April 2020 Revista Española de Defensa 41
Rafael Navarro / Photographic material: Pepe Díaz, NATO, EFE and CHOD.
data on global military expenditure show that a new rearmament
race between the old and new powers is taking place. Now that the
happy years of the 1990s are already forgotten, Defence budgets
are increasing steadily. Outer space, the Arctic Ocean, the East and
South China Seas, the various actors in the Middle East or even
some relevant countries in Africa are all being militarized.
In the face of these realities, it is hard to imagine the new
upcoming system of global governance. As history has shown, it is
not too far-fetched to conclude that these 50 years bring us once
again closer to the starting point, to a reborn bipolarity, this time
where the United States and China are concerned. Fortunately, this
bipolarity is not based on the mutual threat of a nuclear holocaust
but rather on a reckless rivalry in trade and, undoubtedly and
more importantly, in the technological field. If globalization drives
us towards international cooperation in these and other aspects,
technological and trade frictions bring us face to face with the
possibility of a decoupling within the international community,
which is divided and aligned around one of these two new leaders.
Last February’s Munich Security Conference was held under the
significant heading of “Westlessness” of the international order,
thus referring to the loss of pre-eminence of the values of liberal
democracies, values we wrongly believed to be widely accepted.
CHINA: THE EMERGING POWER
China’s leading role stands out in this apparent distribution of
powers. After Mao’s death, the three presidents prior to the current
leader, Xi Jinping, carried out a discreet yet effective transformation
process of the old Central Empire to make it evolve from a
completely centralized economy, which had left the country in a
dilapidated state, to a new system, also ruled with an iron but much
more pragmatic fist. “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or
white, as long as it catches mice”, said Deng Xiaoping. The priority
was to lift hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty to steadily