Foreign policy writers are in danger of running out of cliches. How often can one reuse the old Lenin line of “weeks where decades happen”?
But here we are: in one week, India and Pakistan crept closer to full war, and China moved to warm up its relationship with the European Union only for Chinese president Xi Jinping to jet off to Moscow where he released a strikingly nuclear war-themed joint statement with Vladimir Putin. Oh, and let’s not forget the trade talks with the U.S. coming up this weekend.
The war-like tenor of the moment is difficult to dismiss. And with it there’s a proliferation of weapons-related headlines. Chinese-made arms were apparently used to shoot down several Indian fighter jets in the conflict with Pakistan. Nigeria just approved a deal with the Chinese weapons-maker NORINCO for a local manufacturing facility. This week, China finalized joint military drills with Egypt, which raised rumors of possible jet fighter sales.
The performance of Chinese arms in the India-Pakistan conflict sent shares in Chinese defense firms sharply upward, and it is hard not to worry that those arms will soon show up in other countries too.
Meanwhile, the optics of the gathering in Russia make it easy for the likes of The New York Times to sniff: “The guests include a veritable “Who’s Who” of authoritarians, with the presidents of Venezuela, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea and Belarus expected to attend.”
Which – sure. But the NYT seems to forget that the leaders of Equatorial Guinea weren’t deemed too authoritarian for a hangout with the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Africa when Washington worried about a possible Chinese base in its territory.
I’m not raising this as a tedious bout of whataboutism, but rather to point out that our current war-like moment, and its larger enticement to governments to ditch their democratic duties, were co-authored.
At the very least, it was significantly boosted by the U.S.’s choice to support Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, and its wider regional incursions. This choice reshaped the global landscape, and states are responding accordingly.
One also doesn’t have to dismiss the weight of territorial disputes in the South China Sea to point out that the ongoing drip feed of military exercises and weapons transfers in the region has created new regional security logics and that states on all sides are adapting rapidly. With these adaptations come more and more war talk.
Many of these dynamics predate the Trump era and signaled a larger trajectory of Western power. He then doubled down on them and added major economic disruptions on top.
The result has been the normalization of chaos amid a growing sense of mutual destruction that’s both seemingly inevitable and yet oddly trivial for all its end-times somberness.
The weird out-of-time WWII nostalgia seen in Moscow merges with Trumpian AI triumphalism in an uncanny flattening of the real. As the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino pointed out, looking at her phone “makes me feel like I am strapped flat to the board of an unreal present: the past has vanished, the future is inconceivable, and my eyes are clamped open to view the endlessly resupplied now.”
For foreign policy watchers, that endless now comes with a constant sense of vertigo as what seemed like immovable parts of the landscape keep melting into air. The only things one can say for sure about the emerging scene are that a) it looks alarming and b) it is the result of a co-evolution between the U.S., China, and other powers.
In this context, Trump is less a primary cause of our current crises and more of a powerful mutagen tossed into an already dysfunctional system and making it much weirder.
The issue then is which weirdness Trump will trigger elsewhere. I guess this week’s U.S.-China trade talks will be one place to watch that process in action. But I’m willing to bet that by next weekend, we’ll all be fixated on a new crisis already.
Rinse. Repeat.
Cobus van Staden is Managing Editor at the China-Global South Project.
