From allies to rivals: Understanding the US pivot in a multipolar global landscape

Events of the past couple of months around US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy iterations have left many a scholar and analyst contending that the unipolar moment has ended, and that the world is entering a multipolar moment.

The unipolar moment was ushered in at the end of World War 2 with the US taking a leading role in establishing what are today known as multilateral institutions. The US was therefore an uncontested soft and hard power from 1948 — some would argue till Trump’s first term; others would assert until now. The latter seems more plausible.

Whether one is in Pretoria, Brussels, London, Berlin or even Tokyo, there are protestations and disappointment that Washington is targeting or abandoning them. While in those various capitals Washington’s pronouncements bear a local face, an eagle’s eye view depicts a more nuanced, albeit chaotic picture.

What is inarguable is that China’s rise and that country’s joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 spooked the United States into entering a phase of containing or countering Beijing’s rise.

This remains the case till today, with US foreign policy being in a phase where that country seeks to pivot away from its traditional partnerships and expend its energies in containing China in the Indo Pacific and East Asia. The United States views China — and rightly so — as its only peer competitor, while at the same time recognising Russia as a power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJdf67PwmS8

The US’s foreign policy since the commencement of Trump’s second term has been in the main about focusing on an economic and commercial diplomacy centred around deepening industrial policy through protectionist policies. Relatedly, there has been a continuation of Washington’s foreign policy since the Barack Obama era of seeking to contain China.

As I have argued before in Daily Maverick, initially this policy evolved from getting China into the World Trade Organization with the thinking that as Beijing became embedded into the global economic and trading system, the country would democratise, adopt Western values and subsequently fall into line. This way, it was envisaged that China, as a Western or even hybrid democracy, would kowtow to the only uncontested dominant power — the United States.

When this did not happen, the Quad, comprising the US, EU, Japan and Canada, engaged China through the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement system. In this regard, China became one of the main litigants at the World Trade Organization in trade disputes involving the US, EU, Japan and other major economies.

Most of the disputes involved China’s subsidisation of its companies, which distorted competition in the market. While China would comply with the judgments of the World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement mechanism, the country did not ditch the policy of state capitalism or subsidising its companies.

Coupled with this was that China’s economy continued to grow, in the main benefiting from the Asian giant’s access to markets enabled by World Trade Organization rules and the US-led international liberal order and its emphasis on open markets.

To contend with China’s state capitalism — outlawed in the World Trade Organization — and the country’s growing economy, the US rallied its allies to tackle China head-on, but within the framework of the multilateral trading system.

As a result, discussions within the World Trade Organization began to have a focus on plurilateral agreements. These were agreements that a group of countries could negotiate based on specific issues such as technology, environmental goods, and government procurement, among others.

Critical mass