The US is unleashing a new cold war and another “crusade”
COVID-19 is becoming a key element of US-China relations, as the US directly names China as the cause of the coronavirus epidemic.
The program director of the Valdai Club, Ivan Timofeev, writes about this in an author’s column published on the website of the Izvestia newspaper.
“Just a month ago, such accusations seemed like empty political rhetoric. Today they take on a qualitatively different meaning and form a deep and irreversible funnel, drawing in an ever wider range of problems and processes. The speed at which confrontation develops becomes faster. It will be extremely difficult to extinguish its inertia,” Timofeev believes.
According to him, during the election campaign in the United States, the issue of punishing China for COVID-19 will be one of the key ones, and accusations against China immediately acquired a bright ideological coloring.
“Almost every diatribe or document emphasizes that China is a communist state. Confrontation over a particular issue is immediately brought to the level of conflict of identities - “Us-them”. We are an honest, democratic and open society that has become a victim of “their” policies of manipulation and deception derived from communism and an authoritarian regime. Cold War clichés are quickly being pulled from the archives. True, now in the place of the USSR is China,” the expert emphasizes.
He believes that the legal future of claims against China being prepared in the United States is vague, but it is already clear that a set of claims against China will be actively promoted by politicians, officials and the media, who, unlike the courts, do not need hard evidence, but that will be enough opinions and newspaper publications.
“The danger of such a development of the situation is the exacerbation of a broader set of US-Chinese contradictions that have accumulated in recent years. COVID-19 may accelerate their concentration unexpectedly quickly and non-linearly. The prospect of a new Cold War and another “crusade” loomed on the horizon,” Timofeev sums up.
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