November 8, 2024

Lammy’s ‘progressive realism’ kicks off with his China visit

By: Azhar Azam

Britain's Foreign Secretary David Lammy wrapped up an official trip to China as part of the new Labor government’s effort to take a "pragmatic" approach to engage Beijing, reconsolidating relations with the world's second largest economy from scratch.

Under the Conservatives, China-UK “golden era” relationship towards the end of 2020 shifted into a higher gear as Theresa May in 2018 visited Beijing and discussed cooperation with Xi Jinping. Boris Johnson, despite America’s pressure to block Huawei, in 2020 allowed Chinese telecom giant to operate in the UK on a limited level, seen as a “strategic defeat” for the US.

But ecstasy didn’t last long with London, just six months later, banning purchase of new Huawei equipment and announcing to root out its 5G networks by 2027, shoving both countries into a vicious circle of a diplomatic war. A UK parliamentary committee’s recommendation to counter Beijing’s “‘whole-of-state’ threat” poured gasoline on a fiery relationship. This “violent” shift from “courtship to aversion” was Tories “biggest mistake” that tipped China-UK ties into further ambiguity.

Things seem to have slightly changed with new Labor Prime Minister Keir Starmer in a call with Xi in April sought to forge a long-term and closer economic relations with China and work together on international challenges, hoping to have "open, frank and honest discussions" on disagreements.

This helped melt the ice between two large economies, making some significant developments as UK's Chancellor Rachel Reeves is reportedly planning to visit China in early next year to mull over resumption of Economic and Financial Dialogue with Beijing.

Britain's economy, after falling into recession H2-2023, bounced back, posting an average of 0.6% growth H1-2024. As China-UK trade dropped 21.1% to £86.5 billion in 2023 and Beijing accounted for just 0.2% of total UK FDI in 2022, Starmer is seeing an opportunity to strengthen trade and investment ties with China and build on this year's economic gains. Reeves remarks Britain benefits from trade links including with China, exports and imports and FDI suggest London's inclination towards an economic dialogue with Beijing.

It's the same mission former Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair embarked on two decades earlier, predicting China to become the world's largest economy in the next 20-30 years. By augmenting trade and investment relations, he paved the way for the “golden era,” which lasted for more than a decade before collapsing over US edginess of China’s remarkable economic and technological advancement. Those heydays may be hard to emanate but impart diplomatic wisdom on how to rebuild the relationship.

Other instances also suggest that London is cozying up to China. For example, UK Trade Secretary Jonathon Raynolds recently slammed previous government for doing little to build China-UK relationship and sought "more engagement with China,” ruling out imposing tariffs on China-made electric vehicles.

Labor’s approach is hinged on “progressive realism,” a fusion of policies adopted by two Britain’s former foreign secretaries, Robin Cook and Ernest Bevin, who respectively brought climate action and human rights to the diplomatic fore and helped create NATO and the country's accession to military alliance.

Setting out his vision of “progressive realism,” which American author Robert William claimed to have coined in 2006, Lammy in April criticized UK’ China policy had “oscillated wildly over the past 14 years” of Tory rule, urging Britain to “adopt a more consistent strategy, one that simultaneously challenges, competes against, and cooperates with China.”

This strategy pursues a realist approach to advance progressive goals rather than just confining to disagreements. Lammy's doctrine is being widely vilified; it could enable Britain to explore realistic means of cooperation with the world's largest producer of clean energy, solar panels and electric cars that without engagement isn't possible.

The “broad consensus,” Lammy wrote, “economic globalization would inevitably breed liberal democratic values proved false. Instead, democracies have become more economically dependent on authoritarian states…China provides a particularly stark case.” "In today’s world, Western governments must partner with the Global South," he added, acknowledging they “undermined” the sovereignty of weaker states.

While this economic dependence, with Beijing’s exports also relying on foreign demand, has been reciprocal, The West itself is responsible for decline in share of world trade between democracies between 1997 and 2022. As the West squandered trillions of dollars in wars and operations to change regimes it deemed were incompatible with its liberal values, China spent those years in producing and flooding the world market with cheap goods.

As the West retreated over economic fallouts of wars after killing hundreds of thousands of people, triggering antipathy for it in the Global South, China became aggressive and channeled trillions of dollars in infrastructure development across the developing world. The West has only itself to blame for China ending the era of US "hegemony.”

With America focusing on Indo-Pacific to counter China, Britain is being warned against consequences of any retrenchment from region out of UK new Defense Secretary John Healey’s comments last year that Britain can’t be a “strong military force in Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic simultaneously” and “there needs to be a realism about military commitments.”

Both Britain and Europe are cautious. Over US sea-change, the EU is being urged to “defend Europe with less America” as Britain prioritizes “NATO First” and limits its engagement in the Indo-Pacific to "advancing technology (and) developing military capabilities.”

China's role in net zero and world trade is driving Labor into maintaining a “constructive" relationship with China even in areas where both countries’ "viewpoints" diverge. UK government's readout – accentuating significance of "working together" on global challenges and commitment to promote "secure and resilient growth through increased trade and investment" – suggests Lammy’s realism has come into play in Labor's foreign policy. How his vision will meet the progressive ends though remains yet to be seen.

