Author: Gary Clyde Hufbauer, PIIE

In the year 2018 — 99 years after the end of the First World War, 73 years after the end of the Second and 26 years after the end of the first Cold War — US Vice President Mike Pence announced a Second Cold War : This time with China. How and when it will end is anyone’s guess. The weapons, for the moment, are trade, investment and technology. In 2020 and beyond, the trajectory of the Second Cold War will challenge leaders in Asia and elsewhere. US President Donald Trump stands with US Vice President Mike Pence at the White House in Washington, US, 14 January 2019 (Photo: REUTERS/Joshua Roberts). President Donald Trump’s rhetoric towards China blows hot and cold depending on his daily mood. But Trump’s overriding goal for 2020 is a glowing economy — without that his re-election prospects will take a dive. The economy is far more important to Trump’s political future than impeachment.

Yet, the trade war’s economic toll has largely offset stimulus from the 2017 tax cut. The Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 increased the federal budget deficit by almost US$800 billion annually and cut the corporate tax rate to 21 per cent in line with other advanced countries. But unfortunately, trade wars fostered business uncertainty worldwide and eliminated the investment boost that the lower tax rate would have generated.

Trump can scold Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, but he cannot command negative interest rates. What Trump can do is dial back his trade wars. Accordingly, the near-term outlook is no escalation. Instead, partial rollback of existing tariffs in exchange for assured US agricultural exports seems possible.

But Trump’s near-term trade war tactics are a mere blip in the Second Cold War. Whether Trump is re-elected in 2020 or a Democrat prevails makes little difference. Trump and his Democratic rivals have all convinced themselves — and a majority of Americans — that China is the threat of our era.

But there are differences of degree. Some US political leaders, like Republican and Democratic senators Marco Rubio and Charles Schumer, respectively, characterise China as an existential threat. Others, like Republican Senator Rob Portman, favour targeted responses to specific trade and investment grievances. Henry Kissinger’s calming voice and warning that the United States and China have reached the ‘foothills of a cold war’ find much less resonance in today’s political environment.

During 2020 and beyond, bilateral US–China trade seems destined to stagnate or shrink, but technology will be the lead weapon of ‘decoupling’ — a soft description of the Second Cold War. The United States has already severely restricted US tech companies from selling to Huawei. Not surprisingly, Huawei is already making smart phones without US components .

For a short period, enhanced technological deprivation will slow China’s industrial aspirations. But this will not last. Instructive is the first Soviet atomic bomb explosion in 1949, a mere four years after Hiroshima. To be sure, Soviet scientists were aided by spies at Los Alamos, but China is no slouch when it comes to commercial espionage and Chinese scientific and technological talent and capacities today are far better than those of the Russians in the 1940s.

While the United States is busy decoupling, China has mounted an economic charm offensive. At a time when openness to trade has become too toxic for most world leaders to swallow, President Xi Jinping has repeated a plea for China to welcome more imports. Speaking at the second China International Import Expo (CIIE) hosted in Shanghai over November 5–10, Xi not only called for China to import more, he extolled the World Trade Organization (WTO) and likened globalisation to a mighty river, unstoppable despite many shoals.

American sceptics will scoff at Xi’s speech, but they should ask what other leader of a major economic power is calling for enhanced imports. Not President Donald Trump. Not Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Not Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan.

The Second Cold War confronts Asian leaders with challenges akin to those European leaders faced in the first Cold War. Asian countries nearest China are clear targets of its geopolitical ambitions. Chinese influence travels alongside the Belt and Road Initiative, together with less obvious, and less expensive, covert measures. But China is already a much bigger economic partner for Asia than the United States. Unless China’s ambitions take overt military shape or China’s response to Hong Kong or the Uyghurs becomes visibly bloody, few Asian countries are going to join Washington’s decoupling crusade.

Trump has yet to take measures familiar in the arena of economic sanctions — using secondary trade or financial restrictions to deter third countries from doing business with the adversary. A looming question, in 2021 and beyond, is whether Trump or his successor will take such measures to deter technologically advanced countries in Asia and elsewhere from sharing technologies with Chinese firms. A taste of this option was the largely unsuccessful US diplomatic effort to deter European countries from buying Huawei’s wares. Stay tuned.

Gary Clyde Hufbauer is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics (PIIE).

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Justice Tanko Mohammed, Chief Justice of Nigeria Abuja (Sundiata Post) – The Chief Justice of Nigeria, Ibrahim Muhammad, has called for the amendment of the constitution to accommodate more aspects of the Shari’a law.

Mr Muhammad said this on Thursday at the 20th Annual Judges Conference that held at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.

The theme of the two-day conference was ‘Documentation of Contracts in Islamic Law: Procedure, Sample Precedents and Practice.

