Bill Emmott: China shifting from 'wolf warrior' diplomacy in style swap with US

The Mainichi

8 hours ago

By Bill Emmott, independent writer, lecturer and international affairs consultant
A few years ago, the talk was about China's "wolf warrior" diplomacy, a term used to describe the aggressive, often coercive style being used by Chinese ambassadors all over the world but especially in the Indo-Pacific. It felt as if the Chinese government simply didn't care about whether other governments liked China or not. This year, however, the Chinese style seems to have changed.
To some extent, in fact, that wolf-warrior style has been taken over by the United States. This swapping of styles was displayed clearly at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue of Indo-Pacific defence and security ministers that was hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank of which I have the honour of being chairman, in Singapore from May 30 to June 1.
Pete Hegseth, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, did not use the term "wolf" but in his powerful speech to the Shangri-La Dialogue he talked frequently about reintroducing "the warrior ethos" into the American military and to America's deterrence posture in the region. Unusually for a U.S. Secretary of Defense, he referred specifically to the threats being posed by China in the region and named that country not just as China but as "Communist China," an ideological style rarely heard since the end of the Cold War 35 years ago.
This message was perfectly welcome from the point of view of the Indo-Pacific countries, especially traditional security allies such as Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, and other partners in South-East Asia. For decades, the region has been happy to have American warriors helping to keep the peace. But now that American peacekeeping has "wolf" elements attached, albeit chiefly in an area of policy that is outside Secretary Hegseth's remit, trade and other things are feeling less comfortable.
Under President Joe Biden's administration, countries often complained that America was not paying sufficient attention to trade and foreign investment, even while it was strengthening its security commitments. Since January, under Donald Trump's administration the complaints have reversed: The huge import tariffs he imposed on countries in the region on his so-called "Liberation Day" of April 2 represent far more attention than the region wanted. In fact, they represent a severe economic blow.
Questioned about this at the Shangri-La Dialogue, Secretary Hegseth simply avoided answering by saying that trade was his boss's responsibility, not that of the Department of Defense. He also, however, stated that Trump's foreign policy approach was that America should not be telling other countries what they should be doing -- yet his trade policy appears to many in the region to be doing exactly that.
The interesting thing is that instead of attending the Singapore event and exposing that contradiction, China chose to stay away and keep its head down. Unlike in recent years, China chose not to send its minister of national defense, nor even any senior military officers from the People's Liberation Army, and gave no explanation for its seemingly last-minute decision. Each time a Chinese official asked a question, however, it was one about tariffs or about America's treatment of the 10 (soon to be 11 with Timor-Leste joining) members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN).
The intention seemed to be to exploit the contradiction in America's approach, but to do so quietly and gently rather than in the wolf-warrior style. This lower-key, more genuinely diplomatic policy was also shown by the fact that one day before the Shangri-La Dialogue China unveiled a new multilateral institution of its own, to be based in Hong Kong: the International Organization for Mediation. A convention to establish the new organization was signed by 30 countries, notably including Indonesia.
The likely work of the new organization remains unclear, except that the convention says that it will aim to help resolve international disputes through mediation rather than through existing legal bodies such as the International Court of Justice. It is also not yet clear what sort of disputes might benefit from this mediation, but it is reasonable to suppose that one potential candidate might be the frontier dispute between two ASEAN members, Cambodia and Thailand, a recurrent dispute which led to an exchange of gunfire on May 28 and the death of a Cambodian soldier.
Policy contradictions are not unique to the United States. China says that this new organization will aim to reinforce the principles of the United Nations Charter of 1945. Yet the most flagrant breach of those principles in recent years has been the invasion and seizure of Ukraine's sovereign territory by Russia, which is China's strategic partner "without limits," according to the Joint Statement issued by China and Russia three weeks before the attempted military takeover of Ukraine in February 2022.
Furthermore, there are no signs of a condemnation by China of Russia's breach of the U.N. Charter nor of China proposing the use of its new mediation organization to try to bring an end to that deadly war. According to Kaja Kallas, the European Union's chief representative for foreign and security policy, China is the source of 80% of Russia's imports of dual-use goods that it needs for its war. Nor has China commented publicly on Russia's use of North Korean troops to fight alongside its own army in this war on the European continent.
The other contradiction in China's position is that in the South China Sea, its own navy and coastguards are the most frequent cause of disputes over territorial waters and the reefs beneath them. China is confronting military and civilian ships from the Philippines on a daily basis, and it has ignored a 2016 ruling by the International Court of Arbitration in the Hague over those waters and the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. If China chooses during the coming months or years to try to test the "warrior ethos" Secretary Hegseth talked about at the Shangri-La Dialogue, it is likely to do so over its dispute with the Philippines in the South China Sea, to see what Trump's America is willing to do under the terms of its Mutual Defense Treaty of 1951 with the Philippines.
Such a test would risk raising the U.S.-China confrontation to a new and dangerous level. Until and unless such a test happens, what we are seeing looks like a new stage in Chinese diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific: to be quiet, to sound cooperative and to provide a market for regional exports that is easier to access than the United States. The "wolf warrior" has, for the time being, been superseded by the friendly, quite reasonable-sounding neighbourhood mediator. Let's see how long this phase lasts.