“The cold war is back — with a vengeance, but with a difference. The mechanisms and the safeguards to manage the risks of escalation that existed in the past no longer seem to be present.”
— António Guterres, United Nations secretary-general
“The old cold war had a beginning, a long middle and a surprise ending. If we are looking for this one to follow the same pattern — to end with the collapse of our opponent and a clear victory for the West — we are likely to be disappointed. And there is no guarantee that these cold wars will stay cold.”
— David Sanger in New Cold Wars
“We must understand the threat of a new cold war and take steps to curb it, lest we burden a new generation with a long twilight struggle of arms races and missed opportunities to address global challenges.”
— Michael Doyle in Cold Peace
“The United States and China have different visions not only for the best form of domestic governance, but also for international order. Both want their system to dominate the twenty-first century. This is why they are now engaged in a contest that is global and unbridgeable.”
— Robin Niblett in The New Cold War
The contours of a new and dangerous era are in place. The world has gone from chilly peace to a new cold war. Cold war 2.0 has rhymes from version 1.0. Yet the origin stories emphasise the differences.
The twentieth-century cold war was bred by victory and failure, a child of the Great Depression and the second world war. Version 1.0 had ideology at its heart as two secular religions — communism and democracy — fought Europe’s last “religious” war.
The new cold war, born of decades of peace in Europe and Asia and a wonderful period of economic and scientific achievement, carries less ideological baggage. It draws on the successes of globalisation, even as it veers away from borderless optimism to revive the contest of great powers.
Instead of describing the period after the fall of the Soviet Union as the “post-cold war era,” see it as the golden age of globalisation. The glow fades as geopolitics and geoeconomics turn icy, as the elements of cold war 2.0 set in:
• The United States versus China: With the two superpowers facing off in the contest of the century, the cold war balance means keeping competition from crashing into conflict.
• Multipolarity: In 1.0, non-aligned nations stood as far as possible from the bipolar border, seeking individual benefits from the Soviet Union and the US. In 2.0, everyone must dance. The non-aligned option flowers as many shades of multi-alignment. Nations choose where they stand on each issue and keep making fresh choices. In the multipolar dance, China and the United States must court, not demand commitment.
• Indo-Pacific: The central balance of international power this century will be in the Indo-Pacific. So ends a 500-year period when that balance was made in Europe and decided by the West. Australia declares that “the Indo-Pacific is the most important geostrategic region in the world,” judging the global competition “sharpest and most consequential in the Indo-Pacific.”
• Economics: The world’s top two economies wrestle and wrangle in a huge and complex economic relationship that binds them close. Washington says the main challenge it faces is “competition in an age of interdependence.” The economic intimacy is a vital difference between 1.0 and 2.0.
• De-risking: The vogue word was “decoupling” but axing economic links severs what globalisation delivers. As a more targeted effort, de-risking is limited deglobalisation. This is Washington’s “small yard and high fence.” Wall off vital industries, science and minerals. Draw supply chains closer. Apply the cold war test to trade policy and business regulation. The geoeconomics is mercantilist and protectionist.
• Technology race: China has the foundations to be the world’s technology superpower in major and emerging technologies. The critical technology tracker of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute identifies China as the leading country in fifty-seven of sixty-four technologies, spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and quantum. The United States and its allies face an extraordinary tech challenge.
• Cyber-attacks and artificial intelligence: Cyber is where the cold war rages every day. This grey-zone battlefield is a constant, pervasive digital conflict of theft, espionage, malware, disinformation and fakes. The revolution is artificial intelligence. The realm ‘of minds and machines’ is the arms race of 2.0. Washington aims to build norms on responsible military use of AI and autonomy, and seeks control negotiations with Beijing on AI just as it does on nuclear weapons.
• Nuclear: The nuclear threat is more complex and less predictable. Russia revives the nightmare, repeatedly threatening to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. The structural change is China’s build-up. Beijing is on track to amass 1000 nuclear warheads, up from around 200 in 2019. The US defense department describes “a new nuclear age” of rapidly modernising and expanding nuclear arsenals, “an unprecedented mix of multiple revisionist nuclear challengers who are uninterested in arms control or risk reduction” and are threatening to use nuclear weapons to achieve their aims.
• Space: Satellites revolutionise intelligence and warfighting, offering the constant stare that makes every inch of earth watchable and targetable. Space is a military operational domain, alongside maritime, land, air and cyber. The US military will launch 1000 satellites in the next decade. The moon matters in 2.0 just as it did in 1.0, and the race is on between China, Russia and the United States to put men and women there.
