"Second" Cold War?

Western analysts wonder if the US and China are heading for Cold War 2.0. You can see the basis for that feeling. What started off as trade related issues has now escalated into tit-for-tat consulate closures in Houston and Chengdu, China practically shredding its commitments towards Hong Kong, and increased military moves by both sides in the East and South China Sea.

 

Nick Bisley makes an interesting point about the “first” Cold War:

“While the Cold War was a global contest, its dynamics were starkly different in Asia and Europe. Most obviously, the first three decades of the contest were anything but cold in Asia. Indeed, the label seems like a cruel joke for a region that experienced several large-scale wars from the 1950s to the 1970s in Korea and Indochina, killing many millions of people.”

Yes, the period was “free of bloodshed” in Europe, which is what the white man really cared about. Another difference, writes Bisley, was that Asia had no “Berlin Wall moment”, i.e., there was no one event in Asia that symbolized the end of the Cold War. After all, even today, Korea is divided (but hey, Germany is united, guess which one the white man cares about) and Taiwan’s status remains disputed. But the most important difference between Asia and Europe?

“In Europe, communism was defeated. In Asia, however, it lives on. The Chinese Communist Party has not gone the way of the Soviet Union; quite the contrary, it now oversees the world’s second-largest economy, retains a high level of internal legitimacy and runs a country that is tightly connected with the rest of the world.”

 

Adam Tooze agrees that “Cold War 2.0” is not the right term:

“For Americans, part of the appeal of allusions to Cold War 2.0 is that they think they know how the first one ended.”

Also, as Bisley points out, the first Cold War involved an adversary (the USSR) who didn’t understand “the nature of the economy it ran and the people it led”. Whereas China?

“By contrast (China) is perhaps the most internally fixated great power yet seen. Party elites are acutely aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the system they have built.”

 

The point I quote below from Bisley’s article is addressed to the West, but I think it is something that applies to China as well:

“Given China’s scale, its importance to the global economy and its technological sophistication, an escalation of the rivalry between Beijing and Washington could bring costs of monumental proportions. Rather than carelessly invoking the past, we should be doing everything we can to stop the competition between the two sides from spiralling out of control.”

Unlike the “first” Cold War, this time both sides are economically married to each other. And so the cost, to both sides, will be of “monumental proportions”.