A New US-China Cold War?

Are we sitting on the precipice of a new Cold War in the 21st century? That's a question many have posed in the aftermath of an important address delivered on October 4 by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence. Speaking at the right-leaning Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., Pence outlined the Trump administration’s grievances with China. If one word were to encapsulate the growing theme behind the administration’s approach to China, it's “competition.”

Days before Pence’s address, Matt Pottinger, the senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council, spoke at the Chinese embassy in the U.S. capital. Pottinger, a fluent Mandarin speaker, quoted Confucius to underline the importance of calling a spade a spade: “If names cannot be correct, then language is not in accordance with the truth of things. And if language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success,” he said.

Pottinger went on to lay the groundwork for the vice president’s upcoming address by noting bluntly that “We at the Trump administration have updated our China policy to bring the concept of competition to the forefront.” He underlined that the development wasn’t new; after all, the administration had identified both China and Russia as great power competitors in its December 2017 National Security Strategy and January 2018 National Defense Strategy.

Pence’s speech was supposed to provided strategic heft to this newly emerging dynamic of competition. The speech came in the aftermath of a remarkably negative month for U.S.-China relations. China had canceled scheduled trade and military-to-military dialogues with the United States amid an escalating trade war and the U.S. implementation of sanctions on the People’s Liberation Army’s Equipment Development Department for the purchase of Russian weapons systems.

To compound matters, the U.S. Department of State approved a $300 million arms package to Taiwan comprising military aviation spare parts. The next day, a Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy Type 052C destroyer came within 45 yards of the USS Decatur, a U.S. Navy destroyer carrying out a routine freedom of navigation operation near Gaven Reef in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

On all tracks, the U.S.-China relationship is declining. Even the once-strong personal rapport between U.S. President Donald J. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping – or at least a personal rapport that went one way, from Trump to Xi – appeared to be under strain. On September 26, in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, Trump remarked that Xi “may not be a friend of mine anymore.”

None of this, of course, would come as a surprise to long-term observers of the U.S.-China relationship. China’s rise has been palpable along all measures of its national power and, under Xi, its revisionist ambitions – in East Asia and on the world stage – have grown more apparent. The Obama administration understood this when it declared its now mostly forgotten “pivot” to Asia. The Trump administration, even with its “America First” approach to foreign affairs, has not yet given up on the United States’ presence and interests in the Asia-Pacific and remains committed to taking China to task.

In this context, Pence’s speech was no doubt among the most important high-level policy addresses by a U.S. official on China in some time. Some commentators compared it to Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in May 1946, which came to be seen as one of the defining starting points of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

But are the United States and China heading down that same path?

Analogies are imperfect, but there are several ways in which, even as the United States and China compete, they may not yet be ensnared in a decades-long Cold War. The defining features of the Cold War were the undeniable bipolarity of the international system and the fundamental ideological struggle between the capitalist Western bloc and the communist Eastern bloc. While Pence did address China’s authoritarian political system and Beijing’s desire to export its authoritarian system of government, he did not make this the defining concept of his speech.

It would be easy to imagine an American leader, devoted to the ideals of a liberal society, working to set up Washington once again as the shining “city on a hill” – the vanguard of open societies against the authoritarian designs preferred by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. But Pence did not do this and perhaps he couldn’t have done so credibly given the Trump administration’s own liberal failings. Instead, the vice president outlined a long list of mostly familiar grievances.

What was new on the list of U.S. grievances about China in Pence’s speech was his explication of China’s political interference in the United States, something Trump had referenced in September at the United Nations when he said the United States had “found that China has been attempting to interfere in our upcoming 2018 [midterm] election[s].” Though Trump had alleged China was directly interfering in the upcoming U.S. midterm election, nothing Pence said provided direct evidence of covert efforts to interference in the machinery of the U.S. election process. Instead, Pence described China’s well-known attempts to pursue influence in and interfere in U.S. democracy.

Beijing’s covert and overt attempts to pursue influence in democracies the world over have received growing attention in recent years. The most egregious cases have emerged in New Zealand and Australia, with examples of Beijing covertly buying influence. In the United States, too, there are ongoing covert and overt attempts by China to seek political influence, but Pence did not address these. Instead, he pointed to “a multipage supplement [by China Daily] inserted into the Des Moines Register” – an entirely legal, if questionable, practice – and referenced efforts by Beijing to direct its retaliatory tariffs toward products in states that vote Republican.

Pence chose to cast these efforts in starkly partisan terms too: “To put it bluntly, President Trump’s leadership is working; and China wants a different American president.” The bipartisan agreement that existed during the Cold War about the nature of the threat posed by the Soviet Union does not yet appear to be in place with China and Pence’s partisan language will likely slow the process. Democrats are growing more concerned about Chinese practices on human rights and trade, but the national conversation on China in the United States has yet to converge toward unity.

This too was a missed opportunity for the administration and Pence. Just five days after Pence’s speech, Bernie Sanders, the vanguard of the U.S. progressive left, delivered a foreign policy address casting a challenge that wouldn’t have been entirely at odds with what Pence was trying to get at with China. Sanders identified the fundamental challenge for the United States as a growing axis of authoritarian leaders. While he only mentioned China once in his speech, Sanders noted that “to effectively oppose right-wing authoritarianism, we cannot simply be on the defensive.”

This perhaps identified the biggest shortcoming of Pence's speech, which was that it did not represent a truly strategic approach to dealing with the challenge posed by China's authoritarian system of government by identifying an end state that United States would seek with Beijing. “Competition” alone is not a strategy; it is a means to managing this challenge. China’s leaders are left as a result with an amplified sense of what they’ve now long felt: That the United States is out to contain China’s rise on all fronts, including its economic rise.

That risks paving the path not to a new cold war, but to a hot one. The pressure points for conflict between the two sides – from Taiwan to the South China Sea to the Korean Peninsula – are plentiful, after all. It’s perhaps unrealistic for the United States to have any hope of encouraging the Communist Party of China toward a different behavioral paradigm, but stoking competition without a well-defined end-state increases the risk of conflict.