Sat, Jul 18, 2020 page9

• Calling the US-China rivalry a new ‘cold war’ is dangerous

  If we look to the past to assess current tensions between the two countries, we miss the historical uniqueness of the past as well as our contemporary problems

  • By Mario Del Pero / The Guardian
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  A new “cold war” has become almost a default description of the current rivalry between the US and China. Some structural similarities indeed exist with the 1945-1991 standoff, when the Soviet Union was pitted against the US.

  Just as, for example, in 1950, we currently live in a bipolar system. In terms of economic power, military might, global influence and ability to pollute the planet, two powers — the US and China — clearly stand in a league of their own.

  Just as during the Cold War, this bipolarism is spurious and asymmetrical: Simply put, one side — the US — is much more powerful and influential than the other. The similarities end with this systemic parallel.

  

  Illustration: Kevin Sheu

  As is often the case when thinking in analogies, invoking a cyclical vision of history obfuscates more than it clarifies. More importantly, such thinking produces policy prescriptions — such as promoting an aggressive “containment” of China — which, in addition to being based on a superficial and misleading reading of history, are at best useless and at worst outright dangerous.

  There are three simple reasons why the rivalry is not a new “cold war.”

  IDEOLOGICAL CLASH

  The first is that the Cold War was an ideological clash between two universalisms: two visions of history and of the historical process, and two models of modernity.

  Both the Soviet Union and the US claimed to have mastered this process. They offered, to those willing to follow their example, a path to a future that for them had already arrived.

  To the US, liberalism and capitalism meant mass consumption, high salaries, increasing productivity and unbound freedom. In the Soviet Union, socialism was spelled out as free education and healthcare, complete equality of possibilities and means, and workers’ control of the productive process.

  The two models had more in common that many are willing to admit: They both embodied (and relied on) a form of industrial modernity that had in the gigantic production plant — whether it was Ford’s Highland Park car factory or the Uralmash industrial district of Yekaterinburg — its quintessential symbol.

  However, the ideological polarity fueled the Cold War’s competition and how it was represented to the world.

  Nothing, literally nothing, in the current relationship between the US and China resembles this total and, in theory, irresolvable ideological antagonism.

  Second, during the Cold War, geopolitics interplayed with ideology. The two superpowers competed on a world scale in the attempt to implement their model of modernity.

  However, their concerns were primarily focused on Europe and Germany in particular. It was a conflict for Europe and over Europe. It was there that Washington and Moscow set up two political and military blocs — NATO and the Warsaw Pact — that mirrored each other.

  It was on the “old continent” that the nuclear balance of terror — what former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger would describe as an “interdependence for survival” — was established and institutionalized.

  It was also in Europe that the Cold War eventually crumbled and collapsed. Again, nothing in the current competition between Beijing and Washington resembles the Eurocentrism of the Cold War.

  The final reason is because of globalization and how it has transformed contemporary international relations.

  The Cold War was a system based on an original lack of recognition between the two superpowers, a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the opponent’s social system and universalist pretensions.

  What ensued, at least in the first years after World War II, was an absence of interaction. The mutual vulnerability to a devastating nuclear exchange partially altered this state of affairs.

  It produced the most remarkable — and, for many in the US, intolerable — paradox of the Cold War: a form of interdependence that tied the two sides in an inescapable mortal embrace.

  As a consequence of this, they accepted putting their security, and indeed their very survival, into the hands of the total enemy, against whom those massive nuclear arsenals had been mobilized in the first place.

  Once mutually assured destruction (MAD — the appropriate acronym devised to describe this ironic condition) became real and fully operational, from the mid-1960s onwards, the two sides began to engage each other as never before.

  Washington’s European partners, especially West Germany, jumped on board, offering credits and technology to the Soviet Union and its allies.

  INTERDEPENDENCE

  Whatever parameter we choose to measure this engagement — trade volumes, credits and loans, cultural and educational exchanges — nothing comes remotely close to the current situation between the US and China.

  Over the past 50 years, we have seen a process of global integration that frequently puts the US-China relationship at its very center: Interaction between the two countries has become both a product and a decisive driver of globalization.

  US companies locating part of their production in China; US investments there and, later on, Chinese investments in the US (and the rest of the world); the unique ability of the voracious US market to absorb durable goods produced in China; Beijing’s willingness to hoard US dollars and US Treasury securities in order to subsidize US consumption and to keep the value of its currency artificially low; the millions of Chinese students in US colleges and universities: Such interdependencies now define US-Chinese relations, and are revealing in how particular and determined these connections are.

  Thinking in analogies can be, paradoxically, an ahistorical exercise. It almost always trivializes history itself, decontextualizing both the past events and those contemporary problems for which we seek “lessons.”

  If we call the current rivalry and tensions between the US and China a new “cold war,” we lose sight of the historical uniqueness and specificity of their relationship.

  We also miss the very lesson, possibly the only real one, that the study of the past has to offer: to avoid easy answers, look at the complexity and, invariably, the political opaqueness of a given issue. In other words, to historicize.

  Mario Del Pero is professor of international history at Sciences-Po, Paris, specializing in the history of the Cold War and US foreign relations.
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