Looking at the past 25 years or so, one could argue that the United States has lived through a historical “anomaly.” In those 25 years, starting with 9/11 and ending with the Fall of Kabul in 2021, the United States combatted terrorist cells and insurgent groups without a central command. Unlike states and official armies with chains of command, the primary adversary of the United States in this period has been terrorist organizations fighting with decentralized tactics.
The uniqueness of this chapter in U.S. history makes the recent developments in global affairs all the more significant, because after these 25 years, the United States is on track to, once again, fight states with proper armies and governments. Unlike ISIS or the Taliban, the predicted conflicts with Iran or Venezuela generate strategic discussions about the capabilities of modern warfare and combat tactics.
However, beyond these discussions, defining this geopolitical phenomenon as a “second cold war” is entirely misplaced.
The target of this assumption is China, the primary great power with the strength and weight to challenge the United States. The main reason for this assumption lies in China’s broader geopolitical trajectory. Decades of political and economic development coordinated by China point to a national ambition to establish itself as a superpower with its own sovereign sphere. Over the past few decades, strategic decisions throughout the Asia-Pacific Theater on trade deals, resource extraction, troop deployments and other less publicized matters consistently revealed the anticipation of an open geopolitical struggle between China and the United States.
The tensions between the United States and China often focus on Taiwan and the political gridlock surrounding it. The wider implications of a standoff between China and the West, however, differ from those of the actual Cold War. Where the USSR remains in the West’s collective memory as a “spectre” and an ideological threat, China has consistently integrated itself into the global economy and engaged in trade with the West to foster greater economic cooperation.
A back-and-forth comparison between China and the USSR reveals why fears of a new “ideological struggle” are misguided. The core of this false rationale is the belief that Beijing follows a similar foreign policy strategy to Moscow during the Cold War — an aggressively interventionist strategy motivated by a revolutionary cause to spread socialism worldwide. This motivation is exactly why the United States and the USSR competed in so many proxy wars during the Cold War.
But in reality, China distinguishes itself from the USSR by its non-interventionist stance to foreign policy. Rather than openly fighting the United States-led political and economic system, the country integrated itself into international trade and commerce. This benefited China greatly in the 21st century, as its industry and economy grew substantially compared to the 20th century.
This rapid and significant growth, not the ideology of the Chinese government, is the root of the existing geopolitical competition and the anticipated future conflict between China and the United States. Fears of a new revolutionary wave spreading from China reveal the archaic, 20th-century-era Red Scare thinking of politicians and the public.
As I discussed in a previous article, the primary material condition from which the United States benefits is its preeminent control and influence over global trade and commerce. China’s rise as a nation, a development striving to overcome the United States’s influence step-by-step, poses a historic challenge to the United States. The United States’s strategic concern isn’t that China will spread its ideology like the USSR tried to, but that it will use its own independent capital to build a coalition in Asia and Africa that exists beyond U.S. influence.
A war between the United States and China, at least for the next five-to-10 years or so, is unlikely. However, there are still possible scenarios for escalation, such as a new crisis over Taiwan or issues with the passage rights of Chinese trade ships. In such an eventuality, this will not be a fight between communism and democracy. It will be a struggle between one great power, which seeks a sovereign economic system, and another great power with an existing economic system that will be threatened by this ambition and seek to suppress it.
In this sense, the diplomatic relations between China and the United States must be viewed from an economic perspective. China’s emphasis on developing infrastructure and investing in new resource deals reflects a polity seeking to expand and secure energy sources to fuel its economic growth.
This nuanced understanding of China’s approach to foreign policy and the reasons these developments are concerning for the United States is the essence of the geopolitical situation between the two countries. For this reason, the idea of a “second cold war” must be replaced with a new way of thinking about how and why nations seek to exercise control over capital and resources.
Deniz Gulay is a junior double-majoring in history and Russian.
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