The G7 Pot Calls the Chinese Kettle Black

The Chinese are engaging in economic coercion?! My stars, the West would NEVER do such a thing!

Photo by Chastagner Thierry on Unsplash

I’ve been researching and writing about international relations for a while, and one of the more irritating tropes I see in my day job is when U.S. commentators sound a warning that a rival power might be trying a foreign policy gambit that the United States has been doing for a long damn while.

For example, back in the early oughts there was a lot of folks freaked out about other global actors using international law to constrain U.S. democratic sovereignty. This prompted me to write my one and only law article in which I pointed out that the primary actor doing this was the United States. Furthermore, “US sacrifices of democratic sovereignty pale in comparison to the compromises other countries have had to make.”

Similarly, part of the reason that Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s concept of “weaponized interdependence” took off inside the Beltway was that U.S. officials were convinced China was on the cusp exploiting Huawei’s dominance of 5G networks. Such concerns were valid, but elide the fact that all of Farrell and Newman’s examples of weaponized interdependence had the United States as the primary sender.

I bring all this up because at last week’s G7 summit in Japan, the United States a new concern: Chinese economic coercion. According to the Financial Times:

G7 leaders are set to unveil measures to respond to Chinese economic coercion, as the US, Japan and other members of the group intensify efforts to adopt a unified approach to Beijing.

US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the leaders of the G7 nations — US, UK, Japan, Canada, Germany, France and Italy — would on Saturday release a statement on China and lay out tools the countries would use to push back against economic pressure.

“G7 leaders will outline a common set of tools to address concerns that each of our countries face,” Sullivan said at the G7 in Hiroshima, Japan.

Sullivan said the tools to promote economic security would include steps to make supply chains more resilient, outbound investment measures and export controls designed to protect sensitive technology. The US and its allies are becoming increasingly concerned about China’s ability to secure foreign technology to help its military….

US ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel said China was using debt trap diplomacy and “raw exercise of power” to undermine the political and economic stability of countries.

In recent months, China has imposed sanctions on US defense companies Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and launched a national security investigation into US chipmaker Micron. It has also raided US due diligence firm Mintz and Bain, the consultancy, and detained an executive from Japan’s Astellas Pharma group.

Sure enough, the G7 communique did address this issue, promising to “enhance collaboration by launching the Coordination Platform on Economic Coercion to increase our collective assessment, preparedness, deterrence and response to economic coercion, and further promote cooperation with partners beyond the G7.” On China, the communique pledged to “foster resilience to economic coercion.”

A separate G7 leaders’ statement on this issue sounded an even greater warning:

The world has encountered a disturbing rise in incidents of economic coercion that seek to exploit economic vulnerabilities and dependencies and undermine the foreign and domestic policies and positions of G7 members as well as partners around the world. We will work together to ensure that attempts to weaponize economic dependencies by forcing G7 members and our partners including small economies to comply and conform will fail and face consequences. We express serious concern over economic coercion and call on all countries to refrain from its use, which not only undermines the functioning of and trust in the multilateral trading system, but also infringes upon the international order centered on respect for sovereignty and the rule of law, and ultimately undermines global security and stability.

Now, as the FT story notes, it is undeniably true that China has stepped up its application of economic coercion. This is a real phenomenon, and the G7 is right to develop measures to combat it. If you squint real hard, these nascent steps kinda sorta looks like something that Victor Cha proposed late last year.

With that acknowledgment, I confess I did a spit-take when reading about the G7’s “serious concern over economic coercion” and their “call on all countries to refrain from its use.” Because you’ll never guess which actors in world politics are the most prolific practitioners of economic coercion?! That’s right, take a bow, United States and European Union!

“Economic coercion” is yet another phenomenon where the West is mortified that other actors might be doing what they have been doing themselves for such a long time. And, again, I do not begrudge the G7 taking steps to thwart Chinese economic coercion. What I find exasperating, however, is the holier-than-thou attitude that the communique evinces. The G7 is not upset about the practice of economic coercion; they are upset because they might be the target of said economic coercion.

On the whole, the Biden administration has been practicing some decent diplomacy under difficult circumstances. But there is a strain of self-righteous discourse that runs through a lot of U.S. responses to China and Russia that is self-defeating. Even if the policies are wise — and in this case, they may well be — the justifying rhetoric winds up being self-defeating. It is like, oh, I don’t know, the insistence that “de-risking” is no big deal when it is actually a big deal.

As a general rule, policymakers should avoid saying things that prompt eye-rolls from the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the G7’s latest falls into that trap.