A new cold war with China wouldn’t be like the last one. It could be worse.
children, I don’t like the idea of them growing up under threat of a nuclear standoff between two states. Having studied some nuclear conflict close-calls, sometimes it’s anything but dumb luck that keeps us from actually plunging into one of these conflicts.
Do you think it’s fair to characterize a cold war as a cultural concept? How does this influence how Americans perceive a new cold war with China?
We’re in a period of rhetorical and political posturing, in part because there is a political advantage to having an external ‘bad guy’ to demagogue against.
To some extent at the end of the last Cold War, we almost lost something that was unifying for us in a weird way as well. There were Rocky movies and Rambo movies where we’re squaring off against the Communists. These are the bad guys. We’re the white hats. They’re the black hats. It’s superficially easy to organize, agitate, and motivate political movement in a country when you’ve got something you’re squaring off against.
We’re probably not actually engaged in a cold war yet, although we are posturing as though we would like to. As of right now, there’s probably a gap between where Americans are and where leadership of the U.S. House Committee on China are in terms of just how seriously this threat is perceived, and how belligerent the solutions may be.
How should Americans perceive a new cold war? And how should Washington engage in strategic diplomacy?
I think that we want to be very reticent about taking steps that have the counterproductive effect of making America appear anxious about our standing in the world. By that I mean that we should be more confident than some people in Washington about where the United States stands versus China.
We should continue to concentrate on the potential for us to serve as an international exemplar of those liberties and freedoms that we cherish, whether civil or economic, and if you want to have a strategic competition with China, there’s a way that you can have that.
You can find that in the economic domain without hurrying off to a global war on autocracy. I want an America that continues to concentrate on the best of what it can offer, both to its citizens and to the world. I want an America that serves as an aspirational model for other countries to emulate and for Americans to be proud of and confident about.