Washington’s ‘Great Zero-Sum Game’

It’s easy to become distracted by the many moves made by the U.S. against China. To be sure, there’s always a difference between rhetoric and reality, between ambition and actuality, and this has become ever clearer during the Donald Trump and now Joe Biden administrations.

While new developments like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) summit in Washington, D.C., in September and the trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S., known as AUKUS, are headline grabbers, and while they are sincere efforts aimed at unsettling Beijing and reinvigorating American hegemony in Asia, a bit of historical perspective is necessary here: these are simply new moves in a longrunning game most notable in recent decades for the declining position of the U.S. and its increasing desperation to find a workable strategy that will contain China,