USA vs China-Cold War, Cold Peace or uneasy peace from competition
Welcome to the strange new world we live in. China and the United States are becoming more adversarial toward one another in every way and yet they are both part of a global economy that is deeply interdependent and has a dynamic of its own. Tensions rise but so does trade. It’s not just with the United States. China and Australia have seen growing disputes, attacks and counterattacks. Last year, China?publicly aired?14 grievances with Australia and warned it not to “make China the enemy.” And yet, Chinese purchases of Australian goods?recently hit?a record high.
This is why analogies to the Cold War don’t really capture the unusual nature of today’s great power competition. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union traded?at best a few billion dollars’ worth of goods?every year. Today, the United States and China trade that much in a matter of days.
The Soviet Union?barely existed?on the economic map of the free world. It presided over a tightly controlled economic bloc of communist countries that had few connections — in trade or travel — with the rest of the planet. Mostly, its economy was?about resources?— oil, gas, nickel, copper, etc. China, by contrast, is deeply integrated into the world economy. It is now the world’s?leading trading nation?in goods. Twenty years ago, the vast majority of countries traded more goods with the United States than with China. Today, it?has flipped. Last year, China?replaced?the United States as the European Union’s largest trading partner in goods.
China needs U.S. consumers for its economic growth. But conversely, many of the United States’ largest companies — from General Motors to Apple to Nike — need the Chinese market. The Wal-Mart effect — the availability of low-priced goods of every kind to Americans — has been closely?tied to sourcing from China. Even when you look at something such as the United States’ expanding green economy, you find the shadow of China behind it. Those?solar panels?you see everywhere have become so affordable and thus ubiquitous because many are made in China. And then there is the roughly $1 trillion worth of?American debt?that China holds.
Can Washington embrace the complexity of this challenge? It is facing an economic powerhouse that, unlike Germany and Japan, is not dependent on the United States for its security. It faces a new great power that is not a democracy and has different values and beliefs, and yet has not occupied and controlled countries as Stalin’s Russia did during the 1940s (which is what triggered the Cold War).And this is all happening in a world in which?international trade?has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. It’s not a new Cold War but something much more complicated: a Cold Peace.
Many are beginning to fear the world may soon be caught in the crossfire between Beijing and Washington.
What is happening in the world today is no different from what has happened throughout history, when major countries have had differences with other major countries. And history shows sometimes that lead to war sometimes that leads to standoffs.?I would prefer to use [the] term ‘an uneasy peace’ to describe the current China-US competition rather than ‘a new cold war’, because the [20th century] cold war was driven by that ideological expansion of the US and Soviet Union and through proxy wars.
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“Fifty years on, we are on the cusp of massive change again,” “As big power competition intensifies, I worry that some innocent souls on both sides of the Pacific are going to be caught in the cracks of history and nuance being lost. Confrontational rhetoric is making everything look darker. There might be no turning back.”
US-based researcher Wei Da notes that China-US relations are at risk of stagnating and reaching a state of "cold peace" with the current development. While China has been making friendly overtures to the US, it is also signaling that the ball is in the US’s court. Would any side give space to the other? Who will benefit from such a situation?
But given that China’s overall size and scale of development is comparable to the US, I think it is overstating the case to simply say that China is in a “one-sided love affair” with the US, or revealing a weak spot. China feels that “time and the situation” are on its side right now, so why would it be anxious about its relations with the US? As for the so-called weak spot that applies to both China and the US— each has their strengths and weaknesses.
If China does not adjust its stand and the US sticks to its principles, then bilateral relations will inevitably “stagnate and arrive at a state of cold peace”
But the crux is: which side would benefit from this stagnation and state of cold peace?