*My article (unedited) that first appeared in "Express Tribune"

November 4, 2024

Great power struggle for undersea dominance


Laid on the ocean floor, undersea cables are arteries of international communication, digitalization and globalization and the lifeblood of the global economy. These 600 fiber-optic cables, activated or planned, spanning 1.4 million kilometers carry 95% of global data by transmitting $10 trillion every day while offering the fastest and reliable route.

These thin wires, as wide as a garden hose, are owned by a consortium of parties because of high costs associated with laying of new undersea ecosystems. Over heightened risk of being damaged by natural disasters, fishing nets, ship anchors and sharks, there is a greater need for interstate cooperation to protect the flow of information they electronify.

But by proclaiming principles that aspire to advance cooperation between a handful of countries to “promote selection of secure and verifiable subsea cable providers,” Washington is stonewalling cooperation on an area that delivers international bandwidth, necessary for global digital transition.

A blend of America’s megaphone and coercive diplomacy, through which it denigrates China and strong-arms allies and telcos to dissuade them from partnering with Chinese companies, and geopolitics around information superhighways, underpinning the global economy and finance, to retain its subsea hegemony could stoke tensions with Beijing for the plan's ulterior goal is to phase one of the fastest-growing companies, China’s HMN Technologies, out of the market.

America’s SubCom, Japan’s NEC and France’s Alcatel historically dominated the sector before a seismic shift took place as HMN Tech (then Huawei Marine Networks) entered the fray in 2008 and disturbed status quo, becoming an important player in the market over the next 15 years.

Emergence of a Chinese firm shook the US Department of Justice whose Team Telecom in 2020 raised national security concerns about China’s “sustained efforts to acquire sensitive personal data of millions of US persons.” In 2021, Washington finally added HMN to its entity list.

A Guardian’s investigation of documents disclosed to it by NSA’s whistleblower Edward Snowden, in 2013 revealed the UK’s spy agency, GCHQ, had tapped into more than 200 fiber-optic cables to access a huge volume of communications including between entirely innocent people, sharing sensitive personal information with its American peer.

NSA and other US intelligence agencies have been eavesdropping on its own Five Eyes’ allies such as Australian and New Zealand and snooping on American people including protesters, racial justice activists, journalists, political commentators, campaign donors and Congressmen; there is no clear evidence that subsea cables are being tapped or sabotaged by any country, let it be US, China or Russia.

Recent reports have seen such threats as overblown. Labeling concerns vis-à-vis "tapping into cables to derive, copy or obfuscate data" as “highly unlikely,” a European report in 2022 found “no publicly available and verified reports” indicating deliberate attacks including from China. The threat scenarios “could be exaggerated and suggest a substantial risk of threat inflation and fearmongering,” it said.

Still, US unabated offensive against Chinese company continued as it through incentives and pressure on consortium members including warnings and threats of sanctions and exports controls flipped the contract of Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-6 (SEA-ME-WE-6) cable, snaking its way from Singapore to France, to SubCom.

Per Reuters, it was one of the six private undersea cable deals in Asia-Pacific where the US government had intervened to prevent HMN from winning or forced rerouting or abandonment of cable deals, unveiling Washington’s innate impulse to monopolize undersea ecosystems and marking a beginning of underwater geopolitical rivalry.

Yet China struck back through a $500 million Europe-Middle East-Asia internet cable. Known as PEACE (Pakistan and East Asia Connecting Europe) cable, the project directly competes with SEA-ME-WE-6 and supersedes its rival project with a planned length of 25,000+ km against latter’s 21,700 km, providing even higher bandwidth.

US efforts to control subsea cables shone as market share of HMN, which had built or repaired almost 25% of world's cables and supplied 18% of them in the last four years through 2022, is expected to contract to mere 7%. The top beneficiary of US interventionism is its SubCom that has grabbed only 12% of contracts but accounts for a whopping 40% of cables laid.

At the core of this competition is America’s fear of conceding a critical component of the digital economy to China. US officials have voiced concern the Chinese repair ships could be used for spying; there is no evidence of such an activity either. While some have dubbed submarine cables as “a surveillance gold mine" for world intelligence agencies, most experts believe the biggest risk isn't espionage, sabotage or even rogue anchors rather an uneven spread of cable infrastructure that threatens the very promise of digital equity and demands East-West cooperation to end this digital injustice, especially with the Global South.

For decades, America, France and Japan dominated the global underwater ecosystem. Wary of losing their ascendancy, they are pooling efforts to exorcize Chinese demon and retain influence over submarine cables. The involvement of security alliances such as Quad "to support and strengthen quality undersea cable networks in the Indo-Pacific" and Biden's push to bolster cooperation in the region on cybersecurity including undersea cables and whisk regional submarine plans away from China are beseeching Beijing to respond, elevating risk of kicking off a cold war under the sea.

Multination cooperation has been the catalyst of submarine cable expansion and is essential for the future of the digital economy. But this kiasu approach of asserting a closed group's unwater dominance is threatening to black out collaboration and divide the world in two geopolitical or ideological blocs. This simmering struggle for subsea hegemony should be lulled before it boils up and compounds global challenges, being faced by a fragmented world.

*My article (unedited) that first appeared in "Express Tribune"