No, This Is Not a Cold War—Yet

And ironically enough, at a time of vicious political polarization in Washington, there is no greater agreement between Democrats and Republicans than there is on the idea that China is aggressively trying to displace the United States as global hegemon.

So it’s game on with Beijing, and it’s a fair bet that if former President Donald Trump is elected six months from now, the mood won’t moderate much. In an essay in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, Trump’s former deputy national security advisor, Matt Pottinger—who would likely be appointed in a second Trump administration—faults the hawks of the Biden administration for not being hawkish enough. Writing with Mike Gallagher, the just-retired and influential former chairman of the House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Pottinger comes close to calling for regime change in Beijing, invoking former U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Cold War cri de coeur: “There is no substitute for victory.”

Key U.S. allies such as Britain are pretty much going along with the new wave of hawkishness. Among the would-be cold warriors is Robin Niblett, a fellow at London-based Chatham House. Can anything be done to avoid this descent into another cold war? Niblett asks in his new book, The New Cold War: How the Contest Between the US and China Will Shape Our Century. No, it can’t, he writes, because “the problem is that these two countries are on opposite sides of a profound and open-ended global competition between two political systems that are incompatible and mutually hostile.”

“The new Cold War is now well and truly underway,” Niblett announces. In some ways, this sounds like a crude replay of many of the stark pronouncements we heard during the first Cold War—though this time, more as farce than tragedy (consider that Washington and Beijing shut down relations at one point over an errant balloon). The problem with this view is that the most compelling evidence tells us it’s not true—at least, not yet—and that what exists between the United States and China still resembles far more of a “cold peace.”

The biggest mistake that the new cold warriors make is to argue—as most of them do—that naturally, there are significant differences from the previous Cold War, but that these differences shouldn’t prevent a new one. Niblett actually devotes most of his book to such differences—and he does an excellent job of detailing them—warning in the end not to let conflict with China “become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

But that warning may have come too late. The Cold War comparisons just keep coming. In a famous 2019 essay in Foreign Affairs, Jake Sullivan and Kurt Campbell—later to become President Joe Biden’s national security advisor and chief Asia advisor, respectively—even contended that “China may ultimately present a stronger ideological challenge than the Soviet Union did.” Their argument then was that “China’s fusion of authoritarian capitalism and digital surveillance” could somehow end up proving to be “more durable and attractive than Marxism.”

This is not turning out to be the case—for reasons we’ll get to in a moment. But the main point is this: The differences between the two eras are so profound that they still argue much more for a cold peace than a cold war. And there’s a world of difference between those two terms.

“Cold war” means openly vying for total dominance, military and otherwise. It means constant internal interference with a rival nation through covert action and living with the ever-present threat of annihilation in a hair-trigger, nuclear-imperiled world. “Cold peace,” on the other hand, means that rival powers generally avoid the use of military force and focus their relationship on nonlethal forms of geopolitical competition. The contest is defined by whoever exercises the most influence within a generally agreed-upon international system.

A cold war is always zero-sum; in a cold peace, there’s no winner and no finish line. It’s a lot less exciting, but a lot fewer people are likely to die.

The latter condition is still much closer to what we’ve got now, as I will explain. The former is what the China hawks in Washington—and one almost can’t turn a corner in the nation’s capital without running into a China hawk—seem to believe we’ve got.

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Why is there so little debate on what should be, at the very least, a controversial issue? Part of what’s happening today is an overreaction by U.S. and Western officials to the discovery that Beijing had no intention of becoming a “responsible stakeholder” in world affairs, as Washington hoped after the Cold War. Instead, China has become, under its increasingly hard-line government, the impresario and chief sponsor of a new era of autocracy and suppression of human rights, and it has flagrantly violated international trade rules.

Senior U.S. officials and legislators on both sides of the aisle were embarrassed by their naivete—as were all those credulous pundits—and it seems that hell hath no fury like an engager scorned. After Biden entered the White House, Campbell—who had long been a China hawk—left no doubt that he was nobody’s fool, declaring in 2021 that “the period that was broadly described as engagement” with China “has come to an end.”

That is not quite how it’s playing out, however. As the journalist David Sanger writes in one of the more balanced and farsighted of the wave of new books, New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West, after a hostile first meeting with a Chinese delegation in Alaska in 2021, Biden administration officials have slowly come to realize that China may not be quite as formidable as they thought—and Beijing seems more willing to negotiate a possible way out.

