Scholz Won’t Be Xi’s Last Western Guest
As the German chancellor’s controversial trip to China shows, economic interests have become harder to sacrifice to professed moral values at a time of crisis.
Scholz isn’t onboard.
Photographer: Andreas Gora - Pool/Getty Images
The new cold war is not going as well as some in the West seem to think. In the same week that elections in Brazil brought back to power Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, China’s stalwart ally in Latin America, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will be the first major Western leader to visit China after three tumultuous years when the pandemic and then Russia’s assault on Ukraine irrevocably changed the world.
During this time, the United States turned decisively and comprehensively against China. Businessmen with massive stakes in the country, who were previously reluctant to prioritize national-security interests over corporate profit, finally aligned with public opinion and the foreign-policy elite consensus — that an increasingly authoritarian China, which condones Russian aggression and threatens Taiwan, is a rival that ought to be globally confronted.