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When President-elect Joe Biden assumes office in January, he will confront an acute and sometimes bewildering array of issues. In the foreign arena, we can expect him to reverse some of the policies of his predecessor (by rejoining the Paris Accord on Climate change, for instance). He will also embark on a campaign to reassure traditional allies who believe — with good cause — that they have been ill-used by President Donald Trump. We can expect Biden to establish greater strategic distance from certain Middle East partners like Saudi Arabia and Israel, though that distance will fall far short of a full break. Biden will also abandon the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. He will likely assume a more confrontational approach toward Russia, which he considers a threat to the United States and to international order. But Biden will also be compelled to deal with the most important and ferociously complicated geopolitical question the United States faces today: how to manage its relations with China.
U.S.-Chinese relations are at their lowest ebb since the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. While the Trump administration and the China’s government struck a trade “truce” in January, many U.S. tariffs remain in place. Tensions over perennial sources of contention — Beijing’s assertive naval actions in the South China Sea and its claim on Taiwan — continue to simmer. The U.S. closed the Chinese Consulate General in Houston, claiming it was a center for espionage; China closed a U.S. consulate general in retaliation. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a nasty war of words between the Trump administration and the Chinese government, culminating in the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization. The U.S. has moved against Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat. It has also placed sanctions on the major Chinese technology firm Huawei and urged allies to restrict the company’s role in their communications networks. In July, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a major speech that cast China as a would-be “global hegemon” that threatened U.S. interests and values. The bottom line: Joe Biden assumes the presidency at a time when Chinese-U.S. relations are ugly and getting uglier by the day.
Some of the deterioration in U.S.-Chinese relations is no doubt due to policies of Trump, particularly his trade war against China. There are indeed substantial grounds for harsh criticism of Trump’s approach to China, which has wavered between a sometimes embarrassing admiration for Chinese President Xi Jinping and attempts to scapegoat China for his own administration’s often incompetent and inconstant approach to the COVID-19 virus. But concern with China’s rise both transcends Trump and predates his presidency. A number of China’s neighbors have long been worried about China’s assertive regional policies. Today, Europe is also waking up to the challenges represented by China. Joe Biden, while critical of Trump’s policies toward China, clearly considers China’s rise a substantial strategic challenge; indeed, Biden has declared his intention of “getting tough” with China. In one area — human rights and democracy — Biden’s approach to China will likely exacerbate U.S.-Chinese tensions.
The current moment has given rise to speculation that the United States is on the threshold of a new Cold War with China – if we aren’t in one already.
This is an allusion to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union that stretched from the late 1940s to the early 1990s. It was a period that saw a global strategic and ideological competition between the two countries that divided much of the world into rival blocs. Thanks in part to nuclear weapons — which raised the cost of war between the two superpowers to catastrophic levels — Moscow and Washington managed to avoid direct military conflict: hence the “cold” in Cold War. In fact, the Cold War was anything but peaceful, with deadly wars in the periphery – such as in Korea and Southeast Asia — killing millions. The United States and its allies would eventually win the Cold War. The Soviet empire in Central and Eastern Europe would disintegrate; the Soviet Union itself would dissolve; and its main successor state, Russia, would be reduced to a shell of the USSR’s former power. But victory in the 40-year struggle exacted a terrible human cost. We should nurse no nostalgia for it.
A firm grasp of history is an imperative in the conduct of foreign policy. It permits policymakers to discern patterns in world affairs; to identify general characteristics in the behavior of states; to understand internal dynamics in individual countries; and to craft strategies that allow policymakers to balance objectives and resources. But in foreign policy as elsewhere, a little learning can be a dangerous thing. This is assuredly the case when it comes to talk of a new Cold War with China. To fall back into a simplistic historical analogy risks launching the United States on a path that constrains our options in managing a complex, fraught relationship with a rising superpower.
First, though, we must recognize that the world has changed decisively since the end of the Cold War. The United States remains the strongest state in the world, with an extensive network of formal allies and informal partners. But it simply does not possess the relative power it did in, say, the mid-1990s, when Russia was enfeebled and China just beginning its historic rise to economic colossus. The “unipolar moment” proved to be just that — a fleeting, unsustainable historical interlude. Geopolitics has shifted to a more multipolar system; great power competition has returned with a vengeance. Under Putin, a revived Russia has flexed its muscle both close to home, notably in Ukraine, and further afield, in places like Syria. Even more consequentially, China’s astonishing economic rise has been matched, especially in recent years, by a far more assertive foreign policy, ranging from a military buildup in the South China Sea to the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative.