A Jin-class nuclear submarine from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy takes part in a naval parade near Qingdao, in eastern China’s eastern Shandong province, on April 23, 2019. Mark Schiefelbein/AFP via Getty Images

Biden, in response, is upgrading U.S. nuclear arsenal, including via developing the country’s first new nuclear warhead, the W93, in 40 years; a B61-13 nuclear gravity bomb; 400 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles; a  fleet of nuclear-armed strategic submarines; and a new strategic bomber (the B-21) and air-launched cruise missile.

Beyond that, Biden has come closer than any previous president to violating the long-standing U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity” and openly pledging to defend Taiwan—even as China’s military has stepped up its own threats and military exercises. All of which could easily mean that the two countries may someday leap right over the “cold” part and go directly into a hot war.

At the same time, despite Biden’s demurrals that he doesn’t want a new cold war, U.S. and Western policy practically confirms to Beijing that one is underway—and that it’s coming with the reluctant assent of Pacific U.S. allies such as Japan and South Korea. Nothing delivered this message more forthrightly than NATO’s decision in mid-2022 to expand its focus to the Asia-Pacific region. China’s sense that Washington is quietly imposing a Cold War-style policy of containment on it has been reinforced by groupings such as AUKUS—a trilateral security pact between Australia, Britain, and the United States—and the Quad arrangement between the United States, Japan, India, and Australia.

It’s also quite clear that China and Russia will remain somewhat aligned—if not quite yet fully allied in the military sense. Both countries will continue to work to counterbalance U.S. hegemony, and it’s probably as futile to try to wedge them apart as it would be to divide the European Union from the United States. Despite withholding deliveries of large-scale weapons systems to Russia in Ukraine, China has been supplying finance and, increasingly, equipment and parts—as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken charged after traveling to China in late April to meet Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, following more than five hours of talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

At a news conference, Blinken accused China of “powering Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine” by being “the top supplier of machine tools, microelectronics, nitrocellulose—which is critical to making munitions and rocket propellants—and other dual-use items that Moscow is using to ramp up its defense industrial base.” Trade between China and Russia reached a record $240.1 billion in 2023, which was a major increase over the previous year.

Given all these threats, then, why should we not think of this as an oncoming cold war?

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken walks ahead of a group after arriving in Beijing on June 18, 2023.Leah Millis/AFP via Getty Images

Michael Doyle, an expert in international relations at Columbia University, argues that it is vitally important to distinguish between the goals of China and Russia in the current environment.

“Russia’s a rogue and China’s a rival. I think that encapsulates it pretty well,” said Doyle, who is also the author of Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War, in an interview with Foreign Policy. “We’re now basically engaged in the most extreme cold war-level conflict with Russia,” he added, one not unlike the proxy wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan during that earlier period.

“With China, it’s very different,” Doyle said. “China has benefited immensely from its integration into the world economy, and for the future, China wants to play a lead role in the world economy. So it can’t afford to wreck it, that’s pretty clear. That means a major push back against the militarists in China who want to assert China’s prestige and power over the Eastern Pacific.”

What about the idea that the U.S. and Chinese systems are “incompatible” and “mutually hostile,” in Niblett’s words? In terms of political ideology, this is true to a degree, although perhaps not nearly as much as Niblett and many experts believe. (We’ll get to that later.) But in other respects, when it comes to economics and especially finance and trade, the idea is far more arguable.

In the past few years, an unprecedented raft of export restrictions has been imposed by Washington and European governments to ensure that Western businesses do not share sensitive technologies with Beijing, and those businesses reduce their reliance on Chinese imports in critical sectors such as telecommunications, infrastructure, and raw materials. But all this so-called decoupling (the Biden team prefers to call it “de-risking”) is still only happening on the margins. In 2022, overall two-way trade between the United States and China set a new record of $690 billion, the U.S. Commerce Department reported.

As Sanger writes, even Apple’s iPhone, “a device millions of Americans depend on for everything from their financial lives to their medical histories to the apps that open their front doors,” is still mostly assembled in China—and the company isn’t rushing to change that.

Xi seems to be coming to a much greater understanding of this interdependence, especially as he’s watched his economy tank. That is no doubt one reason that Xi is traveling to Europe this week—perhaps to solicit investment, perhaps in the vain hope that he can drive a wedge between the European Union and United States. But Xi is confronting a vastly different environment than he did during his last visit to the region in 2019. Back then, Europe and Washington had serious differences over how tough to get with Beijing; today, most of that dissent has faded away while mistrust toward China has soared. In a measure of how reduced Beijing’s profile is, Xi is confining his visit to two small and somewhat sympathetic countries, Hungary and Serbia, as well as a third country, France, whose president, Emmanuel Macron, has gingerly tried to prod the EU toward more independence from Washington.

