US obsession with greatness turns tide of approval against it

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo triumphantly proclaimed at the Atlantic Council online forum on Tuesday that “the tide has turned” against China, not only in Europe but also in Southeast Asia and in Africa.

Yet the day before, President Xi Jinping had a video meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the heads of the European Council and European Commission, in which they reaffirmed their resolve to deepen Sino- EU cooperation.

And on the same day Pompeo was making his claim, Premier Li Keqiang had warm discussions with hundreds of business leaders from around the world in an online dialogue of the World Economic Forum in which they expressed strong interest in continuing to tap the potential of the Chinese market.

Statistics show, except for a slight decline in its trade with the United States, for obvious reasons, China’s export- import volumes with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the European Union, Japan and Africa have steadily increased, despite the global pandemic.

And it is the US administration that deserves the charges that Pompeo directed at Beijing — including bullying, human rights violations, intellectual property theft and grasping of global hegemony.

Given the tariff war the US started with China, which the World Trade Organization has ruled as illegal, it is clear which country is taking advantage of its economic might to bully.

The US administration’s intentional playing down of and belated response to the pandemic, which the US president has now admitted to, exposes how well human rights are protected in the country. Not to mention Washington’s handling of the social unrest in the country.

The moves against TikTok have shown that the US is willing to coerce companies to transfer their intellectual property to US companies.

And the bid to strangle Huawei shows the ruthless method the US administration is using to hold onto the US hegemony in technology.

And given the way in which the US has run roughshod across the global rules- based system, it is natural to ask what rules was Pompeo referring to when he claimed in his speech on Tuesday that the US administration’s foreign policy is to ensure the “rules- based system … is the dominant force for this century”.

For this US administration, it is clear that the rules cannot be rules made to promote fairness, but rather terms dictated by the US. This is evident in its bad- mouthing of the United Nations and paralyzing of the World Trade Organization and its quitting of the Iran nuclear pact and Paris Agreement on climate change.

The US is in effect using its containment of China as a warning to others about the consequences of not yielding to its “rules”.

That the US and Israel were the only countries to oppose a UN General Assembly resolution calling for international solidarity to fight against the novel coronavirus, which was approved by a vote of 169 to 2, clearly reveals which country has taken the initiative to isolate itself from the international community.

China has never regarded the US as “a declining nation”, as the top US diplomat claimed. It is Washington itself that fears the US is declining, and which, in its efforts to ease those fears, is causing the loss of US prestige.