GLOBAL BUSINESS 6/2019 Business Spotlight 15A CLASH OF
INTERESTS
GLOBAL BUSINESSTrade war: who will
get the upper hand?ease sth. [i:z]
, etw. lockern
editorial [)edI(tO:riEl]
, Leitartikel
interplay [(IntEpleI]
, Zusammenspiel;
hier auch: Kräftespiel
resolve sth. [ri(zQlv]
, etw. lösen
secretary of state
[)sekrEtEri Ev (steIt] US
, Außenminister(in)
tension [(tenS&n]
, Spannungtravelled to North Korea, the first trip
there by a Chinese president in 14 years.
In a front-page editorial in North Korea’s
Rodong Sinmun newspaper, Xi restated his
support for nuclear talks, saying: “China
supports North Korea for maintaining
the right direction in resolving the issue
of the Korean Peninsula politically.” And
if he was worried about the trade war with
the USA, Xi didn’t show it. As always, he
smiled.A new binary world
Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, two very
different personalities, now dominate
international affairs, as was made clear at
the June G20 Summit in Japan. Together
with other world leaders, Trump and Xi
attended, but it was their “extended meet-
ing” and positive remarks about an easingof trade war tensions that overshadowed
all the other summit events.
The United States and China are creat-
ing a binary world, and this leaves Europe
with a difficult choice: who should be its
partner?
In his 2011 book On China (see box,
p. 17), former US secretary of state Hen-
ry Kissinger writes: “Otto von Bismarck,
probably the greatest diplomat of the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth century, once
said that in a world order of five states, it
is always desirable to be part of a group
of three. Applied to the interplay of three
countries, one would therefore think that
it is always advisable to be in a group of
two.”
The interplay of three countries
Kissinger was writing about was between
China, the Soviet Union and the USA, and