A US-China compact could see a new world order arise

In recent weeks, China, America and Russia have been engaged in high-level diplomacy. US President Donald Trump visited China.

- MANOJ PANT

In recent weeks, China, America and Russia have been engaged in high-level diplomacy. US President Donald Trump visited China. His trip was quickly followed by a visit from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Beijing. Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to travel to America soon, while Putin is likely to visit New Delhi for the Brics summit in September.

With the Iran conflict dominating headlines, most commentators are interpreting the US-China meeting through the prism of a possible settlement in West Asia. That deal will eventually happen. Yet, the broader US-China engagement may prove far more consequential. In many ways, it echoes the famous US-Soviet détente of the 1980s that began with the unratified Salt II treaty and culminated in the Start agreement.

Before that, in 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had launched perestroika, a grand restructuring which contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. The end of the 20th century’s Cold War created a geopolitical vacuum: it ended an old argument of ideology in the context of economic development—the ‘democratic dividend’ had led the US well ahead of its Soviet rival.

As I argued earlier in these pages, Russia’s political decline and China’s economic rise in the 90s created a new and unstable global order in which both China and the US occupied the same side of the economic fence. Some resolution between the two was inevitable for a new global order to emerge.