China: Growing strong but refusing to lead
The best news for international security is that East Asia will remain relatively quiet in 2016. Political leaders in China, Japan and India are preoccupied with all-important domestic economic-reform plans and can’t afford conflicts that are bad for business. Compared with Europe and the Middle East, East Asia should remain calm—unless North Korea surprises us.
China will find other ways to challenge the dominance of the U.S. Beijing will use its $3.4 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves to finance ambitious alternatives to Western-led institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. China will become a new lender of first resort for governments of developing countries that don’t want to meet U.S. demands. U.S. allies like Britain and Germany, eager to diversify their economic partnerships and profit from China’s rise, will continue to follow China’s lead, extending the prolonged battle over whether global commercial standards are decided in Beijing or Washington.
But a stronger China still has no interest in filling the vacuum created by the G-zero order. Beijing won’t fight ISIS or help rebuild Syria. It won’t help ease tensions between Russia and the West. China is the world’s only government with a truly global foreign policy strategy. But that strategy involves solving China’s problems—not the world’s.
Still, it’s a strategy that speaks to some leaders’ interests. “A strong China offers economic opportunities for the U.K.,” says Hague.
There will be plenty of good news in 2016. Crucial, long-awaited reforms will continue to advance in India and Mexico, two of the world’s most important emerging markets. A strong group of leaders in East Asia will keep rivalries in check. Policy corrections in Brazil and Argentina will begin to pay dividends, even if the process of getting there is ugly. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia will profit from competition among the U.S., China, Europe and Japan for much-needed infrastructure investment.
But none of these good-news stories will help resolve the G-zero dilemma. Only a global emergency on a scale greater than anything we’ve yet seen can accomplish that—the sort of crisis that forces a new level of global cooperation based on the world’s true balance of power. It might be a war, a financial crisis, a public-health threat, catastrophic terrorism, an environmental disaster. Though that crisis is approaching, we’re unlikely to get there in 2016. When it finally comes, it will be the biggest story of our time.