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More than 100 years ago, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo. The great powers then responded with a series of geopolitical mismanagement, which led to World War I.
The world today is already in the depth of a global "war". Though the enemy this time is an invisible and previously unknown virus, the spectre of dangerous geopolitical games is still hovering high, and risks making the "war" deadlier.
For China, a country that well understands the ravages of the novel coronavirus, helping those in need is a simple natural response springing from human nature.
Some Western politicians and pundits do not see it that way. In their geopolitical narrative, China has been trying to drive a wedge between major European capitals and Washington with masks and ventilators, undermine the so-called liberal world order, and pave its way to global domination in the post-pandemic world.
The world has indeed arrived at a threshold of a sea change, but those Western zero-summers need to revisit their way of looking at this virus-stricken and fast changing global community. There are several stereotypes of mindsets that need to be rejected.
The first one is the West-centric. The fact is that the world's center of power, which has seen constant shifts, only began to move to the West following the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.
And in recent decades, with the collective rise of the developing countries and emerging-market economies, global politics has seen new changes. Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State and a long-time geopolitical expert, once commented: "We live in a new international environment, a world of multiple centers of power."
The second is that the nature of international relations is a zero-sum game where one's gain inevitably leads to another's loss. This mindset has already been made obsolete as countries across the globe have become highly connected and increasingly interdependent.
The ongoing fight against the COVID-19 pandemic only offers another piece of indisputable evidence that the best way to preserve one country's interests in this age of globalization is to safeguard the common interests of humanity.
The third is that ideological divides are unbridgeable. The truth is that in the presence of the need to go after common interests, no gap is too wide to cross.
That is the case when China and the United States decided to normalize their bilateral ties during the Cold War, and when representatives of almost 200 countries with different ideological beliefs gathered in Paris in 2015 and signed a climate accord to cut greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the impact of climate change.
For those China-bashers and also everyone else, the still raging pandemic presents an opportunity to recognize the deficiencies of the current world order and catch the wave of the future.
A major concern is the growing deficits in global governance. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States has so far not only failed to shoulder its due responsibility to rally or support a coordinated global drive against this common threat, but also tried to undermine the efforts of others by politicizing the pandemic and threatening to cut funds for the World Health Organization.
Such behavior is a far cry from what the world expects from its sole superpower at this difficult moment, when global solidarity and cooperation are badly needed to cope with what many call "the most challenging crisis" since World War II.
That is not alarmist talk. Nobel laureate and biologist Joshua Lederberg once warned, "the single biggest threat to man's continued dominance on this planet is the virus."
However, infectious diseases are not the only major challenges facing the human race. Climate change, terrorism and transnational organized crime, among others, also demand stronger global coordination, and a more effective global governance system.
International affairs should be addressed through extensive consultation rather than decided by one country or a few, said Chinese President Xi Jinping in Brasilia at last year's summit of BRICS, an emerging-market bloc that groups Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
This is why Beijing has been advocating a more democratic and multipolar world, underpinned by a more just and equitable international order.
It is true that the world after the pandemic is never going to be the same, but countries worldwide should come together to make this shift a turn for the better. Ditching geopolitical games is apparently among the must-dos.
(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)
