Daily Times

Hope that a direct phone call between the American and Chinese presidents would break the ice between Washington and Beijing didn’t take long to be dashed. Instead, it confirmed that friction between two countries, also the world’s two biggest economies, is only going to increase. President Xi Jinping of China told his American counterpart very clearly that “whoever plays with fire will get burnt” in reference to the latter’s government’s outreach to Taiwan; especially US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s possible visit to the island during her Asia tour next month.

China still considers Taiwan a breakaway province and seems to believe that the One China policy, that established ties with Washington more than half a century ago, is now shaking. Such fears are warranted because it’s very clear that Washington has been trying to undermine China’s rapid rise for quite a while.

This obsession was, in fact, given the status of official US policy when former president Barak Obama launched the Pivot to Asia initiative, which was openly meant to keep China in check. Since president Biden was vice president at that time, and more or less spearheaded that policy, it’s no surprise that his administration did not reverse former president Trump’s import duties on billions of dollars of Chinese products and instead is now making Taiwan controversial all over again.

This is a very irresponsible policy direction, especially since the IMF warned just this week that the global economy was teetering on the brink of a recession, only two years since the Covid pandemic pushed it into the last one. For the world’s leading economies and the two most influential countries to choose this moment to pick a fight about who will be the biggest bully around makes no sense whatsoever. When the international economy slows down, hard-working people in developing countries suffer the worst of it. And since a lot of them have been struggling to find their feet since the last recession, they have no appetite at all for these superpower games that will make life more expensive for the ordinary Joe in the so-called third world.

President Xi’s stance must be appreciated. Nobody will benefit if American wants to play with fire at this point in time, not even the sole superpower itself. *