athens. And so Allison’s point was you have a similar situation now with China and the United States. United States has been a dominant power for years and years and here’s China emerging. And the United States like Sparta, not recognizing Athens’ role, we’re unwilling to recognize the increased power of China.
And then in my piece, I also extended this to the European rivalry that was taking place in the years running up to World War I. And that was, of course, Britain dominating the seas at this time and being the dominant international power and worried about the emergence of Germany and the rise of Germany, threatening that standing, which I think led to in part to World War I, a war that I don’t think anyone won it. World War II, we know why we were fighting and we knew how the war started. World War I is still a puzzle in terms of who was responsible for that war, but surely this rivalry between Germany and Britain had a lot to do it. Now I’m not predicting that China and the United States will go to war. China would do anything virtually to avoid such a war. I assume the United States is not looking for a war with China. In fact, they’re signaling that they’re not even prepared to defend Taiwan, which is why a lot of people think China will take advantage of this opportunity to use military force.
I’m not one of those people, but you could stumble into war just as the powers stumbled into war in World War I. All it takes is an incident that can’t be controlled. World War I, it was the assassination of the archduke. Here, you could have a military confrontation that no one really wanted. United States and Iran, that can only be mollified and ended, I think with diplomacy. All of these threats, the use of military force is not really getting us anywhere in this what is really an illegal, unlawful, unjustified, unnecessary war that’s being fought at great costs now to the entire international community.
For more information, visit Mel Goodman’s website at melvingoodman.com.
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