POSTSCRIPT 499economic challenge around the world. China emerged as a great
industrial power, and countries such as India, Brazil and Indonesia
championed their own economic independence. The ‘globalization’ of
financial operations, originally sponsored by US administrations, had
the effect of weakening America’s primacy even further.
Two states, China and Russia, were mentioned as potential ene-
mies in a new Cold War with America. Deng’s successors continued
with his policy of collaborating with American corporations in pursuit
of economic modernization. The priority for the Chinese leaders was
to maintain the influx of investment capital and advanced technology.
But as China’s holdings of foreign financial bonds expanded and
America’s external debt increased, there arose concern that American
policy had been nurturing a dangerous competitor. Scandals recurred
as Chinese spying activities were exposed. China treated east Asia as
its special zone of influence and pressed Vietnam and Japan to yield to
its demands. At the start of his second presidential term in 2012,
Barack Obama reset policy to focus on the maintenance of America’s
influence in the countries on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.
It was Russia that became the more overt challenger to US policy.
At first Putin accommodated America’s wishes by facilitating its armed
intervention in Afghanistan in 2001. But he and the Russian ruling
group felt that they received too little in return. America had pressed
ahead with an expansion of NATO across the old Eastern Europe and
into the former Baltic republics of the USSR. Gorbachëv claimed that
this breached his understanding with Baker in 1990; Yeltsin added
that American and other Western leaders were tearing up the assur-
ances they gave after the USSR’s collapse. Putin turned his back on
compromise. In 2007 he objected to George W. Bush’s plan for a mis-
sile shield in Poland. He frequently intimidated Ukraine by cutting
off the gas supply. In 2008 he invaded Georgia and maintained an
occupying force in South Ossetia. From 2011 he stood up for Baathist
leader Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war. In 2014 he intervened in
the political tumult in Ukraine by annexing Crimea. The West reacted
with economic sanctions as he proceeded to destabilize the situation
in eastern Ukraine, where there is an ethnic Russian minority. The
long truce between Russia and America was over, and Washington led
the way in imposing sanctions against Russian economic interests.
Was this the beginning of another cold war? America and Russia
beyond doubt retained ballistic nuclear missiles with the capacity
at any moment to obliterate each other’s main cities and set off a