The competition between the United States and China has seen geopolitical and economic flash points sprawl across continents. (U.S. Army)
The idea of the “Great Game” is rooted in a 19th-century clash of empires. The mighty powers of Russia and Britain exerted their rivalry across an expanse of Eurasia, stretching from the waters of the Caspian Sea to the valleys of Tibet. Caught in the middle were an array of fading kingdoms, petty principalities and warring tribes whom the British and Russians variously conquered, co-opted or coerced to meet their grander strategic goals in competition with the other.
The workings of this “great game” — coined by a British colonial officer in Afghanistan in 1840 — yielded a metaphor that has contemporary resonance, as well. After the end of the Cold War, analysts and journalists saw a glimmer of the “great game” in the Russian, Western and Chinese jostling for influence among the newly independent states of Central Asia.
But experts are now busy charting a far bigger contest reshaping the world. The burgeoning competition between the United States and China has sprawled across continents, with geopolitical and economic flash points in various corners of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America. It has led to a kind of tunnel vision among certain circles in Washington, where policy elites increasingly focus their lens on a far-flung region simply to scope out the size of Beijing’s footprint.
The islands of the Pacific offer a striking example of what the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, branded in a report last week as the new “great game” between China and the United States. An expanding Chinese presence among the region’s scattered archipelagoes and island states — ranging from Beijing’s eye-catching security pact with the Solomon Islands to the Chinese-funded construction of Vanuatu’s new presidential palace — have prompted the United States and its regional allies, chiefly Australia, to step up their engagement with countries on the extreme periphery of the American imagination.
China’s interest in the small nations of the Pacific used to be primarily about Taiwan, the island democracy reviled by the Chinese Communist Party that once could boast diplomatic ties with some of these tiny states. But Beijing’s soft power has steadily deepened Taiwan’s international isolation, with only Palau, the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu left in Taiwan’s camp. China’s promise of near-bottomless development aid is an easy incentive for the Pacific’s oft-impoverished nations. But Beijing’s interests have widened, leading to security and policing agreements with some Pacific countries on top of deepening economic and development ties.
“China’s diplomatic reach is expanding and targeting strategically important countries and sectors, relentlessly cultivating regional political elites with offers of assistance that meet local political imperatives and provide China with inroads and access,” wrote Lowy’s Mihai Sora, Jessica Collins and Meg Keen.
“China has become a major player in development finance, diplomatic outreach, and critical infrastructure such as ports, airports, and telecommunications,” the Lowy report noted. “Working both bilaterally and regionally, China is pushing to play a greater role in key sectors such as the military, policing, digital connectivity, and media.”
The report’s authors added: “Traditional partners such as Australia and the United States worry that the regional balance of power is changing and their influence is waning.”
They’re not sitting on their hands, though. In the past half-decade, Australia has stepped up its diplomatic profile in its neighborhood, opening a host of new embassies and boosting development aid. President Joe Biden joined in on the act, convening a forum with Pacific island leaders last year and committing hundreds of millions of dollars in new development assistance.
The United States and Australia are also tightening their own security cooperation, with the revitalization of Australian airfields to accommodate new U.S. deployments and the much-anticipated AUKUS pact that’s slated to deliver a nuclear submarine fleet to Canberra.
“The United States has ramped up defense ties with allies across the region, including with the Philippines and Japan, as it tries to fend off an increasingly assertive and aggressive China,” explained my colleague Michael Miller. “Australia offers the United States a stable and friendly government, a small but capable military and a vast expanse from which to stage or resupply military efforts.”
The authors of the Lowy report fear for the Pacific island states in the middle, for whom the newfound attention and investment may not entirely be a boon. “The extent of corruption in the Pacific, including ‘capture’ of the state by elites and private interests, has seen no material improvements across the years,” they note.
But the “great game” of the present age, such as it is, is not about blunt imperial coercion. Pacific leaders have stressed their autonomy and self-interest in their deal-makings with China and the West, as have politicians in other parts of the world — not least Africa, where China’s giant economic reach has provoked new forms of competition.
A recent report in the Financial Times detailed how the United States is helping revive the Lobito Corridor, a century-old railway linking the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of Congo to a major port in Angola. The project, which has drawn in financing from major European corporations as well, is perhaps the single biggest U.S. response to China’s sprawling Belt and Road Initiative, which has seen Chinese state companies set up major infrastructure across the world — and, in the process, sometimes, saddle those countries with crippling public debt.
Washington hopes to set a different precedent. “This is a project that will showcase the American model of development,” Tulinabo Mushingi, U.S. ambassador to Angola, told the FT. “We need to have allies that agree with our way of doing business.”
Angolan officials, though, aren’t interested in taking sides. “Angola is doing the smart thing many African countries are now doing: they want to be friends with everyone but they don’t want to be owned by anyone,” Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, an Oxford university professor of African politics, told the British newspaper. “President João Lourenço does not want Angola to be trapped in a new cold war.”
