Twenty years ago, White House officials were concerned about China and escalating US tensions with it. On April 1, 2001, a Chinese fighter jet collided with an American EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft off the coast of China, forcing Americans to make an emergency landing on Chinese soil.
The Chinese detained the American crew for 11 days and carefully inspected their complex aircraft before delivering it. Washington has accused the Chinese fighter pilot of recklessness in flight. “Beijing also apologized to the United States.”
According to Pak Sahafat news agency, NBC News analyst Dan Deluch wrote: “This incident reinforced the view of the then-George W. Bush administration in the United States that China was America’s next great rival. But on the morning of September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda extremists hijacked four passenger planes and crashed three of them into the World Trade Center buildings in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia. Suddenly, Americans turned their attention to the so-called “war on terror.”
After that, American troops were stationed in Afghanistan and the Middle East, and the challenge posed by China was sidelined for two decades.
“It was a wonderful geopolitical gift to China,” said Kishore Mahbubani, a former Singapore ambassador to the United Nations.
Mahboobani, who is currently a professor at the National University of Singapore, stated: The US focus on the war on terrorism was a huge mistake because the real challenge was to come from China.
While China’s GDP in 2000 was $ 1.2 trillion, it jumped to $ 14.7 trillion in 2020.
Beloved, a book on the subject entitled “Has China Won?” “While you were fighting in wars, China was trading,” he wrote.
Experts say that as the United States engaged in fighting extremist militias in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, China’s economic and military power grew dramatically. Beijing has built a missile arsenal, expanded its reach and reach in the South China Sea by building artificial islands, stealing large-scale intellectual property, and resorting to aggressive trade tactics.
“The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies,” said Craig Singleton, an expert at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. After 9/11, China quickly realized that Washington’s strategic focus was to extend 3,000 miles, away from the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and Afghanistan. He stated: It was an opportunity for the country to quietly develop the highly powerful military capabilities, all designed to expand its power in East Asia.
James Lewis, senior vice president at the Center for International and Strategic Studies, said the 9/11 attacks did not change China’s goals but provided an opportunity for the country to close its gap with a so-called war on terror.
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“They’ve been doing all this work all this time while we’re slowing down,” he said, speaking to several US governments on national security issues. At the same time, US officials assumed that we could put the issue of China in the background as we struggled to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration changed its approach to China to gain its support in the UN Security Council over the war against al-Qaeda, easing pressure on Beijing over human rights issues against Taiwan. In 2002, at the request of Beijing, the United States declared an unknown Uyghur organization called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement a terrorist group.
When Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009, US officials began talking about the need to “focus” on Asia and focus more on confronting China. But the ongoing war in Afghanistan and the unrest in the Middle East kept Washington out of China.
“For years, US political and trade leaders did not see China’s economic and trade policies as a major problem,” he said.
“I think it took people a long time to really understand the nature of China’s economic challenge, but it had nothing to do with Iraq or Afghanistan,” he said.
China is now firmly at the top of Washington’s agenda, and both parties agree on the need to “show toughness” to China. But is it too late to respond to China?
Some experts say that valuable time has been lost for such a response, and that the United States continues to suffer from a lack of a long-term strategy for dealing with China, and that the polarization of politics in that country could divert attention from its main task.
“But they also say that the United States remains a center of innovation and still has the tools to compete with China and win.”