Washington Hears Echoes of the ’50s and Worries: Is This a Cold War With China?
The New York Times
Incursions into Taiwan’s air zone, a space launch and what looked like a prisoner swap raise a question that is about more than just semantics. It could signal a dangerous new mind-set.
When Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister and longtime China expert, told a German newsmagazine recently that a Cold War between Beijing and Washington was “probable and not just possible,” his remarks rocketed around the White House, where officials have gone to some lengths to squelch such comparisons.
It is true, they concede, that China is emerging as a far broader strategic adversary than the Soviet Union ever was — a technological threat, a military threat, an economic rival. And while President Biden insisted at the United Nations last month that “we are not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs,” his repeated references this year to a generational struggle between “autocracy and democracy” conjured for some the ideological edge of the 1950s and ’60s.
Yet the question of whether the United States is entering a new Cold War is about more than just finding the right metaphor for this odd turn in superpower politics. Governments that plunge into a Cold War mind-set can exaggerate every conflict, convinced that they are part of a larger struggle. They can miss opportunities for cooperation, as the United States and China did in battling Covid-19, and may yet on the climate.
