Portraying the United States and China as locked in a “New Cold War” has become something of a cottage industry, providing provocative fodder for think tanks, the foreign policy cognoscenti and the broader commentariat while generating reams of stirring material for books, articles and documentary films.
Last month, Time magazine ran an article entitled “How the US Can Win the New Cold War.” Foreign Policy hedged somewhat with a “No, This Is Not a Cold War – Yet” headline. Asia Times has published several articles and op-eds under a New Cold War heading.
China’s English-language state media has likewise invoked the historical analogy. Xinhua, China’s official press agency, recently claimed that the “US attempts to contain China with a Cold War style approach.”
People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, said in 2023 that the “international community must take action to oppose the new Cold War.”
To be sure, analysts, experts and propagandists are all struggling for a glib analogy for today’s Sino-US rivalry. What’s clear is that US-China relations are deteriorating under the weight of escalating trade, tech and ideological wars. But is it really a New Cold War, similar and akin to the old Cold War?
China argues that the US is a hegemon trying to thwart its rightful rise in classic imperialist style. The US, on the other hand, criticizes China’s coercion, especially in the Indo-Pacific, and claims it is undermining the US-led “rules-based” order. But ultimately, each wants to limit the other’s influence over global politics and economics.
Obviously, those tensions are hottest around Taiwan, which the US has vaguely committed to defending if China invades. Should rhetoric erupt into confrontation, it would likely spiral into a conflict unlike anything the world has seen since the end of World War II – and likely more devastating than any seen during the old Cold War.
Prominent figures like the now-deceased Henry Kissinger underscored the urgency of the situation as recently as last year, warning that the US-China rivalry could potentially ignite World War III: “The United States and China must learn to live together. They have less than ten years,” Kissinger estimated.
It’s in this context that statesmen, journalists, analysts and academics are all looking to history to shed relevant light on the current state of US-China relations and by extension how to prevent the situation from devolving into a World War III scenario.
Typically, they arrive at the old Cold War. The period from 1947 to 1991 sheds a certain light on how shifting power relations, nuclear threats, arms races, proxy wars and economic, social and cultural competition for global influence all contribute to conflict between competing superpowers. It also shows how that competition can be balanced and mitigated to prevent direct, debilitating war.
But despite the Cold War’s many practical lessons, today’s US-China rivalry is qualitatively and fundamentally different; it’s simply not the same challenge and so many of the lessons learned won’t and don’t apply today.
Most importantly, the material conditions that existed between 1947 and 1991, the decades spanning the old Cold War pitting capitalist and communist blocs that ended with the fall of the wall in Germany, are fundamentally different now.
The old Cold War divide between the “Capitalist West” and the “Communist East” was characterized by enormous economic and political gulfs. The US and Soviet Union’s economies were deliberately disconnected and intentionally insulated from each other.
During the old Cold War, the two ideological blocs barely traded. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, US-Soviet Union trade averaged only 1% of their total trade. Between 1950 and 1972, the US banned all trade with China. This was despite the fact that, before 1989, one-third of the global population lived in a communist state.
Thus comparing the current US-China rivalry must acknowledge and account for the very different economic circumstances from the old Cold War. Today, the US and China – and almost every other country – are deeply integrated economically via the relatively free movement of capital, goods and people.
China has become the “world’s factory” and is critical to global supply chains and the world economy’s functioning. China is now the top trading partner of most states, including prominent trade-geared nations such as Germany, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Australia. The Soviet Union, for all its military might, never came close to such economic prowess.
The old Cold War was, first and foremost, a military confrontation, not an economic one. The US and the Soviet Union had a symmetrical monopoly on the amount of force they could unleash with their nuclear arsenals. Combined, they had the capacity to destroy each other many times over.
Today, the situation is reversed. The US-China rivalry is – for now at least – essentially an economic competition being decided by supremacy over computer chips, artificial intelligence capabilities and industrial policy rather than nukes. Though clearly that’s changing as economic tensions rise and China builds up its nuclear arsenal.
If US-China relations were to deteriorate on par with the darkest days of the Cold War, it would have enormous, detrimental implications for the world economy, inflicting chaos and pain on businesses everywhere. Despite the drive to “decouple”, unemployment, inflation, bankruptcies and other risks would proliferate in a US-China armed conflict scenario.
The preponderant risk during the old Cold War was that a nuclear exchange between the two rival powers would destroy humanity. Outside of proxy wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Cuba and Angola, to name but a few, the Cold War’s ultimate threat was essentially nuclear.
Today, the risks are, at least for now, less existential but potentially likewise devastating economically. As such, it’s essential that US-China tensions are viewed through the proper lens. And that’s arguably not the old Cold War and likening today’s tensions to a new one.
Scott Houghton is an independent foreign affairs researcher with a BA in history and MA in international politics from Newcastle University. He is currently a PhD candidate in political science and government at the University of Durham.