Cold warriors hold the key to handling China

At times of great global upheaval, policymakers often reach for familiar historical analogies to help them make sense of an uncertain future.
Consider the debate over whether the deepening confrontation between the US and China constitutes a “new Cold War.”
It is a marker of how quickly US-China relationship has deteriorated that commentators are invoking the analogy. Only three years ago, Obama observed that the US had more to fear from a weak, failing China than a strong, confident China.
Analysts such as Robert Kaplan argue that the US-China struggle to shape the 21st century will resemble the all-consuming US-Soviet competition for dominance in the decades after 1945. Other observers have warned that the Cold War analogy is flawed and even dangerous. Such thinking “is a kind of terminological laziness that equates the conflicts of yesteryear … with what takes place today,” writes Harvard University’s Odd Arne Westad. Misunderstanding the threat China poses, they warn, will push the US towards excessively confrontational policies.
The skeptics are not wrong to note the myriad differences between the US-Soviet confrontation and today, or to warn that efforts to re-run the Cold War playbook are likely to fail. Yet simply rejecting the Cold War analogy is also unwise, because that conflict provides useful insights about handling the China challenge.
Let’s begin with the misleading aspects of the analogy. China is not the Soviet Union — it is not a revolutionary state that is ideologically committed to the destruction of the capitalist world. Rather, China is deeply integrated into the global economy, to the point of being the primary trading partner of all of America’s treaty allies in the Asia-Pacific. Although the US-China relationship is worsening before our eyes, there remain areas with some degree of common interest: preserving the stability of the international economy, for instance, or combating climate change.
Finally, current distribution of global power is not nearly as bipolar as it was during the Cold War. For these and other reasons, US-China competition may bear more resemblance to the competition during the late 19th and early 20th centuries between the UK and Germany —increasingly fierce rivals despite being deeply interlinked economically.
The US will not be able to contain a globally connected China in the same way it contained a relatively autarkic Soviet Union. Yet the US will need to limit China’s malign influence just as it limited destabilising Soviet activities during the Cold War. Here the history of that conflict does provide some helpful ideas.
First, the Cold War analogy shows that multidimensional challenges require multidimensional responses. What made the Soviet menace so potent was that it combined a military threat to areas that were critical to the global balance of power with an ideological threat to the supremacy of liberal ideas. As a result, the US and its allies responded not just with military and geopolitical containment of Soviet power, but with policies meant to fortify the democratic core of the Western bloc and demonstrate that communism offered a false answer to the world’s political and economic problems.
Today, the China challenge is commonly seen to be primarily geopolitical and economic, and there is indeed growing evidence that Beijing seeks to replace Washington as leading power not just in the Asia-Pacific but globally. Yet China has also thrown down the ideological gauntlet. Chinese leaders have declared that Beijing’s model of authoritarian capitalism is superior to America’s model of liberal democracy.
Any strategy for competing with China will therefore require efforts to fortify the balance of ideas and to fortify the balance of power. The Trump administration’s formal policy statements, particularly the National Security Strategy, offer a good start, but the president himself has shown scant interest in this dimension of the competition.
Second, the history of the Cold War reminds us that the US needs a theory of victory that can be sustained over a generation or more. The value of George Kennan’s concept of containment was that it identified what the US sought to achieve and how it would do so, by denying Moscow the fruits of expansion and increasing the pressure under which it operated.
The US today finds itself in search of such a concept. There is broad consensus that engagement has failed to tame a rising China, and that a more competitive approach is required. Yet US officials have not really clarified America’s long-term strategic goal. Is it regime change? Holding the line against further expansion of Chinese geopolitical and ideological influence? Cutting a comprehensive deal that will resolve US-China tensions?
Finally, the Cold War analogy reminds us that a decisive factor in competition with China will be how well America tends to its alliances, partnerships.
Alliances and partnerships will play a similarly critical role in the coming years. If the US remains tightly linked to countries ringing China’s periphery, it will be devilishly difficult for Beijing to dominate its geopolitical neighbourhood.
If the US maintains solidarity with the world’s democracies — particularly in Europe and the Asia-Pacific — it will find it far easier to cope with the economic, ideological and geopolitical threat China poses.

—Bloomberg

Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments