I didn’t know whether to be amused by Phelim Kine and Stuart Lau’s piece at Politico, “Ukraine is changing the math for countries caught between the U.S. and China”, for which the tag line appears to be “Europe is listening” or shocked at how obtuse it was. Here’s the meat of the piece:
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Europeans are starting to pay more attention to Biden’s message about the dangers of dependence on dictatorships. With urgency like never before, they are restricting exports of chip-making equipment to China, banning TikTok on government devices and pushing protectionist trade policy. Even long-time holdout Germany, the European Union’s biggest economy and a heavy investor in China, is starting to question its business-first ethos.
China is fighting back. It’s strengthening ties with Russia, offering up a peace plan for Ukraine and pushing the message that governments can be “democracies†even if they deny their citizens the right to vote freely for their leaders.
“We are at a heightened moment — between the war in Ukraine, China’s alignment with Russia, and continued economic tremors — and the stakes for international leadership are fraught,†said Stephen Feldstein, who served as U.S. President Barack Obama’s deputy assistant secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor, and who regularly advises current administration officials on those issues.
Europe is listening.
Listening perhaps. Just not acting. Consider:
Point to Europe’s distancing itself from China on that graph. That’s a trick question. They aren’t.
Just as is the case in supplying Ukraine with arms our European cousins talk a good fight but they’re completely willing to let the United States carry the weight and Uncle Sugar is dumb enough to do it.
Actually I expect the Germans to sour on trade with China. China ran a trade surplus with Germany last year for the first time since 2009 and that doesn’t fit in with Germany’s trade policy. Both China and Germany depending on running trade surpluses with just about everybody in the world including each other is a formula for collision. I don’t think there’s an off ramp for Germany but we’ll see.
