Memories of the Cold War against the Soviet Union are fading. Many balk at the idea of having a new cold war with China and at any prospect of returning to a world where the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation hangs overhead. Some critics think efforts to cut strategic goods from trade with China go too far.
It’s an unfortunate fact that many would rather China suffer no consequence for its human rights abuses and geopolitical provocations, lest a response might disrupt the integrated trade relationship with the workshop of the world.
Even the Muslim world, which stood united against Salman Rushdie, Charlie Hebdo, and now again over Israel, chooses silence with China. Do not imagine that we in the West are immune from that same pressure to appease.
If the alternative to a new cold war is a hot one, the first is infinitely preferable to the latter. This is the dichotomy we face. Avoiding war means embracing the realities of what’s needed to combat China’s ambitions.
It is natural for Beijing and Washington to compete, not least in the global markets. Competition can be both constructive and destructive. Technological and economic competition may well turn out to be good for everyone—the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, for example, was a boon in science and technology. War by contrast would, of course, makes us all poorer and less safe.
When a rising power meets a declining one, violence is always possible. Friendly handovers, such as the transfer of hegemonic power between the British Empire and the United States, are rare. In the heady days of the 1990s, and even the 2000s, it seemed possible that China’s rise might make it a U.S. partner, not an opponent. Prominent historians such as Niall Ferguson talked of the “G-2” and “Chimerica,” the global twins that would share leadership—an idea embraced by some in China.
But that world ceased in 2012, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elevated to power Xi Jinping, a Han supremacist with an unshakeable faith in China’s destiny to be the most powerful country on Earth and a revanchist fervor against the West. Xi, more than any other recent Chinese leader, has absorbed the lessons taught in Chinese schools about the country’s “Century of Humiliation”: the period between the First Opium War and the CCP’s coming to power when the Western powers, according to Chinese textbooks, had their boot on China’s throat.
Today, another hot war is possible—to which a cold war is a better alternative.
When Xi’s elevation to CCP general secretary came to pass, Beijing chose the path of inexorable geopolitical competition. Unlike, perhaps, some of his predecessors, Xi does not see the inevitable rise of Chinese power within the incumbent globalized liberal order as sufficient for China’s “rightful standing.” U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush all foresaw and acquiesced to a future in which China would become the beating heart of the globalized world economy—but in which the United States remained the hard-power enforcer of this global order. Xi considers such an arrangement as imposing unreasonable constraints on Chinese power and potential.
Xi, in other words, does not see the U.S.-instituted and -enforced global order as the route to his country’s inevitable success, as his predecessors did. Instead, he sees it as a straitjacket that must be challenged. He wishes to challenge U.S. power globally in the same vein. He has been doing that in Ukraine, refusing to condemn Moscow’s invasion while supporting Russia’s military-industrial base. Xi has also been aiding Iran’s military modernization, with China becoming the country’s main customer for oil, looking past Tehran’s massively destabilizing effect on the Middle East through Hamas, Hezbollah, and its other proxies. He is willing to sacrifice common interests, including shipping routes around Houthi rebels, to preserve his deepening partnership with Iran against the United States.
Not all of it all the time, of course, because China still hopes to benefit from the trade that allowed it to rebuild itself, but in any and every instance where norms and institutions of the current international order might constrain the whims and designs of the CCP, they must be challenged to secure Xi’s “Chinese Dream.”
The current international institutional order is predicated on values and norms that clash with the motivations and modus operandi of the CCP, as well as those of large portions of the global east and south. Western hypocrisy renders it dangerously vulnerable to China’s rhetorical attacks, however hypocritical these are in turn. U.S. support for Israel in the midst of a disastrous and mishandled war has seen the country’s position weaken globally. Third countries, including India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, with long histories of cooperation with the U.S.-led order now find themselves either tacitly or overtly rooting for a multipolar world where China is able to check Western actions, demonstrated by the most recent U.N. General Assembly votes. China’s soft power has seen results such as the Saudi-Iranian deal to restore diplomatic ties, brokered in Beijing, far enough away to drown out protestations about brutal human rights abuses.
The worldview that now dominates the CCP commits to confrontation with the West and the subversion, capture, and destruction of the international system of governance that the West built following World War II—and remade at the end of the Cold War.
