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US-China decoupling
OpinionComment
Christian Le Miere
Christian Le Miere

Opinion | China’s relations with the US are at their lowest for 30 years, but don’t call it a new cold war

  • Far-flung proxy wars and ideological competition that defined US-Soviet competition after World War II are missing in current landscape
  • Deterring where necessary and bolstering international institutions are preferable to drawing another iron curtain across the world

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The US Navy’s Arleigh-Burke class guided-missile destroyer USS Barry conducting operations in the South China Sea on April 28. The disputed waters in the South China Sea are a potential flash point between China and the United States, but it would be inaccurate to describe the tensions as a new cold war. Photo: AFP
Christian Le Miere
It has become increasingly fashionable to refer to the Sino-US relationship as a “new cold war,” but this term is neither accurate nor helpful. Relations are certainly tense between the two powers and at their lowest point for 30 years. However, mislabelling the current situation as a cold war makes it more challenging to devise effective policy and shoehorns the protagonists into roles they might not otherwise inhabit.
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This is not to be naive about China and its behaviour. China is the United States’ most powerful rival. In its current guise, China seems intent on at least reforming if not overturning the current US-led post-war order to ensure it has a greater, preferably dominant role.

Beijing has supported corporate espionage, made a mockery of intellectual property laws and disregarded international law in areas such as the South China Sea. It has used economic and quasi-military coercion to bully smaller states in disputes and undermined the rules-based order.

In its bid to develop influence worldwide, it has often supported autocratic governments with poor human rights records and even regimes antagonistic to the United States.

But this is a far cry from the Cold War, a geopolitical competition fought between two ideologically opposed superpowers. The Soviet Union sought, particularly in the early years, to transform the global order through a series of national communist revolutions that would enable a worldwide communist utopia.
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China ended its support for such insurgencies in the 1960s. The Soviet Union united vast swathes of the world into formal alliances diametrically opposed to the United States, such as the Warsaw Pact. China’s limited number of close friends – from Iran to North Korea to Venezuela – are a diverse group of states with no uniting philosophy that would prove difficult to corral effectively.

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