The US-China rivalry is not a new cold war, and it's dangerous to call it that

A “new cold war” has become almost a default description of the current rivalry between the United States and China. Some structural similarities do indeed exist with the post-second world war global stage, when the Soviet Union was pitted against the US.

Just as, say, in 1950, we live now in a sort of bipolar system. In terms of economic power, military might, global influence and ability to pollute the planet, two powers – China and the US – clearly stand in a league of their own. And just as during the cold war, this bipolarism is spurious and asymmetrical: simply put, one side – the US – is way more powerful and influential than the other. The similarities end, however, with this systemic parallel. As is often the case when thinking analogically, invoking a cyclical vision of history obfuscates more than it clarifies. More importantly, such thinking produces policy prescriptions – such as promoting an aggressive “containment” of China – which, in addition to being based on a superficial and misleading reading of history, are at best useless and at worst outright dangerous.

There are three simple reasons why the rivalry between China and the US is not a new cold war.

The first is that the cold war was an ideological clash between two universalisms: two visions of history and of the historical process; two models of modernity. Both the Soviet Union and the US claimed to have mastered this process. They offered, to those willing to follow their example, a path to a future that for them had already arrived. The US’s liberal and capitalist present was one of mass consumption, high salaries, increasing productivity and unbound freedom. The Soviet Union represented the socialist present of free education and healthcare, complete equality of possibilities and means, and workers’ control of the productive process. The models had more things in common that many were willing to admit: they both embodied (and relied on) a form of industrial modernity that had, in the gigantic plant – whether Ford’s Highland Park car factory or the Uralmash industrial district of Yekaterinburg – its quintessential symbol. And yet, this ideological polarity fuelled cold war competition and how it was represented to the world. Nothing, literally nothing, in the current relationship between China and the US resembles this total and, in theory, irresolvable ideological antagonism.

Second, in the cold war, geopolitics interplayed with ideology. The two superpowers competed on a world scale in the attempt to implement their model of modernity. But their concerns were primarily focused on Europe, and Germany in particular. It was a conflict for Europe, and over Europe. It was there that Washington and Moscow set up two political and military blocs – Nato and the Warsaw Pact – that somehow mirrored each other. It was on the “old continent” that the nuclear balance of terror – what Henry Kissinger would describe as an “interdependence for survival” – was established and institutionalised. And it was in Europe that the cold war eventually crumbled and collapsed. Again, nothing in the current competition between China and the US resembles the Euro-centrism of the cold war.

The final reason is because of globalisation and how it has transformed contemporary international relations. The cold war was a system based on an original lack of recognition between the two superpowers, a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the opponent’s social system and universalist pretensions. What ensued, at least in the first years of the post-second world war period, was an absence of interaction. The mutual vulnerability to a devastating nuclear exchange partially altered this state of affairs. It produced the most remarkable (and, for many in the US, intolerable) paradox of the cold war: a form of interdependence that tied the two sides in an inescapable mortal embrace. As a consequence of this, they accepted putting their security, and indeed their very survival, into the hands of the total enemy, against whom those massive nuclear arsenals had been mobilised in the first place. Once mutually assured destruction (MAD – the appropriate acronym devised to describe this ironic condition) became real and fully operational, from the mid-1960s onwards, the two sides began to engage each other as never before. Washington’s European partners, especially West Germany, jumped on board, offering credits and technology to the USSR and its allies. But whatever parameter we choose to measure this engagement – trade volumes, credits and loans, cultural and educational exchanges – nothing comes remotely close to the current situation between China and the US.

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Over the past 50 years we have seen a process of global integration that frequently puts the Sino-American relationship at its very centre: interaction between the two countries has become both a product and a decisive driver of globalisation. US firms locating part of their production in China; American investments there and, later on, Chinese investments in the US (and the rest of the world); the unique ability of the voracious American market to absorb durable goods produced in China; Beijing’s willingness to hoard dollars and US treasury securities in order to subsidise America’s consumption and to keep the value of its currency artificially low; the millions of Chinese students in US colleges and universities: such interdependencies now define US-Chinese relations and are revealing in how particular and determined these connections are.

Thinking analogically can be, paradoxically, an ahistorical exercise. It almost always trivialises history itself, decontextualising both the past events and those contemporary problems for which we seek “lessons”. If we call the current rivalry and tensions between China and the US a new “cold war”, we lose sight of the historical uniqueness and specificity of their relationship. And we miss the very lesson, possibly the only real one, that the study of the past has to offer: to avoid easy answers, look at the complexity and, invariably, the political opaqueness of a given issue. In other words, to historicise.

• Mario Del Pero is professor of international history at SciencesPo, Paris, specialising in the history of the cold war and US foreign relations