In December 2001, the Americans sent their mission (ISAF) to Afghanistan. The Chinese, on the other hand, with the consent of the US and the West, were admitted to the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In the first decade of this century, it turned out that America had fallen into “imperial excess”, as was called by Paul Kennedy, a historian at Yale University. It spent too much at home on rampant consumption and also engaged in an expensive “war on terror”.

The Chinese, on the other hand, have been growing by leaps and bounds, at 10 % a year and more. When it became clear that the Middle Kingdom was growing into the second economy in the world, the United States finally “woke up”, and the Obama administration after 2010 came up with the concept of pivot, i.e. paying more attention and even focusing on China and the region.

Looking for the right framework for cooperation, the Americans invented and plugged into a New Zealand initiative called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Until the US joined, the agreement involved only the cooperation of four countries – New Zealand, Brunei, Chile and Singapore. When the Americans joined, however, the number of partners immediately increased to 12, including Australia, Japan, Canada and Mexico, among others.

The situation, which spawned two major multilateral trade agreements in the Asia-Pacific region, one under the domination of Japan and the other of China, meant that when the Joe Biden administration came to power in the US, it had to confront it.

President Biden, in the Japanese capital, attended the second summit of the newly established security and military alliance, called QUAD, comprising the US, Japan, Australia and India. He also attended the signing ceremony of a new economic framework agreement called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework – IPEF.

Thus, the Indo-Pacific formula has taken on concrete content. In addition to the establishment of two military alliances in 2021 including QUAD, the partners created AUKUS, involving cooperation between the US, the UK and Australia.

Although Europe has been literally covered up by the war in Ukraine, it demonstrates clearly, that the main area of this new great power rivalry is the Asia-Pacific region. And that is why it is worth, also in Poland, to monitor it more closely than before.

Bogdan Góralczyk, Professor at the University of Warsaw, political scientist, diplomat, and expert on Asia. order