• Russia: Putin’s Russia is dangerous yet dependent on China. The “vassal” label hung on Russia has some truth. The “no limits partnership” is just short of a conventional alliance — the limit is what China decides. Russia was a principal in 1.0; in 2.0 it is a partner. As the RAND Corporation headlines it: “Russia Is a Rogue, Not a Peer; China Is a Peer, Not a Rogue.”
• Democracy versus autocracy: Ideology doesn’t drive 2.0 as it did 1.0, yet this is a division that still defines the struggle. China wants to make the world safe for autocracies, to privilege power over rules. US president Joe Biden says the world is at an “inflection point” in a clash between democracy and autocracy.
• War: Ukraine is where cold war becomes conflict. In 1.0, the proxy wars were in Asia. Now the US–China proxy war is in Europe.
The chilly new era shaping the way our world will work demands examination and explanation. The writers are stepping up.
A journalist’s version from David Sanger is New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion and America’s Struggle to Defend the West. From Britain’s Sir Robin Niblett, director of the Chatham House think tank for fifteen years, comes The New Cold War: How the Contest Between the US and China Will Shape Our Century. The academic study of international relations offers Columbia University professor Michael Doyle’s Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War.
Sanger says the revival of superpower conflict is “a global shock that took Washington by surprise.” From the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he writes, Washington believed that “the greatest by-product of America’s undeniable victory in the cold war was something like a permanent era of peace among the world’s nuclear superpowers.” The belief that democracy had comprehensively won fed the view that a declining Russia and a rising China “would integrate themselves into the West in their own ways” in search of products and profits: “Economics would ultimately trump nationalism and territorial ambition.”
Washington’s bipartisan assumption that “American power would remain fundamentally unchallenged” has faded only in the past few years, Sanger reports, as “faith in the power of globalisation has come to be regarded as a fantasy era of early-twenty-first-century American foreign policy.”
Doyle’s description of new cold war starts with what the United States got wrong after its victory in 1.0. Instead of a newly constructed international order, he writes, “we entered an era of US unipolarity mixed with much arrogance.”
But 2.0 will be less extreme than 1.0, he argues. The factors that weigh against escalation are “a rational appreciation” of the costs to the US and China of waging the struggle; the “unprecedently large global common interest” in mutual prosperity and protecting the planet’s environment; and in 2.0, the foes are authoritarian, not totalitarian. The nature of the regimes in China and Russia, with no ideology to export, means it’s possible to achieve agreements with the West, Doyle judges: “Putinism is not Stalinist communism, Xi-ism is not Maoism, and no one is Nazi.” The Xi–Putin project is to guard their autocratic systems, ensuring that “markets and information are subject to state direction, and no one outside the government questions state policy.”
More than Doyle and Sanger, Niblett puts ideology at the centre of his tightly written explanation of the differences between 1.0 and 2.0 and how the new struggle should be handled. He says the conflict is “rooted in the fear that the leaders of two very different political systems have of the other.” The last ten years shred the notion that close economic relations can insulate the US and China from political tensions, he says. The two superpowers “are on opposite sides of a profound and open-ended global competition between two political systems that are incompatible and mutually hostile” because each believes “the other represents a fundamental danger to their security if not their survival.”
At the beginning of the new cold war, Niblett observes, we have “no sense of how or when it will end.” His view is that 2.0, like 1.0, will run for decades. He points to the timeline for Australia’s partnership with the US and Britain to build AUKUS nuclear submarines “to patrol the Pacific.” AUKUS, he notes, “measures its milestones in decades, not years.” He sets that timeline against President Xi’s target of 2049 for the completion of China’s “rejuvenation” to overcome America’s policy of “all round containment, encirclement and suppression.”
“Beijing,” says Niblett, “has correctly concluded that the US wants to block China’s ability to catch up technologically in order to hold it back from becoming the dominant power in the Asia–Pacific and America’s global equal.”
The “main battleground” with China at the start of 2.0, Sanger judges, will be over “technology and economics, not traditional military power.” He reports that the Biden administration has confronted “a series of interlocking crises in which the boundary between domestic and international was meaningless.”
Xi Jinping was up for the struggle from the moment he took power. In January 2013, less than two months after becoming president, he gave a major address to party leaders that was only declassified and published in 2019. As Sanger reports, Xi told the Communist Party it was “inevitable that the superiority of our socialist system will be increasingly apparent… Capitalism is bound to die out and socialism is bound to win.”
While this was “an inevitable trend,” the party must follow a “tortuous” road: “We must diligently prepare for a long period of cooperation and of conflict between these two social systems.” China must lay the foundation for a future where it would hold the initiative and “the dominant position.”
