#Top-That Was Fast: Blowups With China and Russia in Bidens First 60 Days

WASHINGTON - Sixty days in his administration, President Joe Biden has a taste of what the next four years may be like: a new era of bitter superpower competition, marked by Washington's worst relationship with Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall. and with China since opening diplomatic relations with the United States.

It has been in operation for many years, as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China have taken strong turns towards authoritarianism. But it exploded openly this month after Biden agreed to Putin's proposal to be a "killer" and the Chinese, who met with the United States for the first time since taking office. new, gave a lecture to the Americans on the error of their arrogance. you see that the world wants to replicate their freedoms.

Most of it was for display on both sides, with cameras rotating. All participants were playing for their domestic audiences, including the Biden team. But it was not entirely an act.

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While the Cold War did not continue - there is little of the nuclear threat of that era, and the current competition is on technology, cyber conflicts and influence operations - the scenes that are occur now have echoes of the ancient. As a moment in theatrical diplomacy, the Thursday-Friday meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, between the Americans and the Chinese was reminiscent of when Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev made headlines around the world. the world 60 years ago by announcing his shoe on a United Nations desk and shouting about the American imperialists.

But as old Cold War veterans suggest, superpower rivalries today bear little resemblance to the past. Putin himself complained that early 21st century Russia is a shadow of the Soviet Union that trained him to be a KGB agent. Russia’s economy is roughly the size of Italy. Its greatest power now is to disrupt and instill fear, by using nerve agents like Novichok to silence dissidents around the world or by using its cybernetics to penetrate well into the networks that keep states United plays.

Yet despite his country's economic weakness, Putin has proven to be highly resilient in the face of mounting international sanctions imposed since he took over Crimea in 2014, which accelerated after he resorted to nerve agents and cyberattacks. It is difficult to argue that they have stopped his behavior.

The sanctions "are not going to do much good," Robert Gates, former CIA director and defense secretary, said recently in a public interview with David Ignatius of The Washington Post. "Russia will be a challenge for the United States, a national security challenge for the United States, and perhaps, in some respects, the most dangerous, as long as Putin is there."

For the Chinese, who were still grappling with the failures of the Great Leap Forward when Khrushchev slammed his shoes and intimidated President John F. Kennedy at a first meeting in Vienna, the story is drastically different.

His path to power is to build new networks rather than disrupt old ones. Economists debate when the Chinese will have the world's largest gross domestic product, perhaps towards the end of this decade, and whether they can meet their other two great national goals: build the world's most powerful military and dominate the race for technologies. key to 2049. the centenary of the revolution of former communist president Mao Zedong.

His power does not come from his relatively small nuclear arsenal or his growing arsenal of conventional weapons. Instead, it stems from their expanding economic power and how they use their government-subsidized technology to connect nations - be it Latin America or the Middle East, Africa or Eastern Europe - with 5G wireless networks aimed at increasingly bringing them together. to Beijing. It comes from the submarine cables that are being wound around the world to make those networks work on Chinese-owned circuits.

Ultimately, it will come from how they use those networks to make other nations dependent on Chinese technology. Once that happens, the Chinese could export some of their authoritarianism, for example by selling other nations' facial recognition software that has allowed them to crack down on dissent at home.

That's why Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security adviser, who was with Secretary of State Antony Blinken for the meeting with his Chinese counterparts in Anchorage, warned in a series of writings in recent years that it might be a mistake to assume that China plans to do so. prevail by directly engaging the US military in the Pacific.

“The central premises of this alternative approach would be that economic and technological power is fundamentally more important than traditional military power in establishing global leadership,” he wrote, “and that a physical sphere of influence in East Asia is not a condition. necessary prior to maintaining such leadership. "