Chasing the dragon

It will be all smiles when Donald Trump meets President Xi Jinping this week in Osaka at the annual meeting of the G20: a show of comity for the cameras and financial markets. The two are midway through one of the biggest trade wars that the world has seen in recent years, with the US imposing tariffs on $250 billion of imports from China and Beijing retaliating in kind. It’s possible that some sort of truce will be reached, as it was when the two men met late last year. The next stage of escalation — additional tariffs, or worse — may be postponed again.

Don’t be misled. The tariff fight is only the most visible, outward sign of a much larger struggle. Security specialists are clear that the new realities of global power revolve around the age-old question of whether these two superpowers — one established, one emergent — can co-exist peacefully, or whether some form of conflict is inevitable, by accident or design.

There are plenty of doubts about Trump’s foreign policy credentials, reinforced perhaps last week by his decision to rescind an earlier order to strike Iranian targets in retaliation for the shooting down of a US drone. On China, however, even critics acknowledge his administration has fundamentally reoriented US policy — and in a way that might even work. For years, China has been stealing secrets from western giants, prospered under an unfair trade regime, and got away with it. It took Trump to blow the whistle.

Over the past two decades, China has risen on the world stage to become the most powerful strategic rival to the US at least since the Cold War. All the time, Washington has been grappling ineffectively with how to handle the changed geopolitical circumstances. In the post-Cold War world, under successive Republican and Democratic presidents — beginning with George H.