By the time Xi’s blueprint was made public, the US system was dealing with different elements of China’s challenge. As Sanger writes, the Pentagon was counting planes in the South China Sea and missiles along the coast; the US trade representative was placing new limits on American companies operating in China and imposing tariffs as punishment for “rampant” theft of intellectual property; the Department of Homeland Security was watching for Chinese cyberattacks on critical infrastructure; Treasury was raising red flags about Chinese investment in Silicon Valley.
When Biden settled into the White House in 2021, Sanger writes, the president’s national security team was struck by “the breadth and scope of Beijing’s new strategy” and how sophisticated China had become in its actions around the world. Beijing had made great strides in making full use of what Pentagon strategists call “all elements of national power.”
The struggle with China is the one big foreign policy issue that Democrats and Republicans are able to agree on amid the bitter divisions of American politics. China is a dynamic and challenging peer competitor if it manages to trump Trumpism to unite Washington. The US presidential election is a moment for America to decide that also offers insights to China.
If vice-president Kamala Harris wins, she will be well-accustomed to the cold war settings of President Biden. Expect policy continuity from one Democrat administration to the next, even if tone shifts. As for a Trump victory, will the Republican leader be able to unmake Washington’s China consensus in the way he threatens to smash much else in the US polity?
Doyle judges that Trump’s presidency from 2016 to 2020 was “an exacerbating force in this new cold war because of his militarism, instability, and unpredictability. Now with president Joe Biden in office, these global divides between democracy and autocracy have become clearer, and President Biden has not de-escalated the new cold war but instead driven in forward.”
If Trump wins, he will be as unpredictable as ever, raging against the cost of alliances and the bad deals America gets around the world. But his ability to smash the Washington cold war understanding will be limited by his protectionist and mercantilist instincts. The trade war Trump waged against China in his previous term helped launched 2.0. A new Trump presidency will put a mercurial character at the centre of a dangerous era.
As president Trump “believed Russian propaganda over American intelligence findings,” writes Sanger. Some of Trump’s advisers “acted as if they had a Russian stooge — a ‘useful idiot’ — presiding over the United States government.” Running a coherent US foreign policy under Trump was stymied by “the president’s own ego, his inability to focus on strategy, and his habit of undercutting policy for his own personal gain.”
Niblett says the trajectory of US politics is a critical unknown for the new cold war, and the November vote “will reveal once again how deeply divided Americans are about the essence of their national identity and their country’s role in the world. Depending on the choice they make, it is possible that the US will return to a more insular outlook that downgrades the importance of alliances and allies, rescinds US commitments to combat climate change and puts America’s own narrow interests as the lodestar for its foreign policy.”
The vast unknowns of the new cold war mean these three books are different takes on a sprawling subject.
Sanger, the White House and national security correspondent of the New York Times, offers a weighty work of journalism that draws on his four decades with the newspaper. He served as a foreign correspondent and bureau chief in Asia, but the flavour and focus is Washington, where Sanger has reported since 1994: “The bulk of the most recent reporting in this book was gathered through interviews with senior administration officials in the Obama, Trump and Biden White Houses and dozens of their deputies and assistants. Almost every senior member of President Biden’s national security team sat down to talk about their experiences, several of them repeatedly.” The quotes and reporting fill Sanger’s 500-page book with people and places at the heart of the geopolitics.
His is “a work of current history, meaning that parts will be lasting and parts will be overtaken by events, and judgements made along the way will be, by necessity, temporary and unsettled.” There speaks the master of a daily craft where the headlines keep shifting — when the facts change, you file again.
Obeying journalist lore that the horoscope and the racing tips typify the unreliability of newspaper forecasts, Sanger is cautious on calling the future. His prediction is the plural in the title: “As the s in New Cold Wars suggests, the addition of new players, acting sometimes independently and sometimes in tandem, makes the current era far more complex than the old one… The original cold war, for all its nuclear terrors, followed some predictable cadences. After a series of horrifying close calls, the major states converged on a vague set of red lines and hewed to them — patting themselves on the back for avoiding Armageddon even as millions were wounded or perished in proxy wars around the globe.” The nuclear brinkmanship and proxy war return as the uncertainty builds.
The new cold war will be accelerated by technology: “Globalisation is out; self-reliance and control of a nation’s own supply chains are in. Nationalism is back in vogue, and so are the strongmen who preach it.”
For views on how the new era will shape and how it should be handled, turn to the think tanker and the academic.
