CHINESE OFFICIAL COMMUNICATIONS OFTEN echo a phrase of President Xi Jinping’s about “great changes unseen in a century.” Increasingly that line seems less like propaganda and more like a simple statement of a vast transformation in the world order.
This overhaul, years in the making, is taking the clearest shape right now in the Middle East, a region where the U.S. has devoted many resources in the 21st century. In March, China helped arrange a peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia, taking the kind of broker role in the region long held by the U.S. Washington currently has no diplomatic ties with Tehran and relations with Riyadh have grown strained.
“We bluster, we threaten, we menace, we sanction, we send the Marines, we bomb,” says Chas Freeman, a veteran U.S. diplomat, “but we don’t ever use the arts of persuasion.”
Freeman was principal interpreter for President Richard Nixon on his visit to China in 1972. The Washington’s “moment of diplomatic glory” is long over. “What has happened is that the American ability to coerce is declining,” he says. “We seem to be approaching the world as though we still have an unchallenged authority that we imagined we did at the end of the Cold War.”
