There hasn’t been a world so deeply divided by a conflict since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a conflict John F. Kennedy called a „long, dawning struggle.“
Joe Biden’s
national security advisers were recently working on a secret mission on how the president could safely enter and leave the Ukrainian capital ahead of the anniversary of the Russian invasion when they learned of a problem closer to home: a suspected Chinese spy balloon had been spotted in US airspace. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, preparing to fly to Beijing, canceled his trip, and on Feb. 4, in full view of the world, an F-22 shot down the balloon off the coast of South Carolina, where it sank like a strange symbol of that precarious moment.
In the days that followed, the United States shot down three more hovering objects and then announced that there was no evidence that any of them were connected to China. By this time, however, the machinery of confrontation was in full swing. In a radio interview, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, speculated that the balloon was „a test to see what the US would do,“ and ventured that China’s leader Xi Jinping was „bent on a world war.“ Nikki Haley, a Republican contender for the presidency in 2024, signaled her support for something close to regime change, telling her supporters that „Communist China will end up on the ash heap of history.“ China viewed the uproar as a sign of America’s decline. Its top-ranking diplomat, Wang Yi, called the balloon launch „borderline hysterical and a full misuse of military force.“
Not since the fall of the Berlin Wall has the world been so deeply embroiled in a conflict, which John F. Kennedy called a „long, dawning struggle“ to shape its future. Broadly speaking, it is a split between democracy and autocracy, pitting the United States and its allies against Russia and its dominant partner, China. Officials on all sides, however, downplay analogies to the past. That’s as it should be, because banal triumphalism about the Cold War obscures how close we came to a nuclear catastrophe – a threat Putin resurrected last week when he suspended Russia’s last arms control agreement with the United States. Look at how many lives were lost in proxy wars around the globe that historian Paul Chamberlin estimates claimed more than twenty million victims.
The blocs in this new Cold War are hardening. A few days after Vladimir Putin’s invasion, Germany announced a „turning point“ in its longstanding relationship with Russia that would change its military and energy policies. A reinvigorated NATO expressed unprecedented concern about China’s ambitions at a summit last summer that included the leaders of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has strengthened military ties with Australia, Japan, and India; just recently, it announced plans to expand military activities in the Philippines to reinforce its ability to defend Taiwan.
2However, the war also demonstrated the limits of US influence. Despite Russia’s brutality in Ukraine, it has maintained or strengthened its ties with a number of countries. Yet India, which is working with the United States to counter China, is heavily reliant on arms and oil from Russia and has increased trade with Russia fivefold. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently visited nine countries in the Middle East and Africa. Still, none of these countries is as important to Russia as China: although the two nations have little sympathy for each other, Xi and Putin have forged a bond out of their hostility to Washington’s domination that binds them. Beijing has supported Moscow by buying Russian oil while selling commercial drones and microchips to russia. Support is also provided by Beijing’s abstention from voting in the United Nations to condemn the invasion. Xi’s government calls itself a neutral party, but on Friday it proposed a cease-fire that addresses many of Russia’s demands.
Ahead of the anniversary, the Biden administration accused China of considering whether to supply weapons to support Russia’s war – a criticism that China denied. If China were to supply weapons, it would represent a momentous shift away from the international system and indicates that Xi cannot afford to let Putin fail, regardless of the consequences for Beijing’s fragile standing in Europe. It would be a calculation reminiscent of an earlier moment of fear, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said, „The problem now is not whether the banner of the Soviet Union will fall, but whether the banner of China will fall.“
The prospects for preventing a cold war from becoming a hot war currently rest less on grand strategies than on urgent action. After the balloon incident, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tried to call Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe but was refused. In December, the United States said a Chinese fighter jet had come within a few meters of a US warplane in international airspace over the South China Sea. The US then offered talks to defuse the conflict, but Beijing declined. Before the balloon got in the way, Blinken had been expected to use his trip to reopen negotiations on how to handle these types of encounters and establish „guardrails“ that could prevent an accident from turning into a disaster.
Too often, at the outset of a standoff between major powers, more attention is paid to weapons than to communication. George F. Kennan, the architect of US containment policy toward the Soviets, has often complained that his theory was used to justify a military buildup rather than a sustained commitment to political and economic diplomacy. In a new biography, historian Frank Costigliola writes that after Kennan „spent the four years from 1944 to 1948 promoting the Cold War, he spent the ensuing forty years undoing what he and others had done.“ However, there are limited lessons to be learned from the Soviet example for today, because China is economically very large. Toward the end of the Cold War, US trade with the Soviet Union was about $2 billion a year; US trade with China today is nearly $2 billion a day.
Washington should strongly oppose Beijing’s human rights abuses, its militarization of the South China Sea, and its threats against Taiwan. But if we are to limit the worst risks of a Cold War, the United States should also prepare for what the Nixon administration called détente – a policy pursued toward the Soviets in the late 1960s and later summarized by Henry Kissinger as „both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort at détente.“
Until his last days, Kennan warned against the seductive logic of wars, both cold and hot. In 2002, at the age of ninety-eight, he spoke out against the war in Iraq, arguing that history teaches that „you start a war with certain ideas“ but often end up „fighting for entirely different things“ that you hadn’t thought of before.
