German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has publicly rejected the notion that democracies should restrict their trade relationships with Communist China in response to Beijing’s degradation of human lives and international security. Scholz did so by observing on Tuesday that “globalization has been a success story that enabled prosperity for many people. We must defend it. Decoupling is the wrong answer.”
Scholz happily ignores the fact that China is now the world’s most existential threat to that rule-of-law-based capitalist globalization. Instead, Chinese President Xi Jinping seeks to replace that global order with a feudal mercantile order ruled by Beijing. But Scholz’s latest hat tip to Beijing is just the tip of the iceberg. According to Politico and Bloomberg, he will become the first Western leader to meet with Xi following the latter’s coronation for a third term in office later this month. Scholz and the leaders of the European Union’s three next largest economies — France, Italy, and Spain — were invited to Beijing earlier this summer. Those invitations reflect China’s priority interest in wooing European powers away from U.S. efforts to confront its various aggressions.
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Scholz’s visit is a major diplomatic coup for China and for Xi personally. It will lend high prestige and credibility to Xi’s effort to present himself as the 21st-century successor to Mao Zedong. And coming alongside near unprecedented U.S.-China tensions, the visit can only be viewed as a stinging German rebuke to Washington.
It’s unclear if many in Washington will notice. After skillfully cultivating U.S. media and think tank favor, Germany has mastered the art of avoiding heavy U.S. criticism for maximizing its own interests at America’s expense. There is no better example of this dynamic than the favor former German Chancellor Angela Merkel won in the United States, even though her premiership was a catastrophe for Western security interests. Pushed by his morally courageous Green Party coalition colleague and foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, Scholz has belatedly rejected Russian energy extortion and pledged to increase defense spending (whether the spending will materialize over time is unclear).
But Scholz’s China policy is clearly a very different matter. His visit demonstrates the unwillingness of Europe’s most powerful economy to punish Beijing for providing cover to Russia on Ukraine (a war that guts a defining principle of the supposedly sacred European project). Still, the Biden administration has the responsibility to act in U.S. interests by calling out this undermining of a critical U.S. foreign policy concern.
No U.S. foreign policy concern is more significant than that of China.
After all, China is engaged in a vast global effort to steal, buy, and cajole itself into a position of technological, military, and economic dominance. Sometimes, this effort is somewhat subtle, as with China’s interest in cutting-edge Western research. And sometimes, this effort takes on a starker character, as with China’s military compression, and possible invasion between 2024-2027, of Taiwan. But the basic point is that Communist China’s agenda greatly threatens American prosperity and freedom.
Just consider the prospective impact of China’s demand for political obedience on American corporate, cultural, and government life were China to become the global gatekeeper to economic growth. Considering that young American sailors may soon have to fight a war against the People’s Liberation Army, it is an urgent U.S. government responsibility — hello, Rep. John Rutherford (R-FL) — to push allies to counter China’s threat.
China recognizes as much and is willing to spend big or punish greatly to defeat the U.S. alliance structure. In two different articles on Wednesday, Beijing’s Global Times outlet evinced as much. Referencing China’s import market for U.K. goods and the large number of Chinese students who study in Britain, the newspaper threatened that new Prime Minister Liz Truss’s more robust stance toward Beijing would cause a “heavy blow to two countries’ economic, trade, and people-to-people exchanges.” In contrast, it hailed Scholz’s anti-decoupling rhetoric with an article titled “Scholz defies ‘decoupling’ in fresh sign of Europe’s nuanced shift on China policy.”
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Germany has the right to pursue whatever foreign policy it desires. But the stakes demand that the U.S. not be an idle witness to actions that fundamentally counter its interests.
