(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
In the book The struggle for world power Øystein Tunsjø takes up a large amount of empirical material and launches a thesis about a new bipolar world order, where the US and China fighting for world power. Tunsjø emphasizes that we no longer have a unipolar system, which we have had since the 90s with the USA as the overall dominant power, but that we have now instead returned to a bipolar system as during the Cold War. He believes that China is now emerging as a new superpower that has replaced the Soviet Union as America's counterpart, but unlike the bipolarity of the Cold War with a sharp dividing line that went right through Europe, we now have a confrontation at sea. According to Tunsjø, this risks not immediately escalating into a nuclear weapons conflict if one party crosses the border to the other, but rather into a war or a conflict at a lower level.
Tunsjø rests on the academic works from the 'realism tradition' within the subject of international relations.
China's military power still cannot match that of the United States, but economically China has grown into a power that may overtake the United States in the next few years, and militarily China has sufficient capacity to be able to compete with the US Navy in Chinese coastal waters.
To many in the Third World, the Chinese leadership appears more modest and humble.
But this approach is probably problematic. Tunsjø rests on the academic works from the 'realism tradition' within the subject of international relations, and he also applies himself to geopolitical theory – and there is good reason for that in a time like this, dominated as it is by neoconservative hubris and idealism. The problem is not his realistic and geopolitical approach – but his 'American glasses'. His approach is characterized by what in intelligence analysis is described as 'mirror imaging': When you describe the other person, you see yourself in the mirror. In short, he believes that Chinese leaders will behave like Americans if given enough power to do so.
Extended cooperation
But China's story is different. While the Europeans realized their colonial adventures, not least the British and later Americans came to dominate people in Africa, Latin America and Asia, Chinese sailors had traveled to India and East and South Africa even before the European adventures began. The Chinese traded with these peoples, but no attempt was made to conquer their lands. They did not have the 'missionary instinct' and 'gentleman mentality' which have been so typical of Christian and Western tradition.
In Africa, but also in Asia and Latin America, many states have wanted extended cooperation with China, but not with USA, because one does not want to be ruled by western 'Besserwisser mentality'. You don't want the hubris of the old colonialists or the neoconservative USA Pax americana with bribery, extortion and protracted wars. To many in the third world, the Chinese leadership appears as more modest and humble and not as "assertive and aggressive", as Tunsjø writes. When he writes with expressions such as the "struggle for world power", it seems as if he believes that China is interested in dominating other countries – as the European colonial powers did, and as the United States has proven willing to do. Not least this applies under the leadership of the later decades neokonservative elite i Washington.
Built trust
Contrary to the neoconservatives' "Project for a New American Century", it is not for China to usurp the place as "the sole superpower" (to use Colin Powell's words), i.e. to strive to become the new central power in a Chinese unipolar world order – but to be one of several key actors on the global stage. China is unlikely, like the British and Americans, to strive for a military hegemony "to rule the waves".
China has had one authoritarian and violent domestic tradition from the imperial era, but in contrast to what Tunsjø writes, there has been little "assertive and aggressive" in foreign policy. In recent decades, the United States has initiated a large number of wars and supported a large number of coup d'états, while in the same period China has built up trust in various states in the Third World. Admittedly, China has tried to prevent at all costs Taiwan from becoming an unsinkable US aircraft carrier – and will do so by military means. The Chinese have also been less willing to compromise with other states on the country's national borders at sea, but both of these cases concern the issue of their own territory, not of other states.
US financial hegemony
Tunsjø is guilty of so-called mirror imaging by speaking in terms of the US and China's "struggle for world power". For China, it is more about freeing itself and freeing the world from American hegemony. A key American political writer (a candidate for the post of President Reagan's National Security Advisor) informed me of his negotiations in Moscow in the 70s that the Russians did not understand what the US's power consisted of. They did not understand that "we control the mass media, and we control the financial system". He told me this at a conference more than ten years ago. The USA's power is not only about economic and military capacity, about the country's geographical and population size or about scientific and technical development, but also about global hegemony. US financial system, media system and military bases and special forces are global.
China is unlikely, like the British and Americans, to strive for a military hegemony "to rule the waves".
Today's China understands more of what the USA's power consists of than what the Soviet Union understood in the 70s. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, and from 1 January this year also Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) have therefore started trading in their own national currencies rather than in dollars, to circumvent US financial hegemony. The US global financial system will eventually be replaced by a system that rests to a greater extent on gold and national currencies. This should pave the way for a multipolar world order with the BRICS countries as relatively independent actors alongside Europeans and Americans. But it is possible that we are initially facing a new bipolarity in Samuel Huntingtons spirit with 'the West against the rest', with the US and Europe standing against the BRICS countries and the 'global south'. Today, China's security rests not only on secure access to Russian gas and oil, but also on Russia's advanced weapons technology and nuclear capacity – which would be able to provide China with a significant security guarantee in the event of a serious conflict with the United States.
Tiananmen Square
It must also be said that the USA's involvement in Ukraine from 2005 and especially from 2014, as well as President Obama's and Hillary Clinton's simultaneous "pivot to Asia", caused China and Russia to seek much closer cooperation. An American 'aggressive' policy was aimed at Russia and China at the same time. With the USA's direct intervention in the regime change in Ukraine in 2014 and with the US game about Japan from 2010, China and Russia almost forced to cooperate, and it developed into something even more intimate than a traditional alliance. Their strategic partnership was "boundless," they wrote. But in all these cases it was the United States that was the instigator, which provoked Russia and China to respond.
It is striking that there is nothing about this in Tunsjø's book. His perspective is American, which can be illustrated by the fact that he spoke several times about the "massacre in Tiananmen Square" (Tiananmen Square) – which did not actually take place. Early on 4 June 1989, there was a bloody clash between the military and youths a few kilometers west of Tiananmen. Quite a few soldiers were killed and many, perhaps more than 300 civilians, lost their lives in the clashes. But according to witnesses and according to the study done by the Colombia Journalism Review (Sep./Oct. 1998, ref. Jay Mathews, The Myth of Tiananmen, 4 June 2010, https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php), presumably no one was killed in Tiananmen Square, and the students went home before the military took over.
Tunsjø's conclusion for Norway is that we must adapt to American policy towards China in order to retain the security guarantees from the United States. We will therefore not be able to work closely with China in the economic area, including a free trade agreement, which Norway has been discussing for a long time. It is becoming "more difficult to get in both a bag and a sack", he writes. According to Tunsjø, the threat from Russia will force us to adapt to US policy towards China. But if you look at American maritime strategy, it is primarily in the USA's interest to have a significant American presence in Northern Norway. Norway is much stronger in the negotiations with the US than Tunsjø seems to believe. This means that we are also fairly free to choose our policy towards China. We can definitely have closer cooperation with China than what Øystein Tunsjø claims.
