Mark Leonard
Foreign Affairs, Jan. 8, 2024
“By aligning with majority opinion in such countries as Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa, China can present itself as an alternative to what it sees as a warmongering, hegemonic, and hypocritical America.”
Over the past year, as Western diplomats shuttled frantically from one end of the world to the other in their struggle to contain an ever-growing succession of wars, crises, and other calamities—from Ukraine to Darfur to Nagorno-Karabakh to the Democratic Republic of the Congo—China leaned into the disorder. Hamas’s October 7 attack and Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip have presented Beijing with yet another crisis to exploit. While the United States discredits itself with the countries of the global South through its seemingly unqualified support for Israel, Beijing has carefully calibrated its response to the war, paying close attention to public opinion in the developing world.
Six months ago, I warned in Foreign Affairs that while the West is seeking to preserve the existing rules-based international order by tweaking some of its elements and inviting in a few additional actors, Chinese strategists are increasingly focused on surviving in a world without order. And they are offering to help other countries build their own sovereignty and freedom of maneuver as Western dominance recedes.
Since Hamas’s brutal attack, the Biden administration has tried to reconcile public support for Israel with private pressure to more carefully target its attacks in Gaza and to be more open to a political settlement with the Palestinians. Beijing, on the other hand, has been much less constrained by the need for balance. By calling for a two-state solution, refusing to condemn Hamas, and making symbolic efforts to support a cease-fire, it has taken advantage of global anti-Israeli sentiment in a bid to elevate its own standing in the global South. In its painstaking attempts to mirror global public opinion as closely as possible, China is following a broader strategy: embracing the global conflagrations that so bedevil Western policymakers. … [To read the full article, click here]