Commentary
Decoupling from China has a history that extends back to the Cold War, but has renewed and is gathering speed. It most recently restarted in the U.S. technology sector, and is now moving to the world’s most important economies in Europe and Asia. The mainstream media is ablaze with what a year ago was seen as a crank idea, and what Beijing propagandists attempt to denigrate as “Cold War thinking.”
But in May, the Financial Times quoted Michael Shoebridge at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) saying, “Decoupling is real and growing. China and US decoupling has now been joined by EU-China decoupling, and we’re facing a common strategic challenge of Russia and China that unifies European actors with Indo-Pacific actors.”…