Employees work at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, China, on Sept. 4, 2021. VCG via Getty Images

Indeed, given the degree of integration and the mutual benefits to each economy of participation in global markets, it’s clear that the strategic threat that China and the United States pose to each other is far less than the threat that each country faces from a failure of cooperation.

This is especially true when it comes to stopping climate change and future pandemics, as well as stabilizing the regions that each country is keen on exploiting commercially—particularly the global south. Outright conflict—as opposed to economic competition—is not going to help either side there. More to the point, both the U.S. and Chinese governments have come to realize this, which helps explain why the trade war started by Trump hasn’t gotten much worse.

And what about that supposed ideological challenge from China? In her cover essay in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs titled “Can China Remake the World?” Elizabeth Economy of the Hoover Institution goes even further than Sullivan, Campbell, and other pundits, in some respects, by suggesting that Xi is pursuing nothing less than a reconception of the entire postwar system. “Xi Jinping’s ambition to remake the world is undeniable,” she writes. But Economy, who is respected as a careful scholar, ends up undercutting her own argument by noting that Beijing’s various attempts at alternatives to U.S.-led postwar power structures—the Belt and Road, Global Development, Global Security, and Global Civilization initiatives—“appear to be failing or backfiring.”

Indeed, the evidence indicates that China, along with Russia, is failing to build up a significant counterbalance to long-entrenched Western institutions, among them NATO, the U.N., and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It is true that many nations, especially in the global south, have sought to remain nonaligned among the two great powers. India, in particular, is carefully navigating a complex middle course, joining Washington’s Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (albeit not as a defense ally) while continuing its robust economic relationship with Russia as a balance to China.

But Xi continues to stumble even in winning his fellow autocrats over. For years, he has been offering them up a sort of ideological dog’s breakfast: an unsavory blend of bribery, bluster, and bullying that few countries are buying. They will, of course, occasionally defer to China to remain in its good graces.

For example, at its annual summit in Johannesburg in 2023, the BRICS forum of five major emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—announced it would induct six new members, ostensibly to create a balance-of-power rival to the U.S.-led West. These were Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina (though Argentina later reversed course). On paper, this looked worrisome for the West, encompassing six of the world’s top 10 oil producers, nearly half the world’s population, and 37 percent of global gross domestic product (measured by purchasing power parity).

In fact, however, the expanded BRICS amounts to even less geopolitical heft than the Non-Aligned Movement did during the Cold War, according to Foreign Policy columnist C. Raja Mohan, a well-known Indian strategist. “Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are close U.S. security partners,” Mohan wrote. “Even if they have their differences with Washington, they are unlikely to abandon U.S. security guarantees for untested Chinese promises, let alone protection by the formless sack of potatoes that is BRICS.”

Thus, it is clear that despite its official rhetoric, China is doing little to displace the international system that the United States and other Western powers created. Instead, China seems mainly intent on beating the United States at its own game within that system. Beijing really has no other choice if it wants to sustain its economy, many experts say.

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But even at this game, Xi has been scoring almost as many own goals as Washington in recent years. During the Chinese president’s 2019 visit to Europe, Italy signed on to his Belt and Road Initiative—Xi’s massive, China-led global infrastructure project designed to win friends (and encumber them with debt)—becoming the first G-7 member country to do so. But in late 2023, Rome withdrew, saying it saw no real benefits. Another major Chinese initiative with the European Union, the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, also quietly died after Beijing refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Today, the United States has more than 50 allies and strategic partners around the world, including several—such as the Philippines—that ring China’s perimeter and were once wary of Washington but have since re-upped security pacts out of fear of Beijing. Most of them, including the 32 wealthy NATO countries, comprise the richest nations in the world. By contrast, “China’s main allies are North Korea with an economy ranked 125th in the world by nominal GDP and Russia with an economy the size of Texas,” writes Randall Schweller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, in a forthcoming academic article titled “The Age of Unbalanced Polarity.”

As a result, “even a traditional Western sphere of influence appears out of Beijing’s reach,” Schweller concludes. “Ringed by major powers, its economy weighted down by inefficient capital markets, ruled by a leader who continues to reverse economic reforms and double down on statist economic policies, China looks ever more like it will remain a weak Number 2 in an unbalanced bipolar system.”

