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An international alliance to stand up to China? Thats what the new US President Joe Biden wants, but what are the chances of forging such a grand coalition of Western interests? Its worth a try, certainly. Just dont count on it, thats all.

Few issues speak quite as directly to Americas growing sense of insecurity as the rise of China. The sense of a nation broken by culture wars, economic malaise and political division contrasts sharply with an increasingly assertive Middle Kingdom powered by conformity and seemingly unstoppable economic growth.

In little more than a decade, US perceptions of China have gone from mutually beneficial economic partner to ideological, geopolitical and military rival which for too long has been allowed to take a naive West for a ride. A recent poll of US security experts conducted by the Washington based Centre for Strategic and International Studies found that nearly 80 per cent of respondents thought that if there was a military conflict with China today, the US would prevail. But that confidence shrunk to just 54 per cent ten years out.

Credit for sounding the alarm must go to Donald Trump; hes done more than anyone to shift the mindset from the accommodative approach of the past to the confrontational one we see today. Yet the harsh truth is that on almost every other level, his China policy has been a failure.

Far from containing China, it has only stiffened President Xi Jinpings resolve. China grows stronger by the day. The US trade deficit with China has not narrowed as Trump promised it would; the impact of the tariff war has fallen not on Chinese exporters but on American importers and consumers; few if any US firms have withdrawn from China and some have actually increased their investment there.

Nor have his policies succeeded in isolating China internationally; over the past several years, China has managed to strike numerous trading alliances with near neighbours and beyond, including key Western allies in the region such as Japan, Australia and New Zealand under the umbrella of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

Biden promises to be just as tough as his predecessor on Xi, who he once described as a thug, but he proposes to do it through multilateral means, or by building an alliance of like-minded nations prepared to stand up to Chinas bully boy tactics.

If it is to work, it needs to be quantitatively and qualitatively different from the ineffectual machinations of the Obama administration, which only further emboldened the Xi regimes ambitions.

Yet Trumps unilateralism has proved equally toothless. By picking fights with virtually everyone, including supposedly friendly nations, he allowed China to divide and rule.

The united front against China that Biden seeks has already suffered something of a setback as a result of the China/EU investment deal struck last month.

The so-called Comprehensive Investment Agreement is supposed to give greater access to each others markets. Once championed by the UK while it was still a member of the EU, it has been under negotiation for more than seven years now, so can hardly be seen as a deliberate sleight.

What is more, it does little more than mirror the Phase One trade accord already reached by Donald Trump when attempting to de-escalate the US trade war with China a year or two back.

All the same, Europes timing, in the interregnum between Trump and Biden, and with the standoff over Hong Kong and the Uighurs reaching fever pitch, could scarcely have been more unfortunate. China sensed a chance to stick one on the US, and by offering a few arguably meaningless concessions at the last moment, it succeeded.

One of those concessions was agreement to conform with the International Labour Organisations convention on forced labour, which if enacted might offer some respite to the Uighurs. Yet there is no timetable for ratification of the convention, and the EU failed to obtain any commitment at all to separate guarantees on freedom of association.

The investment agreement is not a tool for regime change, the EUs director general for trade, Sabine Weyand, said bluntly in a recent interview. If complete conformity with Western human rights and state aid principles is what the Biden administration demands, she seemed to be saying, then the EU cant be a part of it, citing the latest Brussels buzz phrase of open strategic autonomy, or essentially the EU acting transparently in its own perceived self interest regardless of what others may want. So much for the collective front.

The UK is left tiptoeing its way between the EUs desire to trade, and Americas determination to isolate China and make it conform with Western norms. At Prime Ministers questions this week, Boris Johnson refused to call Chinese treatment of its Uighur minorities genocide, in contrast to team Trumps parting shot and what appears to be the position of the Biden administration. The sense is that he doesnt want entirely to burn bridges with Beijing.

Biden hopes to forge a united front against China; Xi banks on it not being as easy as it looks. He may be right.

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Biden hopes to forge a grand Western alliance to stand up to China. Don't count on it - Telegraph.co.uk