As a professor, Doyle builds with theory. Only an academic would give his third chapter the title “Superpower Systems, Hegemonic Transitions, and Multidimensional Polarity.” The writing, though, is cool and clear. And Doyle has plenty of experience of the rooms where theory and values are pushed aside while the politicians, diplomats and military debate interests and power. He served as assistant secretary-general and special adviser to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and chaired both the UN Democracy Fund and the International Peace Institute.
Doyle argues that the world must strive to march on from cold war to détente and a more stable, if chilly, stability. The object is to shift from 2.0 to a cold peace: “In a cold peace, no great power attempts to subvert the political independence or territorial integrity of another. That is not the world we are in today, where both are challenged. Basic security is at risk and human rights are on defence.”
In this better-managed cold peace, China and the US agree to a “nonsubversion pact” with “guarantees and institutions of formal cooperation.” Doyle offers four bridges to cold peace:
A shared fate — climate: The “biggest global health threat of the twenty-first century” is climate change, according to the Lancet. Doyle says climate change will cost 250,000 lives per year, 2030 to 2050, from the combined effects of malnutrition, floods, droughts and other disasters, rising seas and civil conflicts.
The US and China working together on climate is a bridge of necessity and opportunity: “Cooperation is essential if the climate is to be sustainable. But in themselves, measures of climate cooperation will not be enough to head off a cold war. Indeed, if [Chinese foreign minister] Wang Yi is to be believed, progress on reducing cold tensions is a prerequisite for successful cooperation in climate change.”
Crimea and Ukraine: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “has made an accommodation that could lead to a cold peace more difficult,” Doyle writes. “Everything now depends on the outcome of the war.” If a long war crawls towards stalemate “the results in Ukraine would come to resemble those of the sad cold war armistices dividing East and West Germany and dividing (and still dividing) North and South Korea.”
Doyle’s prescription is a general ceasefire and negotiated peace for Ukraine that would be part of “a wider framework of détente between Russia, NATO and the European Union.”
Taiwan and China: “Taiwan is the epitome of a new cold war legitimacy conflict: the self-determination of the functionally independent Taiwanese people against China’s claim to sovereignty resting on a memory of a hundred years of colonial humiliation.” Doyle offers pragmatic compromises: US “constructive ambiguity” on Taiwan would be acknowledged by China; to avoid the chance of inadvertent clashes, the US, China and Taiwan would bar military planes and ships from the Taiwan Strait while recognising international passage by civilian craft. If China won’t agree, the US should sell Taiwan defensive weapons, such as anti-ship missiles and sea mines.
Cyber peace: New rules for the cyber realm should aim to achieve a détente that prohibits sabotage and political destabilisation.
Along with these four international bridges, Doyle argues that the US must reform itself if it is to steer towards cold peace: “The United States must be made safe for a stable world.” The reformed America Doyle longs for would be less vulnerable to international tension and prepared to conduct a steadying foreign policy to balance the international system. His changed US is a nation that looks hard at itself as well as China.
Starting from the universal ambitions and restraints of the United Nations charter, Doyle says a key instrument in the new cold war should be an international “caucus of democracies” to signal common resolve and coordinate common action. The caucus should welcome any autocracy willing to help issue by issue, Doyle writes: “Achieving a democratic caucus will call for reinforcing the liberal order supporting human rights. It calls for reasserting international rule-of-law principles, reaffirming existing alliances (while constructing new ones measuring up to new challenges, especially in the Pacific), and developing better balanced trading regimes across the Atlantic and the Pacific that are open to all who are willing to abide by their rules.”
Robin Niblett thinks the China challenge is so great it will force the US to get serious and get back into the international game. The think-tanker’s habit of mind is to offer a “playbook” for the new cold war. He accepts that the US is less internationally minded and has stepped back from geo-economic leadership because of the deep schisms in its domestic politics. But, as an internationalist, he sees the US recalled to a global outlook and a re-energised transatlantic alliance by the military challenge from Russia and China’s assertive rise. “I am a Gramscian at heart,” Niblett writes, “whatever the pessimism of the mind, I believe in the optimism of the will.”
Power politics, Niblett hopes, will demand the US look beyond domestic politics. The new factor is the Indo-Pacific dimension, the way the Beijing-Moscow alignment also caused “the emergence for the first time of an Atlantic– Pacific partnership, which is fusing around the G7,” with the addition of Australia and South Korea to create a G9. The risks China and Russia pose in 2.0, Niblett says, can be balanced by the many opportunities in the “Global South.”
The five rules Niblett offers for 2.0 aim to reduce the risk of devastating conflict, sustain economic globalization, revive liberal democracy, and create space for cooperation on global challenges.
