A new ‘Cold War’ with China might be the best hope for the future

Have we commenced a new Cold War with China?

While the question feels abstract, it has implications for foreign policy and has, as a result, triggered a ferocious debate. The prevailing view is that the analogy is inexact, obscuring more than it reveals.

I’m not so sure. While there are important differences, the key features of the current global setup seem to mirror that epoch in international relations. Oddly, the biggest difference between the two moments — the one that convinces me that this isn’t a new Cold War — may actually, ironically, mean that the current moment is more dangerous.

At first glance, the Cold War analogy looks good. The world appears to be divided into two increasingly contentious blocs — liberal and illiberal states — although the chief division among them is normative (a word I prefer to ideological). And, as in the Cold War, a good number of other countries prefer not to take sides. That competition occurs across most, if not every, dimension of international relations and has the very real potential to spill over and become a kinetic, bloody conflict.

Russian scholars were talking about a new Cold War as early as 2014 following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, which was the exclamation point on a more general deterioration in relations between their country and the West.

In 2022, British historian Niall Ferguson charged that “Cold War II began some time ago,” a view that matched that of fellow conservative Elliot Abrams, who wrote in National Review the same year that it was “A commonplace that a new Cold War has begun.” The thinking of David Sanger, The New York Times national security correspondent, is evident in the title of his latest book, released in April: “The New Cold Wars.” The use of the plural form is an interesting twist.

While U.S. President Biden has been reluctant to accept the notion, Russian officials aren’t hesitating. In July, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denounced the U.S. decision to deploy long-range missiles in Germany as part of “steady steps" toward a Cold War, adding that “all the attributes of the Cold War with the direct confrontation are returning.”

Not so fast. The distinctions between that dark time and this one are striking. The first and most obvious difference is the fact that today’s main adversary is China; then it was the Soviet Union.

The single most important change is the economic integration of China, the principal competitor, with its anticipated adversaries. In the original Cold War, the Soviet Union led its own economic bloc. The rigid boundaries that separated the two antagonists — the West and the Soviet imperium — differentiate between then and now. China disdains the idea of allies while promoting partnership with all countries in all forms of endeavor.

Observers also focus on the ideological dimension of the struggle and don’t buy into the casual blurring of that concept and norms that I performed a few paragraphs ago. Patricia Kim, a China scholar at the Brookings Institution, instead argues that “a fundamental difference between today’s China and the Soviet Union is that Beijing does not seek to overthrow democratic regimes or force its political model on others. ...” Moreover, she explained, “China is not intent on displacing the United States as the world’s dominant military power and is unlikely to present a global military challenge in the near future.”

The most measured assessment is, as usual, that of Harvard scholar Joseph Nye, who concluded that “If ‘Cold War’ means intense prolonged competition, then we are in one, but if the term is used as a historical metaphor for the past, then we are not (yet) and should avoid it.”

Last week, Gary Roughead, former chief of Naval Operations, offered a different analogy. Speaking virtually at the Genron NPO Asia Peace Conference, he rejected the ((idea of a )) new Cold War as “unhelpful, inaccurate and limiting — beyond limiting, harmfully determinative,” the product of “a different time under different circumstances.”

Echoing my own thinking, Roughead focused on the commercial component of this competition, “a surge in technology that dwarfs that of the dawn of the industrial age or military developments of the Cold War.” And, he added, “Unlike the military contests of the past, relevant competitive technology goes beyond kinetic weapons of destruction.”

He instead suggested that we have entered “a new great game,” a world in which “our time and our challenges are a result of the stirring of old empires.” It’s hard to disagree given Russian President Vladimir Putin’s lament for the collapse of the Soviet Union — “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” — and his pining for the restoration of the Russian Empire. Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping strives for China’s rejuvenation and reclaiming Beijing’s rightful place at the apex of global politics.

I am increasingly inclined to reject the Cold War analogy, even though it recognizes the sweep and scope of the competition and identifies the stakes. Other distinctions make the difference for me.

Unlike the first Cold War, this competition eschews proxies. China, Russia and the United States are staring each other down and there are no intermediaries to buffer their hostilities. Defense commitments are straightforward, making the prospect of confrontation very real.

Second, and most worrisome to me, is China’s refusal to concede the centrality of competition to the relationship. Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy first characterized the U.S.-China relationship as dominated by competition, a view that continues to shape U.S. thinking. As former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki put it in 2021, “Strategic competition with China is a defining feature of the 21st century.”

China disagrees. Beijing rejected Trump’s NSS analysis, with a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson saying that “the Trump administration went in a very wrong direction ... regarding China as a ‘strategic competitor’ and even a ‘threat’. ...” In 2021, then Foreign Minister Qin Gang dismissed competition as simply a means to “contain and suppress China in all respects and get the two countries locked in a zero-sum game.” At his summit last year with Biden, Xi said that “competition among major powers does not conform to the trend of the times.”

Leaving aside the gap between Chinese rhetoric and behavior, recognition that competition was the core element of relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was a defining feature of the Cold War. This acknowledgment forced the governments in Washington and Moscow to prepare for the worst consequences of a genuine crisis — a nuclear exchange that could result in widespread destruction and annihilation. Fear of a global apocalypse spawned a determination, in the form of detente, to promote peaceful coexistence and its associated guardrails and shock absorbers — crisis communications mechanisms, arms control agreements and eventual arms reductions, as well as the need to better understand the adversary.

A refusal to admit that the U.S.-China relationship is fundamentally competitive denies the single most powerful force driving those remedial efforts — a sense of urgency. If a possible breakdown of relations or outright failure will only yield minimal consequences, then there is no need for worst-case planning.

Sadly, it is the fear of catastrophe that focuses the mind. That animated the Cold War and the absence of such a fear is what most differentiates this moment from that one — and, ironically, risks triggering the disaster that world leaders avoided decades ago.