China is winning the diplomatic fight against the United States – RT World News

By Timur Fomenkopolitical analyst

The past few weeks have seen a full display of China’s diplomatic strength. Shortly after Xi Jinping made a successful trip to Moscow, where he met with Vladimir Putin, Beijing announced that it had brokered a deal to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The breakthrough was widely seen as a blow to American influence in the Middle East. Then China persuaded Honduras to transfer diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing, and now high-ranking Western politicians and EU officials, including French President Emmanuel Macron, European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez crowd together to visit Beijing.

Taken as a whole, the past few weeks have seen China enjoy huge diplomatic gains at the expense of the United States, spilling freezing water on Washington’s attempts to isolate Beijing “Cold War-style” on the world stage. and on a relentless propaganda campaign steeped in negativity and fear. But even so, the reality continues to shine through that China is simply too big and too important globally to be isolated, illustrating that Biden’s strategy of creating overlapping multilateral alliances in the purpose of containing Beijing will not work.

China’s “great power moment”

China has demonstrated that it is a superpower capable of steering world affairs in its own direction, a privilege that the United States considers its exclusive right. Beijing’s peace proposal for Ukraine and the normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran have shocked the system in Washington. Xi’s visit to Moscow in particular brought a new balance to the dynamics surrounding the conflict in Ukraine and undermined hubris-driven US miscalculations that it could escalate the conflict to the point of forcing a zero-sum outcome in favor of their own strategic goals.

As noted above, European leaders reacted to Xi’s visit not by turning on China as hoped, but by stepping up diplomatic engagement with Beijing and trying to stay on board. But what will China’s response be? It is reasonable to expect an element of “So stop siding with the United States against us”. Thus, a potential consequence of China’s strategic partnership with Russia could be the weakening of US influence over the EU, which Washington is trying to bolster by fanning the flames of war in Ukraine. Beijing thus brings a much-needed balance to the equation.

Taiwan is bleeding its allies and the US is powerless to stop it

Amid it all, the United States was powerless to prevent Honduras from recognizing mainland China rather than Taiwan, with the two countries officially opening diplomatic ties on Sunday. US officials reportedly tried to “to lean on“Honduras to change its mind, even speaking of a”change of heart”. Unsurprisingly, Washington’s condescending attitude was dismissed – after all, why shouldn’t Honduras be entitled to the same diplomatic relations with China as the United States itself? And who is the United States to lecture Honduras on what constitutes its national interests?

This decision leaves Taiwan with only 13 so-called officials”diplomatic allies” left. Although the influence of these states combined is less than that “unofficial” support that the United States now gives to Taipei, it nevertheless shows that international recognition of the one-China policy, and thus the affirmation that Taiwan is part of China, is growing. Moreover, while Washington tries to create a conflict on this issue, Beijing does not fight for countries to recognize and support its position. The Honduran switch, which Taiwan dubbed “dollar diplomacyis a reminder that China’s economic size and reach as a partner is too great to ignore, and there is nothing the United States can do about it.

A losing battle?

US foreign policy is currently focused on harnessing China as a geopolitical rival through protracted military, economic, technological, and political strategies. This has included building new global alliances such as AUKUS, weaponizing human rights issues such as allegations of “Uyghur Genocide”imposing an ever-increasing embargo on high-end components and generating military tensions around the island of Taiwan.

However, US assumptions that China can be completely isolated stem from the hubris of the unipolar experiment, which chronically overestimates US power and underestimates China’s position. The past few weeks have shown that isolation is not easy and that Beijing still retains the ability to shape geopolitics as it pleases. The big game therefore continues, and Xi Jinping may still have a few tricks up his sleeve.