AS RUSSIAN MILITARY FAILURE IN THE WEST drives it ever deeper into the arms of the East, how should we understand the situation that confronts the United States, the current hegemonic world power?
Is it comparable to the Cold War that developed after 1945, or should we look back to Anglo-German rivalry before 1914? Does the challenge the Kaiser’s Germany offered imperial Britain give us any sort of guide to how Xi Jinping’s China threatens America’s place in the sun?
Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it was commonplace to talk about how a “New Cold War”, with China and Russia had definitively replaced the post-Cold War optimism of the 90s. Western giddiness that the collapse of communist command economies meant the world was converging on a globalist free market model had ended long before Biden’s USA re-embraced traditional American naked economic protectionism.
Since the Covid virus spread worldwide from Wuhan in 2020, Western unease at China has exploded into open disdain for Beijing. The atavistic fear of the “Yellow Peril” has revived. Geopolitical concerns about the expansion of the Chinese military — and especially its naval power — in the South China Sea are matched by suspicion at its economic and infrastructure projects in distant lands, including those in which Chinese influence scarcely if ever touched in the past.
CHINA’S BELT-AND-ROAD PROJECT MAY WELL BE VIEWED as a latter-day Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway — Wilhelmine Germany’s bid to free herself from English-speaking economic mastery. In reality, Basra was to have been the terminus of that line so that barrels of its abundant oil could be loaded onto wagons for Central Europe rather than shipped out to the British Empire by the Anglo-Persian oil company, already established across the Shatt in Iran and soon to nestle in Kuwait from 1914. Germany’s lack of oil spelled defeat in both 1918 and 1945.
Trans-Eurasian railroads and pipelines are part of Beijing’s way out of being trapped and blockaded by the United States.
