China's role in the new world order

The most important feature of the current and foreseeable international geopolitical system is the geostrategic competition between the great powers. The so-called liberal world order - the institutions, alliances, economic agreements and democratic values that formed the basis of the post-World War II global geopolitical system - is already under threat on many fronts.

A new global geopolitical scenario is taking shape in which two major poles are emerging, each composed of two centres of power. We will call this the "dual bipolarity". The transatlantic pole comprising the United States and the European Union, which is relying on the transatlantic link at a time of internal crisis; and the Eurasian pole comprising China and Russia, which is growing in influence, supported by the Eurasian partnership.

This geopolitical model has many similarities with the geopolitical theory outlined by the Briton Halford Mackinder under the title The Geographical Pivot of History, the result of a lecture delivered to the Royal Geographical Society (London) in 1904. He spoke of the pivot region of world politics being a vast area of Eurasia - a land power - which could take over the world from the Thalassocratic power.

If we consider the two great powers that today have the most geopolitical prominence - the United States and China - their defence spending in 2018 was $168.2 billion by China and $643.3 billion by the United States - according to the 2019 Military Balance -. In other words, the US spent almost 4 times as much on defence as China. On the other hand, if we look at the international ranking of their GDP while that of the United States is 21,344,667 million $, China's is 14,216,503, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) of 2019. In other words, China's GDP is 2/3 of that of the United States. Both countries rank 1st and 2nd in the world in terms of GDP.

In the course of history there will not be many examples of what is currently happening in global geopolitics when a country - the United States - which for more than 70 years has been the undisputed leader of the international system of power relations, designing a world order that benefited it, unilaterally renounces its world leadership without any other actor having stripped it of the immense power it has accumulated.

And what history does teach us in these cases is that when a great power abandons geopolitical spaces of a different nature, these power vacuums are occupied by other rivals, who implement different values, criteria or geopolitical rules, which establish and condition a new system of regional or international power relations that are different and even contrary to those that previously existed.

Thus, the United States has refused to approve the reforms of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank for nine years; it is not participating in the Syrian conflict resolution negotiations in Astana; it has withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership (TTP); it opposes economic globalisation; it has doubts about sanctions against Russia as a result of the annexation of Crimea; it questions NATO's principle of collective defence; or it withdraws from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

China's "One Belt. One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative is China's bet on the future of international geopolitics. It embodies China's desire to build a Eurasian power by connecting the two most dynamic extremes of the continent: East Asia and Western Europe. To be a viable reality it needs to be coherent and synergistic with US, Russian and Indian Eurasian interests.

The claim by some pundits that China is one of the two major global superpowers, along with the United States, may still be questionable. It is true that China is already an undoubted regional power with aspirations for greater global prominence. The choices China is exercising are already affecting the geopolitical distribution of military power in East Asia, and the geopolitics of international economic power.

But it is also true that to be a superpower it is necessary to acquire supremacy in all four areas of global power: military, economic, technological and cultural. While at the economic level China can be considered to enjoy similar supremacy to the United States, in all other areas it is outstripped by other major powers. On the other hand, China is filling the geopolitical vacuums left by the US, such as in globalisation, the East Asian TTP and climate change.

Jesús Argumosa, Director of the Chair in Strategic Studies at the European Institute of International Studies (IEEI) and President of the Spanish Association of Military Writers (AEME).