LONDON (Reuters) – The abrupt closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston marks the latest incident in a rapidly escalating conflict between China and the United States.
FILE PHOTO: The flags of China, the United States, and the Chinese Communist Party are displayed at a flag stand at the Yiwu Wholesale Market in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, China, May 10, 2019. REUTERS / Aly Song / File Photo
Future historians will likely focus on 2020 as the point at which the intensification of strategic competition between the United States and China turned into a new cold war.
The two superpowers are now in conflict in multiple geographic theaters (South Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America) and multiple vectors (trade, investment, technology, espionage, international institutions, health policy, naval, air power ). , missiles and territorial disputes).
The superpowers have articulated an increasingly long list of complaints and almost no significant interest in common. Both are trying to push third countries into an alliance system that would see the world divided into two decoupled blocks. Red versus blue. With us or against us. Total confrontation. Basically the definition of cold war.
Some policymakers and strategic study analysts still hesitate to employ the concept of the Cold War, distrusting the analogy with the decades-long US / USSR conflict and its implications for medium and long-term international relations.
But there is no doubt that both countries increasingly see and describe the conflict in existential terms. If it looks like a cold war, and it sounds like a cold war, it is probably a cold war, and the concept illuminates more than it hides.
ANCESTORS
The current Cold War between the United States and China has been building for some years, as has the experience of the Cold War between the United States and the USSR, which dates back to 1947, but where the antecedents were evident in the last part of the World War II, when the two countries were still nominally Allied in the United Nations.
For almost a decade, there have been growing complaints about intellectual property theft, trade imbalances, espionage, diplomatic contention and siege, and territorial disputes. So just as the cold war between the United States and the USSR really started much earlier (it was already evident in 1945), the cold war between the United States and China started a long time ago.
But in terms of a point where the intensification of strategic competition becomes an absolute cold conflict, 2020 seems to mark the qualitative and quantitative turning point, and serves as much of a convenient date as 1947.
The coronavirus pandemic and the deepest economic recession for a century have increased tensions, and the conflict has become a central issue in the US presidential election with the top two candidates determined to appear tough on China.
However, like the Cold War between the United States and the USSR, the war between the United States and China is likely to span multiple U.S. administrations and generations of Chinese leaders, with periods of more intense conflict alternating with detente.
The conflict is not personal between the President of the United States, Donald Trump, and the President of China, Xi Jinping. It increasingly encompasses most of the elite groups in both countries.
As patriotic hawks push for a hard line, there is less and less political, diplomatic, and intellectual space for pro-engagement views in the United States or China.
Changes in top leaders on both sides will not necessarily end the conflict, just as the replacement of Truman and Stalin did not end the conflict between the United States and the USSR.
RESOLUTION
Like the cold war between the United States and the USSR, the conflict between the United States and China is likely to continue until the costs become intolerable for one or both parties.
The conflict between the United States and the USSR remained primarily a cold war, with actual military combat limited to proxy wars in developing countries such as Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan.
The conflict between the United States and the USSR is often presented as a successful example of managing international tensions.
But at the time it was not obvious that the conflict would remain cold and would not escalate, for example, during the Cuban missile crisis.
The current conflict between the United States and China is also a classic example of the Thucydides trap, where a rising power (ancient Athens and modern China) challenges the current one (Sparta now the United States).
History suggests that such conflicts often end in an involuntary but real military confrontation, such as the one between Britain and Germany in the early 1900s (“Destined for war: Can the United States and China escape the trap of Thucydides? “Allison, 2017).
Beyond the economic conflict, there is a long list of potential hotspots that could spark real fighting, including Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Some cold warriors on both sides welcome the “strategic clarity” of more open competition and conflict between the United States and China.
A Manichean conflict between two blocks, economically and diplomatically decoupled, offers a tantalizing repetition of the great conflict of the second half of the 20th century, which ended with the triumph of the United States and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
But that conflict dominated global politics for four decades, and the end result was not obvious in the 1960s and 1970s.
There is no guarantee that the Cold War between the United States and China will follow the same trajectory or end in the same way.
Proponents of a confrontational approach between the two superpowers must be careful what they wish for.
(The opinions expressed here are those of the author, Reuters columnist)
Edition by Elaine Hardcastle
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