'New Cold War' - Really!

The weekend is upon us - and so is the weekend reading. But for some of us - 'North of border', it is an extended weekend. Yippee!

With new American tariffs and foreign leader gatherings - most notably the warm visit by Russia’s President Putin to China - these actions seem to underscore the  ‘cominteriats’ signaling of a fresh ‘New Cold War’. This dour vision has recently emerged from both the policy types - more on that in a moment - and with members of the journalistic community. Most notably on the journalistic side you can turn to David Sanger and his examination of current great power relations - New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West:

For years, Putin had courted Xi, and vice versa. While both leaders were reclusive during the pandemic, they kept talking to each other, and each, in his own way, cemented his authority and became vocally more nationalistic. Now Putin needed Xi to demonstrate to the world that he and his fellow autocrat could combine their power and influence. For all their differences—and there were many—they had one common purpose: to stand up to the United States, frustrate its ambitions, and speed along what they viewed as its inevitable decline. … This is a book about a global shock that took Washington by surprise: the revival of superpower conflict (2024, 9 and 17)

So what is up? It appears that there are many voices from both of these communities - policy types and journalists - that declare that what is emerging in global order relations is a new cold war. Prominently expressing this viewpoint is the strong voice, actually voices of several  ‘China hawks’. My focus was drawn especially to the article penned by Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher. These two are notable ‘China hawk’ voices. Pottinger served as US Deputy National Security Adviser from 2019 to 2021 and as Senior Director for Asia on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. There are strong whispers in Washington, today, I am told that Pottinger will assume a significant foreign policy position if Trump wins the Presidency in 2024. Gallagher has been a clarion voice in Congress chairing the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. The Committee has issued several strong critical Reports concerning China’s current actions and demanding a far more aggressive strategic and defense policy against China. As an aside, Gallagher has just resigned from Congress. For what, I am not sure.

The piece by these two appeared in the always influential Foreign Affairs. The piece is quite forward leaning beginning with its title: “No Substitute  for Victory: America’s Competition with China Must be Won, not Managed”.  As the two see the current circumstances,  the Cold War is already upon us: 

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. Lukewarm statements that pretend as if there is no cold war perversely court a hot war; they signal complacency to the American people and conciliation to Chinese leaders. … Victory requires openly admitting that a totalitarian regime that commits genocide, fuels conflict, and threatens war will never be a reliable partner. Like the discredited détente policies that Washington adopted in the 1970s to deal with the Soviet Union, the current approach will yield little cooperation from Chinese leaders while fortifying their conviction that they can destabilize the world with impunity.

Pottinger and Gallagher are committed to a view that Xi Jinping is stoking the current rivalry and encouraging disorder and chaos in the global order: 

Whether Xi is acting opportunistically or according to a grand design—or, almost certainly, both—it is clear he sees advantage in stoking crises that he hopes will exhaust the United States and its allies.

For Pottinger and Gallagher the struggle as well is not just a military one but an economic one: 

But the United States could keep the Chinese military contained and still lose the new cold war if China held the West hostage economically. Beijing is bent on weaponizing its stranglehold over global supply chains and its dominance of critical emerging technologies. … Washington must also halt the flow of American money and technology to Chinese companies that support Beijing’s military buildup and high-tech surveillance system.

Two reactions seem to me to emerge from their analysis. First there is the push back from others that the current circumstances amount to a ‘New Cold War’. So one can look at the analysis of Michael Hirsh, for example, at Foreign Policy. In the FP article, “No, This Is Not a Cold War—Yet Why are China hawks exaggerating the threat from Beijing?” drives home the contrary view. Hirsh, not surprisingly, notes the comparison most new Cold Warriors identify between the US-Russia Cold War - the old Cold War, and the current rivalries. As he writes: 

But the main point is this: The differences between the two eras are so profound that they still argue much more for a cold peace than a cold war. And there’s a world of difference between those two terms.

Thus, for Hirsh the current examination misses the distinction between a, ‘Cold War’ which aims for “total dominance military and otherwise”. In contrast to this, and clearly the position that Hirsh adopts in examining the current international relations circumstances is what he refers to as a ‘Cold Peace’:

“Cold peace,” on the other hand, means that rival powers generally avoid the use of military force and focus their relationship on nonlethal forms of geopolitical competition. The contest is defined by whoever exercises the most influence within a generally agreed-upon international system. A cold war is always zero-sum; in a cold peace, there’s no winner and no finish line. It’s a lot less exciting, but a lot fewer people are likely to die. The latter condition is still much closer to what we’ve got now, as I will explain. The former is what the China hawks in Washington—and one almost can’t turn a corner in the nation’s capital without running into a China hawk—seem to believe we’ve got.

The terms seem slightly artificial but it remains evident that at least on the economic front the US has indeed engaged China in a determined, even an aggressive manner. This is the other reaction to current international political and economic relations.  The Biden Administration has, according Alexandra Sharp in another FP article invoked a host of new tariffs:

U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled a new slew of U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports on Tuesday. The White House cited “unacceptable risks” posed by Beijing flooding the global market with cheap products. Around $18 billion of imported goods will be affected, including electric vehicles, semiconductors, steel and aluminum, critical minerals, medical products, and solar panels. Biden also said he would maintain tariffs, originally established under former U.S. President Donald Trump, on more than $300 billion of Chinese goods.

Among some of the key changes, the White House plans to quadruple electric vehicle duties to more than 100 percent, double taxes on solar cells and semiconductors, and place a 50 percent tariff rate on hospital syringes and needles. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said these tariffs were justified to combat Chinese efforts to steal U.S. intellectual property. The United States imported $427 billion in goods from China and exported $148 billion to Beijing last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

Now $18 billion is not the ‘end of the world’ for sure. But still two conclusions can be drawn, perhaps, from these new Biden Administration tariffs. First, and maybe because it is the case that we are already in serious election mode, it appears that the Biden Administration has completely abandoned the WTO and the dispute settlement system. The US that was so critical in the ‘90s to building global trade rules has gone rogue with respect to the trading system as we knew it. Secondly, it seems rather difficult to characterize the tariffs. It is not at all clear whether these tariffs are purely protection for US industry and US interests, or whether there is a bona fide economic security dimension to the tariff actions. As one colleague suggested, “well it is possibly both”. But the reality is that  the US is coming very late to the game - whether solar panels, EVs, or their batteries. China is ‘eating the US lunch’ with respect to these technologies as one US politician is prone to claiming. And it strikes me that this tariff strategy that this Administration has glommed onto is a loser. It might be advisable for US politicians to come clean - but I’m not holding my breath till that happens.