'Global China' conceit is only possible because of America's rising inability to do diplomacy

Photo by Kayla Kozlowski on Unsplash

There is a reason the West is watching China’s moves on the world chessboard with appalled fascination. Just days ago, Beijing brokered a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran. And this week began with China’s President Xi Jinping suggesting a peace plan to end the war in Ukraine.

Sections of the US media are in little doubt about what we were seeing when Mr Xi visited Russia. It’s the “arrival of a more global China”, intoned one heavyweight paper from the Beltway, the circumferential highway that encircles Washington, DC. It quoted an analyst, who discerned China building a “new Asian and then global order”. Another leading American paper offered the following take: “Russia-China Summit Showcases Challenge to the West”.

Why such gloom about the “challenge”? Is the challenge even real? China’s so-called peace plan is dead in the water. Vladimir Putin himself forestalled the Western response by saying that while he welcomed it, others would not.  Sure en…