Justice Muhammad, in his address read by Justice Muhammad Danjuma, Grand Khadi of Niger State, urged academics to champion the cause of redesigning the methods of teaching Shari’a law.

He said the implementation of his suggestions would be more feasible if universities give the Shari’a law its own faculty.

“As we all know, there are sections of the constitution that allow the implementation of Shari’a personal law and apart from that, we cannot do more,” he said.

“However, we have the number to emend the constitution to suit our own position as Muslims,” Mr Muhammad said.

The CJN also highlighted the importance of the Shari’a legal system to the legal profession, saying Shari’a law ought to be taught in Arabic language in Nigerian universities.

“The Shari’a law should be taught in Arabic not English. There is no university in Nigeria that runs Shari’a in Arabic; they all teach Shari’a in English. So, academicians let’s also look into this issue,” he said.

Mr Muhammad’s call for a constitutional amendment for an apparently religious reason is bound to stir controversy.

As the head of the Supreme Court, the CJN also heads the nation’s judiciary. Some Nigerians on social media have described Mr Muhammad’s suggestion of an amendment influenced by religious demography as “sectional”.

“The Supreme Court is supposed to be made up of eminent jurors who are patriotic and not partisan, but unfortunately their decision reflected (in) CJN Tanko Muhammad’s idea of Sharia in a secular democracy,” wrote Nwaogu Paul, a Twitter user Related stories

Divorce: Court orders arrest of businessman for contempt

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An alliance between Russia and China is the next military threat The United States appears to be settling in for a protracted period of great power military competition. Ever since Russia seized Crimea and militarily intervened in Ukraine, and as China moved onto islands across the South China Sea while claiming almost all surrounding waterways, American defense officials determined that rogue states and terrorist organizations should no longer be the epicenter of war planning and military resource allocation. The third offset strategy of the Obama administration and the national defense strategy of the Trump administration have followed, with their explicit reprioritization of defense objectives. After a quarter century without major worries over great power competition, we find ourselves in an era that some now consider, rightly or wrongly, echoes the Cold War.

China and Russia no longer share a common expansionist ideology, but realpolitik considerations are driving them together. Both are subject to American sanctions of various types. Both have also found themselves in the crosshairs of Pentagon defense planners as a result of their assertive regional activities, with Russia mostly in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and China mostly in the Western Pacific, but both partially across regions as far away as Latin America as well as Africa. Both recognize that to stand up alone against an established alliance system led by the United States is very difficult, as neither has any truly powerful allies of its own.

Yet together they dominate Eurasia and their strengths complement each other. One is a huge land mass with nuclear weapons and hydrocarbons, but it has a modest and shrinking population. The other is an economic superpower and second in conventional military power by most metrics. Some look at this and conclude that China and Russia will become natural allies as time goes on. Others say such an assessment is nonsense given their mutual mistrust and indeed the very proximity that could help them work together. How can Washington resolve this contradiction? We would propose that much of the answer is in unpacking what an alliance means.

There are at least four ways to look at the term. The first is transactional cooperation where economic and other critical interests coincide. Arms sales are often the key element of this type of alliance. The second adds largely symbolic cooperation on minor military exercises or collaborative military training. The third further adds a willingness to share intelligence, posture forces, and conduct peaceful exercises and provocations against mutual adversaries. The fourth includes formal defense pacts centered on mutual defense pledges that promise more or less unconditional military assistance with combat forces in the event that either finds itself at war.

The last is what the United States has with its closest allies such as Japan, South Korea, and most nations in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but that is not the only way in which the term is meaningful. Defined in this way, the first two elements of a possible alliance are often relatively benign and often hard to prevent in any case. The real task for American policymakers, therefore, is to conduct United States foreign policy in a way that the security relationship between Russia and China will remain limited in these domains, without progressing very far into the third way.

Unfortunately, there are already examples that Russia and China have done considerably more, especially in Eastern Europe and the Western Pacific. Even in Africa, Moscow and Beijing appear to be exploring new ways of cooperating far away from the contentious European and Asian theaters. Last month, Russia and China conducted a joint naval drill with South Africa near the Cape of Good Hope, a strategic crossroads where the Atlantic Ocean and Indian Ocean converge. While the South African military described the drill as a basic “multinational task force to react to and counter security threats at sea,” the message conveyed by growing Russian and Chinese interests in the continent has become very clear.

Moreover, while China has already established its first overseas military base in Djibouti in part to protect its interests on the continent, Russia also seeks to be a bigger player in Africa, mainly through weapons sales and cooperation agreements in a host of areas from military training to nuclear technology. It seems likely that Russia and China will continue to find ways to leverage their combined military and economic clout across Africa. Given that the United States and Europe have real interests there, thinking about ways to counteract or at the very least monitor Russian and Chinese designs is one way to strengthen their positions in the continent.

