Another cold war

Last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken paid a three-day visit to Beijing. Admittedly, he was charged with an unenviable task. He was to smooth ruffled feathers and send a firm warning. America, Blinken said, wasn’t looking to provoke conflict with China but also wasn’t going to stand by quietly while the CCP aided Russia’s war on Ukraine, dumped fentanyl into American black markets, and menaced Taiwan with gunboats. When it comes to China, the Biden administration is trying to “speak softly but carry a big stick.”

For the Baby Boomers among us, the dynamic must have an air of déjà vu. According to many commentators, America is in the midst of a new cold war, only with Communist China, not Russia. In a cold war, perhaps even more than a hot, decision-making is clouded by the “fog of war”—what is the enemy thinking? Is he planning to attack, or looking to withdraw? Is he more afraid of me than I am of him? If you act too aggressively, you risk provoking a confrontation that might have been avoided; but if you are too cautious, the enemy may seize crucial ground at your expense. In hindsight, Nixon’s “détente” strategy with the USSR in the 1970s looks sadly misguided, while Reagan’s aggressive gamble to risk open war in the 1980s appears as a brilliant strategy. But both were far from obvious at the time.

Then as now, such strategic calculations depend on assessments of just how strong the enemy really is—a challenging assessment when dealing with closed societies that carefully regulate the flow of information and excel in generating self-aggrandizing propaganda. After a long period of relative complacency, many Americans (led by Trump’s bellicose rhetoric) began to wake up in the mid-2010s to the idea of China as a serious threat—a nation not only with the potential to outstrip America economically, militarily, and geopolitically, but a nation fully intending to use that muscle to threaten American interests and remake the world order. Within just a few years, the Overton window has shifted dramatically, with both parties willing to sacrifice the benefits of free trade in order to protect crucial national security interests, and to unite behind the recent anti-TikTok legislation.

But is it possible this will prove an overreaction? Some analysts have begun to suggest that we have already seen “Peak China,” and that Beijing is likely to look far less threatening militarily and economically ten years from now. China’s prolonged “Zero COVID” policy, together with other economic headwinds and a bursting property bubble, has the world’s formerly most dynamic economy struggling amidst deflation and slowing growth. Much more ominously, the switch from the infamous “one-child” policy to an aggressive pro-natalism has failed abysmally, with birth rates sagging to historic lows and demographic projections painting a grim picture of a shrinking, greying society in coming decades.

To see the implications of such demographic collapse one need only look at China’s neighbor, Japan, which after a similarly meteoric rise to the world’s second-largest economy, entered a prolonged slump around 1990, coinciding with its much earlier demographic transition, that has seen it fade into increasing geopolitical irrelevance. Such considerations might suggest it’s time to lay aside the saber-rattling, offering a carrot rather than a stick to Chinese officials fearful of their impending decline.

Prudence, however, dictates otherwise. A recent essay in the journal Foreign Affairs casts doubt on the notion of “Peak China,” arguing that Beijing still stands to reap enormous fruits in coming years from the economic, military, and diplomatic initiatives it has already launched, and still has enough momentum to outstrip a stumbling or complacent United States before its demographic winter really begins to bite. Indeed, as the recent example of Russian aggression shows, a nation does not have to be thriving and growing to pose a serious threat to its rivals. If anything, impending weakness can lead nations to take desperate measures, even launching strikes on their neighbors while they still can.

China still harbors clear ambitions to knock the United States off its perch and make the world safe for autocracy, and has a detailed action plan to achieve that goal. As Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher argue in another recent article in Foreign Affairs, “No country should relish waging another cold war. Yet a cold war is already being waged against the United States by China’s leaders. Rather than denying the existence of this struggle, Washington should own it and win it.”

Of course, this isn’t something that just Washington can do. The only reason America won the first cold war was because ordinary Americans across the nation accepted the reality of the struggle and made sacrifices to win it. For us today that might mean deleting your TikTok app, paying a bit more for iPhones and smart TVs not made in China, or even ponying up for tax increases to fund military or infrastructure spending. Do Americans today have what it takes?