Since Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing, the trajectory of U.S.-China relations had been towards greater levels of cooperation and economic integration, even if these masked deep underlying contradictions and the ever-present possibility of confrontation. However, over the course of the last few years, we’ve witnessed a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy with respect to China.
In 2011, the Obama administration announced its “pivot to Asia,” in which it aimed to shift its focus away from bombing the Middle East and towards “advancing American interests” in the Pacific. Everyone understood that this meant making China containment the unambiguous central plank of U.S. foreign policy.
But even the pivot had its contradictions.
On the one hand, the U.S. established a marine base in Darwin (North Australia), ramped up its naval presence in the South China Sea, and offered China’s neighbors a significant economic incentive—in the form of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—to join in the efforts to prevent China’s emergence as the pre-eminent regional power in Asia.
On the other hand, U.S.-China diplomatic cooperation achieved a milestone with the negotiations surrounding the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015.
Donald Trump came to power with a promise to stop China “raping” the U.S. economy, and his administration has adopted an aggressively anti-China stance. Influential members of his top team include (or have included) such fanatical China hawks as Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Stephen Bannon, Robert Lighthizer, and Peter Navarro.
The U.S. side kicked off the current trade war in January 2018, with tariffs on solar panels (a move that highlighted both Trump’s climate-change denialism and economic illiteracy). In 2019, the U.S. administration imposed a ban on Huawei, and started to put pressure on its “Five Eyes” and European allies to do the same, on the basis of outlandish and easily discredited accusations that Huawei was using its hardware to spy on behalf of the Chinese government.
Now in 2020, Trump and his team have settled on anti-China racism as the perfect get-out-of-jail-free card in order to justify the U.S.’s horrifying mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic. If more than 200,000 coronavirus deaths can be blamed on the “Wuhan virus,” and if public anger can be directed at China and its people rather than the utter fecklessness and cruelty of U.S. capitalism, so much the better.
Connected with all this is the disinformation campaign around Xinjiang, the attack on TikTok and WeChat, and the ever-louder calls for an economic “decoupling” that would be far more damaging to the U.S. economy than the Chinese.
On top of all this is a military escalation that includes ever more frequent U.S. naval operations in the South China Sea, vastly increased weapons sales to Taiwan, encouraging Japan’s rearmament, the deployment of the THAAD anti-ballistic missile defense system in South Korea and Guam, and the bulking up of the Indo-Pacific Command.
A new cold war?
It’s not difficult to see the parallels between the current escalation and the “Cold War” waged by the U.S. against the Soviet Union and its allies. Indeed, the basic political dynamics are the same.
Mainstream history paints the cold war as an extended geostrategic battle between two superpowers struggling to extend their influence throughout the world.
In fact, the Soviets didn’t use the term “cold war.” They didn’t see it as a battle between superpowers; they considered that they were defending their right, and the right of other countries, to pursue a model of development other than the one prescribed by the U.S., to develop in a way that wasn’t directly aimed at producing economic and political benefit for U.S.-led Western capitalism.
As Vladimir Shubin, former head of the African Section of the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, put it: “For us, the global struggle was not a battle between the two ‘superpowers’ assisted by their ‘satellites’ and ‘proxies,’ but a united fight of the world’s progressive forces against imperialism.”
If the Soviets and their allies were fighting for different countries’ right to develop on their own terms and according to their own plans, the U.S. and its allies were fighting for the opposite: to prevent the creation of new paths of development outside a system of imperialism.
President Harry S. Truman was explicit about this when he said, in 1947, that “we can survive only if the whole world adopts the American system.” With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cold War came to an end and a new era—the notorious “End of History”—came into being. It was an era of extreme neoliberalism, yawning inequality, structural adjustment and reckless militarism.
Thankfully, the high tide of U.S. hegemony has run its course, the main reason being the rise of China. Now, China is the second-largest economy in the world in GDP terms, and will overtake the U.S. within the next few years. Furthermore, it’s emerging as a science and technology powerhouse in its own right, resolutely moving beyond its Washington-assigned status as a cheap manufacturing base.
Meanwhile China is increasingly willing to speak out at the UN and other forums against hegemony—for example, using its veto multiple times along with Russia to prevent UN Security Council military action against Syria.
The Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, among other projects, indicate China’s growing importance in global affairs, particularly in terms of encouraging development in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The rise of China, while posing no threat whatsoever to ordinary people in the West, constitutes a genuine threat to the uncontested domination desired by the U.S. ruling class, and this is the key dynamic driving the new cold war.
Oppose the drive to war
Working class, oppressed, and progressive people throughout the world must do everything they can to prevent a potentially disastrous new cold war.
The most important reason is that we are all the same species, sharing the same planet, sharing the same natural resources, and facing many of the same problems. In an increasingly connected world, these problems can’t be solved in the context of escalating tensions, relentless propaganda, diplomatic hostility, and the threat of military conflict.
The pandemic is a good example. The virus thrives by infecting as many people as possible. And the only way for humanity to handle the virus is to prevent it from infecting people, and ultimately to eradicate it.
You can’t do that in some countries but not others. All countries need to cooperate on this issue: on vaccine development, on containment measures, on information sharing, on early warning systems, on epidemiological research.
The same goes for climate change. Averting climate breakdown—a situation whereby large parts of the planet are rendered uninhabitable—is an issue for the whole world and all countries need to take it seriously and cooperate on it.
A new cold war will bring no benefit to ordinary people in the West. It will mean fewer jobs, reduced investment, reduced export markets, and increased prices on imports. All this will be accompanied by rising anti-Asian racism and a renewed momentum along the ideological dead-ends of empire nostalgia and white supremacy.
In the interests of peace and progress, we must push for a de-escalation of tensions, and for respectful, friendly, and mutually beneficial relations between the West and China.
EVENT: The No Cold War campaign, formed earlier this year, is hosting an online international peace forum this Saturday, September 26. The event brings together peace movements from around the world (including CND, Stop the War Coalition, CODEPINK, Black Alliance for Peace, and Pivot to Peace) to analyze the dangerous deterioration in U.S.-China relations and discuss what measures we can take to reverse the tide of war. Speakers include Victor Gao (professor at Soochow University and former interpreter to Deng Xiaoping), Kate Hudson (CND), Chris Matlhako (South African Communist Party), Margaret Kimberley (Black Alliance for Peace), Vijay Prashad (Tricontinental Institute), Jodie Evans (CODEPINK) and Ollie Vargas (journalist, Bolivia). You can register for the event at www.nocoldwar.org.
Like all op-eds published in People’s World, this article reflects the opinions of its author.
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