The title of this post might seem quite redundant. I was talking to my friend, Mr. Pseu who has a podcast. He often bounces ideas off me and for whatever reason, we were talking about the state of the US-China relationship. I realized during our conversation that many news analyst and just regular people view China all wrong. But more than that they don’t know anything about Geopolitics. Don’t worry, I won’t be going into super in depth lengths here. But before I begin I want to mention a book that I would recommend reading if you are interested in learning more. The book is called War by Other Means written by Robert D Blackwill and Jennifer M. Harris. This book thoroughly educated me on geopolitics. In this particular post, I want to explain the basic concepts of geopolitics.
The Power of a Strategy
Many struggle to understand the complexity of world politics. Its not surprising to me either. Its complicated and confusing. However, there is a simple way to understand politics. Politics can be understood by game theory. Game theory is the possible choices and outcome of any given political actor. The game theory states that an actor will either make a rational decision or irrational decision. Depending on what context is known about the actor and circumstances, one can guess what results might come of it. So this relates to geopolitics because we can predict what countries will do with relevant statistics and history of actions. The definition of geopolitics is a simple combination of two words with ‘geo’ meaning geography and politics meaning relations between countries in this case. So geopolitics is international relations in a geographical nature.
The geopolitical relationships between countries boils down to basic strategies used for handling every situation that a country might face. You could also call this foreign policy. However, in geopolitics especially between world powers like the US and China. We have to focus on strategies. Strategies are the instruments used in forming a policy. Its how a country deals with problems. The US is well known for going to war or a proxy war. China is more known for their economic pressure. Every country can use any strategy they would like except not all countries are equal. This means where the US could use pretty much any strategy in the book, a country like Canada will not have the same clout. It even depends on what type of government is in that country. The US has a little disadvantage because democracy tends to be slow-moving. China has an advantage of being a one party, oligarchical run country.
Geoeconomics: More effective than war?
One of the things that is discussed in heavily in the book, aforementioned in my introduction is geoeconomics. This is an important facet of geopolitics. Geoeconomics is what China has actually master quite a bit better than the US. You’ll notice that China rarely uses its military for any sort of international conflict. You can trust that China has one of the biggest military’s in the world and its still growing. However, they don’t need to use it. China has figured out that with its recent economic surge it has gained clout that it never had in previous centuries. The basis of China’s geoconomics is based on strategies using trade and currency. Recently, Trump decided to raise tariffs on Chinese import products. China responded in kind with a raise of tariffs on US goods. But you see China holds a variety of methods and employs them as necessary. Some of the methods are still a work in progress such as forcing the standard reverse currency to be the Chinese Yen. China has state owned banks that have more assets than the biggest banks in the US even topping the World banks. The Chinese are slowly converting other countries through various positive or negative economic pressures to start using yen as the standard. As we know the US dollar currently holds the standard reserve. A switch of that to China would mean that China controls the world’s money flow.
So why is geoeconomics better than war? China pushes around its influence and offers countries either favorable trade deals or unfavorable trade deals depending on what they see fit. Granted the United States does have a bigger sphere of influence. But sphere of influence is only a small factor in geopolitics, I’ll discuss the pivot briefly next section. China is achieving their goals through these geoeconomic strategies more effectively and without the loss of life. The problem for the US is that we don’t do nearly as much geoeconomics as we should. The US has untold power with the standard reserve currency. The US primarily uses sanctions, which sounds bad but in reality can be easily subverted. It would take an whole other blog post to describe how wars have not really worked in favor of the US.
A Pivot in the Right Direction?
President Obama really couldn’t do much right during his presidency. But there is one minor bright spot. He started the pivot to Asia, more specifically China. The pivot is a geopolitical strategy uses economic power to maintain an healthy economic and political relationship with China. This was a step in the right direction. The Pivot if the legislation had passed and if President Trump didn’t shut it down, would have provided agreements with ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and other councils in Asia to foster economic growth in Asia. It was actually a rare moment of clarity in foreign policy especially given President Obama’s knack for drone bombing the middle east to bits. Its unfortunate that it didn’t work out because instead starting a trade war that US can’t win, we should be trying help the countries around China be successful so they can manage their own relationships with China. Instead of letting China dictate the relationships of all the countries. The failure of this agreement has basically allowed China to grow its sphere of influence.
Taste of Geopolitics
I hope this general and fairly vague description of geopolitics and geoeconomics was enlightening. The point of this post was to introduce some of the concepts in geopolitics. I think its important to understand that in the context of international relations its important to understand that both sides will probably act rationally in the case of US v. China. When people talk about nuclear war between the two nations, its very unlikely given the co-dependence. US buys way too much imports from China for there to be any actual war unless Trump really turns up the heat on tariffs. Also in order for the US to maintain the dominance that we’ve had, the US will have to adopted some new geoeconomic strategies to counter the Chinese building of power. War isn’t the only way to settle a conflict or protect your interest in a place. If only the war hawks in DC understood this concept…
Thanks for reading.
PS. You can catch Mr. Pseu’s podcast: The Pseudollectual on Spotfiy or any other major carrier of podcasts. I’d recommend it.
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