Western leaders can acknowledge this reality and respond appropriately to attacks on the global system and on its values. If they choose not to do so, for whatever reason, that is not the benign avoidance of conflict: It is appeasement of a dangerous authoritarian regime that will sense weakness and only make more demands. A more powerful and uncontained China ups the risks, in turn, of a hot war.
China itself faces internal challenges severe enough to warrant a tougher stance, morally and strategically. Recent purges at the Politburo, economic downturn, credit crises, and crackdowns on businesses and capital flight have rendered China particularly vulnerable to sanctions. For the first time in a long time, Xi needs the United States to move on a few key sticking points, notably on technology embargoes for semiconductors, and to help reverse the trend of disinvestment of U.S. firms from China. The West has the leverage to force concessions—and to leave Chinese military technology trailing.
A new cold war with China would keep the conflict and competition strictly confined within established parameters and limit the possibility of spill over into genuine conflict. There are valuable lessons we can learn from the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
First, the Cold War must not be talked about as if it were a hot war done carefully. It is one thing to acknowledge Beijing’s hostile positioning and to respond appropriately, but it is another thing to allow ourselves to become ideologically committed to escalating hostility against China simply because it is China. As the Cold War shows, general diametric opposition can still include instances of cooperation—whether that’s the United States and Soviet Union working together on the polio vaccine or now working with Beijing on climate change and pandemics. This doesn’t demand a general acquiescence to China’s attacks on global human rights or the international order but a careful cleaving off of issues to create their own space.
As the experience of the 1990s and the 2000s shows, cooperation has been possible between the United States and China. We should leave the door open to a future Chinese administration to choose a more benign and cooperative relationship with the West and the rules-based international order. This is unlikely to happen while Xi is in power—but the West must keep signaling that it’s possible, as long as China pulls back on its current behavior.
China is not the Soviet Union. It will not buckle economically from a failed war and an arms race, as the Soviet Union did. The solutions that worked against Moscow may not work against China, not least because Beijing can read history books, too.
But given the reality that we are in a long-term conflict, there’s one imperative demand: not becoming dependent on China for strategic supplies. China is doing its best to be strategically independent of U.S. technology, especially militarily. The West must likewise develop strategic independence of Chinese technology, value chains, and manufacturing. Asymmetrical leverage over Western economies and over defensive capabilities invites disaster. A stable balance of deterrence staved off calamity during the face-off with the Soviet Union. It can do so again with China.
Providing a path out of conflict means drawing clear red lines on what is acceptable and what is not in this new competition—and what steps would eventually lead to conflict. Ambiguity will court escalation. Escalation can get out of hand quickly. Noninterference in democracies would make China an acceptable global partner and allow the United States to coexist in spite of myriad hostile state actions. Current hostilities in terms of economic and cyberwarfare, especially with targets including the U.K. Electoral Commission and U.S. military installations, carry a long-tailed risk of escalation. But the West has already shown that it is not willing to escalate these offenses beyond condemnation—which is probably the best we can do.
The only clear case where strategic ambiguity has worked so far is in the U.S. position vis-à-vis Taiwan. And in that case, the policy can remain standing so as to not give the Taiwanese perverse incentives or stir unnecessary worries. But in all other cases, if the United States fears some move or another by China, then it should spell out its fears explicitly and say in advance exactly what costs it is prepared to impose for crossing that line. Clear rules of engagement were beneficial in conflict management in the Cold War. They will be useful in the next one.
This prospect should worry Westerners. It should sharpen our minds and our reflexes. But appeasement is neither a useful nor moral option. We must be clearheaded about the actions needed to avoid unnecessary escalation into direct military confrontation, a hot war.
The Cold War was a frightening time. But it was better managed than we may think. War was avoided. There was no hot war—just as there must not be now. Indeed, China is not funding hot proxy wars in the way the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. Unlike Iran’s colonial ambitions in the Middle East or the Soviet Union’s ideological battle, China’s goals are more solipsistic but no less frighteningly sincere.
And in that sense at least, a “Cold War mentality”—in government, among scholars, within our militaries—might be just what is needed to avoid an instinctual appeasement or its grim double: uncontrolled escalation. We must be prepared to call this new cold war accurately and act accordingly.