The change of hegemony from the British Empire to the United States materialized in the thirty years from the First to the Second World War. Washington and Moscow faced each other for four decades in a Cold War in which the Soviet Union lost by technical KO. No one knows how the dispute between the United States and China will be resolved. If it will be a cold war (without warlike conflict between the contenders) or if we will have some shock.
The G7, a relevant club due to the political and economic weight of the countries that make it up (all Western, except Japan, which is partially Western), is meeting these days in Hiroshima. The setting, a city devastated in August 1945 after the United States aircraft dropped an atomic bomb on it, invites us to talk about the control of nuclear weapons. On the menu will also be chips, the war in Ukraine, the sanctions against Russia (the diamond trade). And Chinese.
East Asia has been the region of the world that has grown most intensely in recent years. In a reverse movement to that of the industrial revolution in the 18th century (which brought military and technological power to the West and submission and pain to the East), the center of gravity of the world economy has now shifted away from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In terms of GDP, China is the second largest economy on the planet, Japan the third and South Korea the eleventh. In the year 2000, the region accounted for a quarter of world GDP. Now it must be a third party.
All this growth has been possible thanks to the “cold peace†in which these countries lived. Protected by the security umbrella provided by the United States in some cases and the pacifist conviction of a generation traumatized by the nuclear Holocaust in others, they concentrated on growing and conquering world markets.
Until the day came when China stopped being “the world’s factory”, the economy that only knew how to copy, to become a technological and military adversary. In a superpower.
Taiwan is the most eloquent expression of China’s will to assert itself. The dispute over Taiwan worries all the countries in the area today. Especially Japan, nervous because Chinese drones and reconnaissance planes fly over islands like Okinawa daily.
But the immediate threat is the economy. The United States has already asked its allies to restrict trade in certain products with China and reorganize their supply chains.
The fragility of the balances that have governed the area in the last half century is evidenced by the case of South Korea. Seoul’s main trading partner is China. Its great ally, the United States, which has been there since the end of the Korean War (1953). The objective of the US Navy has been to protect the country from its neighbor to the north, which periodically displays the effectiveness of its weapons.
In recent months, Kim Jong-un has already shown that his missiles can reach cities in the American Pacific. Therefore, South Korea fears that the US will leave them stranded and focus on their protection. Seoul, which had abandoned its nuclear program in exchange for that protection, is now interested in its reactivation. In the last two years, military spending in all the countries in the region has not stopped growing.