The issue, in other words, is nothing at all like the height of the Cold War, when—as John F. Kennedy said in October 1960 while running for president—the whole globe itself seemed to be up for grabs when it came to hearts and minds. As JFK said then, the concern for most of the world was “which system travels better, communism or freedom. Can our system help them solve their problems, or must they turn to the East?”

Not many are turning to the East these days. Nor should we worry much that they will anytime soon. So why are so many observers putting the worst possible face on the conflict? (Full disclosure: I myself used the term “cold war” in a 2022 essay after NATO’s turn to the Asia-Pacific, though I critiqued the move and suggested that simply accepting the idea of an inevitable cold war represented “a failure of imagination and political courage on the part of the U.S. president and major powers.”)

There is no question that hawks vastly outnumber the small minority of scholars and pundits who still insist that we face a cold peace and not a cold war (among them being CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who first used the term in 2021 and recently called Pottinger and Gallagher’s proposals “reckless, dangerous and utterly impractical.”) The biggest problem may be that the idea of a new cold war is just the new zeitgeist—and that long-entrenched policies on both sides, in Washington and Beijing, have made the term fairly meaningless.

In an interview with Foreign Policy, Schweller said that when he first entered the academic job market in 1993, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, international security (IS) studies were fizzling fast. Now, they’re hot again.

“Promoting the idea of Cold War 2.0 definitely promotes the careers of IS scholars,” Schweller wrote in an email.

And that’s true on the Chinese side as well, said political scientist Eun A Jo of Cornell University. “Hawks in competing states benefit from each other in their domestic battles,” she said in a phone interview. Like the Soviet and U.S. hard-liners of the Cold War, the militarists in China are eagerly promoting the idea that the United States seeks to contain China. “The deepening ideological tensions between the two countries today are more likely a product of this dynamic than China’s growing evangelism” about becoming a world power, Jo said.

Xi attends an event held by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and the U.S.-China Business Council on the sidelines of APEC Leaders’ Week in San Francisco, California, on Nov. 15, 2023. Carlos Barria/AFP via Getty Images

Xi’s decision to drop the wolf-warrior show and cajole American investors into returning to China marked the first time in decades that a Chinese leader entered a summit meeting knowing that he was playing a weak hand. He seemed increasingly desperate for American help.

In the past year or so, Beijing has also begun to signal that it may not be so eager to invade Taiwan any time soon, given the risk of additional economic sanctions at a time when China’s economy is growing only at 2 percent to 3 percent a year rather than 8 percent. Xi “must be wondering if his generals were overestimating the skills of the People’s Liberation Army, just as [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s generals had predicted a short war in Ukraine,” Sanger writes, and he quotes a Biden official as saying, “There may be more time on the clock than we think.”

China under Xi also seems increasingly willing to negotiate arms control in the last year or so, Sanger writes:  “Suddenly, the Chinese seemed, vaguely, to be interested in some kind of dialogue—perhaps because they didn’t want to get into an expensive arms race, perhaps because the tightened military alliance between Washington and Tokyo gave the United States new counterstrike capabilities.”

Another factor that opens the door to some necessary realpolitik with China is that Biden has all but dropped his other cold war-style narrative—the idea that we are in a two-bloc world of democracies versus autocracies. Especially with an autocrat-enamored Trump threatening to retake the U.S. presidency in November, it’s clear that we are living in far more of a spectrum of political ideology and practice that ranges from the liberal democracies of the West to Russian and Chinese autocracy—but with a lot of mixed regimes in between, such as India, Hungary, and Brazil.

Indeed, with the credibility of U.S. democracy itself in question, it’s reasonable to hope for a mutual recognition that neither system is perfectible. That could also make a modus vivendi easier. The Chinese despise democracy and Americans despise autocracy—but we are now enduring the pitfalls of democracy just as Xi and his underlings are contending with the shortcomings of autocracy.

Sanger’s book makes clear that China is still dabbling in cold war-style tactics, including dropping malware code into U.S. infrastructure, possibly to test how to slow down a U.S. response to a Taiwan invasion. And at least one analogy to the first Cold War should be drawn: Neither side can afford to miss an opportunity to ensure that we remain in a cold peace rather than simply stumbling into a new cold war.

“I see a similarity with late 1940s especially, when it was relatively unclear what kind of threat [Joseph] Stalin and the Soviet Union posed,” said Doyle, the Columbia University expert. “I think that’s sort of the world we’re in right now. There are legitimate warnings about the nature of the rivalry with Russia and China. But let’s relearn the lessons of detente at the same time as we learn the lessons of the Cold War.

“And detente is something we should do now rather than waiting 20 years.”