While Moscow and Beijing have cooperated with Washington in applying economic pressure against Iran and North Korea, that could change if the Trump administration continues to take unilateral steps that punish the Russian and Chinese economies without first attempting to establish a broader legitimacy. The relationship between Russia and China is not a given. It will continue to evolve largely as a function of United States foreign policy. Washington needs to keep that fact firmly in mind as it makes diplomatic decisions, postures forces, imposes sanctions, and otherwise engages in global statecraft in the months and years ahead.

Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow in foreign policy and Adam Twardowski is a senior research assistant in foreign policy for the Brookings Institution.

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The exercise will be closely watched by Israel, particularly if the exercise includes practice in ASW because the Arabian Gulf is an area where Israel keeps one of its five Dolphin-class submarines.

US Navy members stand guard on aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln as it transits the Strait of Hormuz, November 19. (US Navy via AP)

Iranian Navy Commander Rear Admiral Hossein Hunzadi announced that Iran’s naval forces would conduct military exercises with naval units from China and Russia in the Indian Ocean near the entrance to the Arabian Gulf.

This represents a significant regional maritime development, as both Russia and China can deploy naval forces, second only to the United States’, and particularly because the United States usually has a carrier task force in the region. Furthermore, the US Navy 5th Fleet is based in Bahrain.

The Chinese and Russian deployments for the Maritime Safety Belt exercise will require substantial logistical support, given the long voyages from both countries.

In the past, both China and Russia contributed modest naval forces to anti-piracy patrols off Somalia but, if there is to be a more significant presence at the exercises, the nearest bases beyond this they might utilise their ships from would be Djibouti for China and Syria for Russia, otherwise the ships would deploy from their home ports.

Interestingly, the pretext for the joint exercises, as stated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in October, is “the fight against terrorists and pirates in the Indian Ocean,” even though the problem has largely been eliminated because of US-led Task Force 151 and Operation Atalanta multinational maritime naval forces, which remain fully operational and still provide many regional security measures.

The Russian Navy consists of five fleets: the Baltic, the Northern, the Black Sea and the Pacific, along with the Caspian flotilla. Surface vessels from the fleets could be diverted to the exercise. In November, a Baltic Fleet detachment transited from the Mediterranean into the Red Sea via the Suez Canal to the Gulf of Aden for training involving anti-piracy operations.

Several Northern Fleet ships left Severomorsk port December 3 en route to the Atlantic while, in the southern Atlantic near the Cape of Good Hope, the Russian Navy’s Marshal Ustinov missile cruiser recently completed an exercise with the Chinese Navy’s Weifang frigate and the South Africa’s Amatola frigate.

In October, a detachment of Pacific Fleet ships, including the Pacific Fleet flagship Variag missile cruiser and the large anti-submarine warfare (ASW) ship Admiral Panteleev, left Vladivostok for the Asia-Pacific region. Any of those detachments could participate in the exercises near the Arabian Peninsula.

The deployment represents a significant show of allied naval support for Iran, whose surface fleet is far more modest. China’s maritime interest is clear, given that it buys a significant amount of Iran’s oil, which it ships home by sea, particularly as it has become the world’s largest oil importer.

Beyond energy concerns, another element is uniting the trio’s economic concerns; Iran and Russia are subject to punishing US sanctions while the Chinese economy has been burdened with onerous US import tariffs. The naval exercises accordingly show solidarity with Iran in resisting Western economic hegemony.

While the US Navy has assets it can surge relatively quickly to the area, including the 5th Fleet in Bahrain and, further afield, the 6th Fleet in the eastern Mediterranean in Naples, Washington’s efforts the past several months to form a naval coalition to strengthen its presence in the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean to counter Iran have been unable to attract major European support, drawing interest only from Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Israel.

The Trump administration’s attempts to assemble a naval coalition to secure Arabian Gulf merchant shipping after last summer’s oil tanker attacks represent a significant decrease of regional American power projection.

For centuries, countries have deployed their naval forces “flying the flag” as a unique projection of benign military threat. In the troubled Middle East, the Russia-Iran-China naval triad represents a new element challenging the long-standing Western maritime hegemony there.

Foreign observers will be particularly interested in what the three navies are undertaking beyond their professed anti-piracy exercises. The exercise will be closely watched by Israel, particularly if the exercise includes practice in ASW because the Arabian Gulf is an area where Israel keeps one of its five Dolphin-class submarines, suspected of being armed with nuclear-capable cruise missiles on patrol as a deterrent against Iran.

The exercises are occurring at a time when Iran is experiencing “maximum pressure” from the United States.

While only the foolhardy would protect the future in the Middle East, the more pressure the Trump administration puts on Russia, Iran and China, the higher the likelihood of rapprochement between the three governments and the higher the possibility in the future of them showing further solidarity.

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