China’s foreign policy has diverse origins. Much may be traced to Chinese history and, in particularly, a sense of grievance associated with the humiliation at foreign hands during much of the 19th and 20th centuries. More recent internal developments — notably Xi’s rise to power — are also an important explanatory factor. But there is also the fact that China is simply acting like many rising powers before it. China seeks to carve out a sphere of influence in East Asia, for instance, much like the United States did in the Western Hemisphere during 19th century. And Beijing is trying to extend its influence beyond its immediate vicinity. This is perfectly predictable behavior. Does this mean we should ignore China’s more assertive foreign policy? No. Indeed, we may need to counteract it, should Beijing take steps that threaten our vital national interests. But we should neither be surprised nor outraged.
The challenge posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War was very different from the one presented by China today. China may indeed be undertaking a military buildup with the clear intent to challenge U.S. naval dominance in East Asia. But China’s military threat to the United States pales in comparison to the millions of Soviet bloc troops, backed up by a gigantic nuclear arsenal, that threatened peace in Europe during much of the Cold War. Nor does Beijing show any particular inclination to engage in the nasty proxy wars that were a deadly hallmark of the Cold War. In addition, U.S.-Chinese rivalry lacks much of the ideological conflict that served as a major fault line during the Cold War. True, China remains a nominally communist state, though one that would be unrecognizable to Marxist-Leninists of earlier generations. China’s leadership clearly disdains liberal democracy. But communism, as a global phenomenon, possesses nothing like the appeal it did before the great Marxist-Leninist experiment of the Soviet Union utterly failed. (We often forget that major communist parties were once important factors in post-war Western Europe.) China’s economic model – one that has raised hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty – is surely admired. And autocrats around the world are observing, with interest, China’s deployment of state-of-the-art technology to control its population. But today there is little of the fierce ideological rivalry that existed during the Cold War.
The greatest difference between the Cold War-era Soviet Union and contemporary China is the very factor that has driven China’s rise to power: its central role in the global economy. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s integration into the global economy, except for oil, gas and some raw materials, was minimal. China, in contrast, lies at the very heart of the world economy. It has either the largest or second-largest economy is the world, depending on how GDP is compared. It is deeply embedded in global international trade and investment. A broad-based effort to isolate China is well-nigh impossible to imagine. Global economic integration has produced huge benefits. But it comes at the price. The United States and its allies are severely constrained by the potentially huge economic costs associated with a policy of “containing China.” The same, by the way, is true of China, too, as it must balance its actions against potential backlash. To this extent, integration does place constraints on both the United States and China. But, even within these constraints, today’s China enjoys a broad scope of action. Not only can China say “no” when it comes to many matters of high domestic or foreign priority, it can say “Hell no.” And it does. In other words, it enjoys the prerogative of great power status that the United States has exercised for decades.
A Cold War with China would limit possible cooperation with China on a broad range of international issues. True, the United States did cooperate with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But this cooperation was very narrow and largely confined to arms control. With China, the need for collaboration is far more urgent and comprehensive. This is particularly true when it comes to the pressing global issue of climate change. China and the United States are, respectively, the world’s largest and second largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Forging an international approach to this issue is impossible without a modicum of Sino-U.S. cooperation. The same is true of other issues, ranging from macroeconomic cooperation during economic downturns to collective efforts to address pandemics like Covid-19.
In other words, the situation today is far more complex than during the Cold War, with powerful forces driving both confrontation and cooperation. The result has been the emergence of “hedging strategies” on both sides, marked by approaches that uneasily comprise elements of both collaboration and rivalry, with Beijing and Washington — at some simplification — hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. But such hedging strategies themselves hold the risk of escalation and miscalculation. Even under best-case scenarios, for instance, we may well see continued military build-ups in East Asia; miscalculation — particularly in the South China Sea and over Taiwan — could lead to outright military conflict. Efforts to further deepen U.S. military cooperation with traditional East Asian allies risk further alienating China; so do measures — notably closer U.S. strategic collaboration with India — that could prompt Chinese concerns about strategic encirclement. In short, even a Chinese-U.S. relationship marked by high degrees of cooperation in discrete areas (climate change, for instance) possesses a dynamic that could still drive toward ultimate conflict.
This reality suggests that the U.S. approach its policy towards China with scrupulous care. The United States will be best served by nuanced diplomacy and restrained rhetoric. Deceptive, if easy, historical analogies won’t help.
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