The portrayal of the United States and China as being at odds with one another has developed into something of a house industry, providing controversial material for think tanks, the global commentariat, and the media in general, while producing reams of stirring materials for books, articles, and narrative films.
Time magazine published an article last quarter titled” How the US Is Win the New Cold War.” Foreign Policy hedged somewhat with a” No, This Is Not a Cold War – Yet” headline. Under the New Cold War coming, the Asia Times has published a number of posts and op-eds.
China’s American- language condition media has also invoked the historical analogy. Xinhua, China’s standard media company, recently claimed that the” US attempts to have China with a Cold War type strategy”.
People’s Daily, the formal news of the Chinese Communist Party, said in 2023 that the “international society must take actions to reject the new Cold War”.
To be sure, experts, experts and shills are all struggling for a slick analogy for tomorrow’s Sino- US conflict. What is clear is that US-China relations are deteriorating as a result of growing business, technology, and intellectual conflicts. But is it really a new Cold War that is comparable to the previous Cold War?
China contends that the US is a superpower trying to stop its legitimate rise in the traditional colonial manner. The US, on the other hand, criticizes China’s persuasion, especially in the Indo- Pacific, and claims it is undermining the US- led “rules- based” purchase. But unfortunately, each wants to control the other’s control over international politics and economics.
Clearly, those hostilities are hottest around Taiwan, which the US has faintly committed to defending if China enters. If speech were to start a fight, it would probably turn into one unlike anything the world has seen since the end of World War II, and it would probably be even worse than any seen during the ancient Cold War.
Famous people, including Henry Kissinger, who is now adolescent, warned that the US-China conflict could lead to World War III by praising the urgency of the situation as late as last year. They have less than ten times”, Kissinger estimated.  ,
Politicians, journalists, analysts, and scientists are all looking at history to understand how the present state of US-China relations is and, in turn, how to prevent the situation from turning into a World War III incident.
Usually, they arrive at the ancient Cold War. The time from 1947 to 1991 sheds a certain illumination on how shifting power relationships, nuclear threats, hands races, proxy wars and economic, social and cultural opposition for global influence all lead to issue between competing superpowers. Additionally, it demonstrates how competition can be balancing and preventing a direct, crippling 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 wo n’t and do n’t apply today.
The material conditions that predated the start of the Cold War, in which capitalist and communist blocs competed for power until the wall fell in Germany, are fundamentally different now.
The” Capitalist West” and” Communist East” divided in the old Cold War due to significant economic and political rifts. The economies of the US and the Soviet Union were purposefully disconnected and insulated from one another.
The two ideological blocs barely exchanged during the previous Cold War. 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 done in spite of the fact that one-third of the world’s population was residing in a communist state before 1989.
Therefore, the very different economic circumstances from the old Cold War must be taken into account when comparing the current US-China rivalry. Through the relatively free movement of capital, goods, and people, the US and China are now firmly integrated economically, just like almost every other country.
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 both had a symmetrical monopoly over how much force they could use with their nuclear arsenals. Combined, they had the capacity to destroy each other many times over.
Today, the situation is reversed. The US-China conflict is essentially an economic battle being decided by supremacy over computer chips, artificial intelligence, and industrial policy rather than nuclear weapons, at least for the time being. Although it’s obvious that as China increases its nuclear arsenal and economic tensions rise, that’s changing.
If US-China relations were to worsen to the depths of the Cold War, it would have profoundly negative effects on the global economy, causing chaos and suffering to businesses everywhere. Despite the drive to “decouple”, unemployment, inflation, bankruptcies and other risks would proliferate in a US- China armed conflict scenario.
In the old Cold War, the preponderance of the risk was that a nuclear conflict between the two rival countries would endhumanity. 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 a result, it’s crucial that US-China tensions are viewed through the appropriate lens. And that’s arguably not the old Cold War, and it’s unfair to compare the current tensions to a new one.
With a BA in history and an MA in international politics from Newcastle University, Scott Houghton works independently as a foreign affairs researcher. At the University of Durham, he is currently pursuing a PhD in political science and government.