Joseph Bouchard
China has become America’s greatest competitor and will most likely remain so for the next few decades — and if recent headlines are to be believed, the U.S. is headed to its downfall.
Apparently, the U.S. is losing in the Asia-Pacific, Africa, the Middle East — the entire Global South. This month, Brookings called the U.S. a “losing superpower.”
Such alarmism shouldn’t cloud our judgment. The U.S. has done well pushing for its own interests and advancing its values around the globe. Where it could improve is in using public media to broadcast its successes.
The U.S. has made significant progress combating China in the Asia-Pacific. In the last decade, a number of countries, including the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Pacific Island States, and Thailand, have signed new defence commitments and partnerships with the United States. AUKU.S. and the Quad also help the U.S. defend its interests in Asia against China.
Ties between the U.S. and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) couldn’t be stronger. Its mission has expanded beyond trade into security cooperation and democracy promotion, while the U.S. remains the largest investor in ASEAN. Western partners have also made the Asia-Pacific a key region of interest, increasing security and political expenditures while making the fight against Chinese influence an agenda-defining priority. As a result, most countries in the region are growing skeptical of China’s bullish attitude, and turning the tide on strategic ambiguity. Many are overtly choosing to work with the U.S. over China.
The U.S. has also been engaging strategically in Africa’s diplomatic space. Unlike China and Russia, who have intervened in Africa to boost oppressive policies and propagate their own superiority complex, the U.S. has been focused on upholding universal values of freedom, democracy, and development, treating African nations as equal-footing partners.
Last year, the U.S. government put forward the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit and the U.S.-Africa Business Forum, both held in Washington. The U.S. has also been resilient in its response to various humanitarian and civil conflicts, sending over a billion dollars in development assistance to Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, Egypt, South Sudan, Mali, and the Central African Republic. Migratory and food security crises in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel have been met with additional support.
Finally, in the face of the Wagner Group’s brutal support for anti-terrorist and pro-dictatorial measures in the region, the U.S. has supported elections in a variety of African countries this year, promoting U.S. values and the self-determination of African peoples. The U.S. has also repeatedly supported infrastructure projects in Africa, which have actually been finished and effective, unlike many of China’s.
Despite these accomplishments, there remains a negative gap between U.S. actions in the developing world and how much the media ecosphere is talking about those achievements.
China seems to have the opposite problem. While China’s system is rife with scandals—mistreatment of local workers, environmental destruction, racism, contract manipulation—the media machine never stops spinning bad news into gold until it seems their government can do no wrong.
But it can and does.
For one, China has successfully raised its own debt (and that of other countries) to astronomical levels, creating financial disasters wherever it goes. China may boast about its investment record and the BRI’s success, but its results have been mixed at best, resulting in debt cycles and abandoned and crumbling infrastructure projects.
China has also been unable to manage its rising power. Xi’s aggressive posturing has wrecked many countries’ perception of China. Moreover, it has consistently lied about its COVID record, with most experts calling its policy a humanitarian disaster leading to authoritarian measures and social unrest. It rushed its vaccine diplomacy, causing most of its programs to be ineffective and contingent on political commitments. This is all without mentioning its domestic problems, including depopulation, a fiscal crisis, and alleged genocide against ethnic minorities.
The Chinese foreign establishment has gotten very good at dodging attacks and shifting the entire conversation to the failings of its critics and accusers, including the United States. Denial and deflection are China’s bread and butter.
The U.S. doesn’t suffer from poor leadership, but from lousy PR. Fear of being called imperialist has made the U.S. turn over a lot of the media power it successfully used during the Cold War to boost the image of the U.S. and its fight against Communism. Institutions like Radio Free Europe, Stars and Stripes, and the Voice of America—which used to spread liberal-democratic ideals across the globe—have since been severely defunded.
Today it’s as though bad news is all that sells in America. To find information about U.S. progress in the Global South, one must rummage through embassy memos, think tank white papers, and White House press briefings which no one reads.
The United States should return to investing in communicating what the U.S. is accomplishing, how its interests are being advanced around the world, and how China’s progress is antithetical to liberal-democratic values.
Joseph Bouchard is a Young Voices contributor and freelance journalist covering geopolitics in Latin America. His articles have appeared in The Diplomat, The National Interest, Mongabay, and Global Americans. He is an MIA candidate at Carleton University in Ottawa.
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