Rule 1: Don’t create a self-fulfilling prophecy: One of the worst tendencies of governments, Niblett writes, is to interpret their opponents incorrectly and so create the future they’re trying to avoid. The potential for misjudging capabilities and intentions in the new cold war is great, and so are the implications of being wrong: “Capabilities do not always reflect intentions. And official statements today do not necessarily point to actions tomorrow.”
China certainly wants to dominate its region and match the US globally, Niblett says, but “whether these capabilities and intentions mean China will dominate the world in the twenty-first century is questionable. China today is riddled with internal political contradictions and economic vulnerabilities.”
Rule 2: Rally the liberal democracies in a G9 with Australia and South Korea: “The current G7, which includes the EU, is the logical forum to do this, but enlarging the G7 into a G9 by including South Korea and Australia would be a powerful signal that the major liberal democracies allied to the US and threatened by the China–Russia alignment will consistently coordinate policies to enhance their technological strength and collective economic security. With South Korea and Australia formally in the mix, the G9 could avoid repeating Europe’s mistake of over-reliance on Russia for its energy security in the late carbon era by relying on China for their renewable energy in the early green era.”
Rule 3: Build peaceful economic competition: Avoiding trade and investment with China contains its own risks, Niblett notes, because it cuts across the integrated supply chains and open trade that have improved so many lives. While restricting sensitive items like semiconductors, telecoms equipment or processed rare earths, he advocates growing trade with China in “non-critical economic sectors”: cars and car parts, consumer electronics, civilian purpose machine tools, luxury goods, clothing, processed foods, financial and other services and entertainment.
Rule 4: Revive arms control: A dangerous nuclear arms race is now under way, says Niblett, reawakening the spectres of proliferation and an accidental launch: “Beijing’s current priority is not arms control. It wants to build a stockpile of warheads and launch vehicles that will put it on a par with the United States and Russia this decade.” He thinks the drift towards nuclear weapons proliferation may already be unstoppable, noting that “Brazil, Argentina, Iran, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Turkey all have or could gain access to the technical capacity to develop nuclear weapons as well as their delivery systems.”
Rule 5: Partner with the Global South: “Stemming the process of climate change and transitioning to models of more sustainable and inclusive economic development are objectives on which the liberal democracies can make a meaningful difference; they are objectives on which our credibility will be rightly judged and from whose success we will also benefit. Liberal democracies cannot prevail without the support of the Global South; the battle for the Global South is the battle for control of the twenty-first century.”
In 2.0 the nations of the Global South have “a magnetic geopolitical pull” they did not possess as the Non-Aligned in 1.0, Niblett says, because now they are the majority: “While America and its allies today make up a declining 50 per cent of global GDP and a shrinking 14 per cent of the world’s total population, what was a marginal Non-Aligned Movement of seventy-seven countries (G77) in the last cold war is now nearly double that number. Together, they constitute a growing 65 per cent of world population — including some of the world’s most populous nations such as India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Brazil — and nearly 30 per cent of world GDP.”
The crucial weighting Niblett gives the Global South is the way a British strategist adjusts focus to the central balance being made in the Indo-Pacific. China’s aim is to eject the US from the Asia. Apart from North Korea, though, nobody else wants America to leave them to Chinese domination. As Niblett remarks, “China remains unique among current and past great powers in having no true allies. Even China’s hopes to grow its political influence in the Asia–Pacific region is hitting the buffers, largely because of its own misinterpretations of external risks and opportunities.”
US pushback is expressed in the Quad with Australia, India and Japan, and the AUKUS project for Australia’s nuclear-powered submarine. These are fresh statements of the US will to power in the region where the world’s balance of power will be set.
At the centre of a democracy caucus and G9, the US would be less protectionist and nativist if the international call was heard above the domestic clamour. Such an America would gaze steadily at the growing might China brings to this struggle. For all its problems, China is a much richer foe than the Soviet Union. And China’s empire will not collapse in Soviet fashion.
The new cold war must seek balance, find understandings, build confidence and develop guardrails. Cold war 2.0 shares the same purpose as version 1.0: keep the superpower contest cool enough to avoid Armageddon. •
New Cold Wars: China’s rise, Russia’s Invasion and America’s Struggle to Defend the West
By David E. Sanger with Mary K. Brooks | Scribe | 528 pages | $45
The New Cold War: How the Contest Between the US and China Will Shape Our Century
By Robin Niblett | Atlantic | 192 pages | $32.99
Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War
By Michael Doyle | Liveright | 336 pages | $49.95
