Steven Weber
The United States and China are firmly locked in a cold war struggle whose outcome will be the most important determinant of peace, prosperity, and quality of life in international politics over the next decade.
That view enjoys nearly unanimous agreement—in Beijing and Washington, among Democrats and Republicans, and around the world in Brussels, Delhi, and Abu Dhabi, where leaders increasingly frame choices and consider options with an eye toward how they should position their nations within this new bipolar power contest.
This piece is the first in a series that will propose a strategy for the United States to conduct and win the modern Cold War. That strategy will include a general set of principles and consistent, specific tactics for grappling with critical issues, including technology and artificial intelligence, Taiwan and territorial conflict, and the flow of goods, ideas, and money.
This strategy will build on the unprecedented (and unexpected ) success of 1980s Cold War statecraft. That extraordinary victory was conceived and executed by a set of courageous leaders and advisers who could not have known in advance that the risks they took would play out in success
The 1980s analogy, like all historical cases, isn’t perfect. China is not Russia, 2025 is not 1985, the Sino-American relationship is more deeply interdependent economically than the U.S.-Soviet relationship ever was, and Trump and Xi are not Reagan and Gorbachev. Consider that agreed. But though history doesn’t repeat, it often rhymes. There is a credible and workable center-right inspired Cold War statecraft theory and strategy waiting for America—if we have the courage and discipline to embrace and execute on it.
How we got here.
That we’d end up in a Sino-American Cold War was nearly inevitable, though that wasn’t the conventional wisdom a few decades ago. During the 1990s, Democrats held the view that intentional efforts to incorporate a fast-emerging China as a great power into an American-led world order of open trade through WTO membership and relaxation of certain technology export controls would prompt a detente or even an alignment of sorts. They predicted that we’d see a gradual political liberalization in China, a softening of major security issues in the Pacific, and a relationship that at its best might come to resemble that between the U.S. and the European Union.
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