To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.
In recent years the crisis of the transatlantic relationship and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has become a common theme in media, and various scholars have frequently questioned the futures of both entities. Not only are the new sovereigntist and populist trends within the NATO members calling the relevance of the transatlantic relationship into question, but some have found a reason to identify a crisis in the transatlantic relationship from the rise of global actors and the emergence of China as a great power in particular. China’s economic recovery after its “century of humiliation” is reshaping the international geopolitics and shifting the economic epicenter of the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
With China’s colossal Belt and Road Initiative spurring Eurasian connectivity, Eurasian economic bonds will soon surpass transatlantic economic bonds by orders of magnitude. Europe is trading more with Asia than with the United States, and China remains the most important trading partner of Germany, the pivotal state in Western Europe. How will the triangular relation be reshaped by China’s rise and by the current US-China trade war and the outbreak of Coronavirus? The roundtable will address these questions, looking closely at economic challenges that emerged in this new geopolitical context.
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Lucy Hornby, Nieman Fellow, Harvard University; Deputy Bureau Chief in Beijing for the Financial Times
Yasheng Huang, Epoch Foundation Professor of International Management and Faculty Director of Action Learning, the MIT Sloan School of Management
Yukon Huang, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington D.C.
Moderated by: Maria Adele Carrai, Fellow, Harvard University Asia Center
Series on “China’s Rise and the Future of the Transatlantic Relationship.” Co-sponsored by the Harvard University Asia Center; Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies; and Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship, Harvard Kennedy School