One more word on Beijing’s plans leading up to, and during, the 2020 crisis. This crisis was to be the pivotal point for the Communist Party of China. If the People’s Republic of China (PRC) could not compete economically with the U.S. under the terms of the existing, Western-created, “rules-based world order”, then those terms of engagement would have to be changed. If the PRC economy could not grow in terms defined by the West, then the West’s economies would have to be reduced. The 2020 crisis would potentially “level the playing field”: flattening the terrain of strategic engagement. An integral byproduct of this was the reality that the 2020 crisis also lowered an already depressed global demand for energy, particularly fossil fuels which had come to be the primary energy driver of global economic growth. Oil, in particular, had been the great underpinning of 20th Century growth. As […]