Against A New Cold War

Earlier this month, Liberal Currents ran a piece calling for a new Cold War between China and the US, arguing that this new conflict would improve democratic and developmentalist outcomes in both countries. Responses ranged from criticism to good-natured trolling to some less good-natured trolling, and inspired the author to respond himself. I wrote this piece to engage with the arguments in that article on their own merits, as a policy proposal and political statement.

Contrary to what your high school textbook and film franchises like “Rambo” and “Red Dawn” taught you, the Cold War was not primarily a conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. That’s what the US teaches because it frames the war as something the US won—the Soviets are gone, after all—and because it relegates most of the actual violence of the war to the status of sideshow or backdrop to the “real” story of the war, the superpower rivalry. This version of the Cold War is real and lethal, but limited to proxy wars conducted in places white people don’t live, with the occasional spy thriller thrown in to mix things up.

Understood this way, the Cold War becomes scenery for the establishment of US cultural hegemony, with everyone watching Hollywood movies and wearing blue jeans, for  technological advancement and landing on the Moon, for economic progress spurred by rivalry with another great power. At the center of this narrative is the escalating possibility of mass death via nuclear annihilation, a nightmare that lives on in the minds of millions of Americans long after it has outlived its reality as a danger.

This perspective misses what actually happened in the Cold War. It presents the successes of worker organizing and racial liberation in the US as responses to international great power competition. It frames economic development as the innocent consequence of imperialism. And it centers the potential massacre of Americans rather than the actual deaths of millions of people of color in the Global South.

Rather than a hypothetical conflict that occasionally got heated, The Cold War was a series of extremely violent and very real wars in which millions of people all over the world died. It was fought by the US and the Soviets, yes, but also by the Indonesians, by the Argentines, by the South Africans, by the Algerians, by the Vietnamese. Decades of scholarly work has sought to decenter the US in the story of the Cold War, and to tell it as a properly global story. In order to do that, though, one must understand its stakes.

Conflict of empires

The Cold War was a global conflict over the geopolitical order after World War II. The US and the USSR were some of the principal belligerents in that conflict, but they were far from the only ones. Fascism had been broadly defeated, with the exception of some holdouts in Spain and Portugal and small movements in most western democracies. Those same western democracies were in serious trouble. They had relied on Soviet help to defeat the Nazis, and in western Europe their societies and economies were deeply damaged by the war—and in some cases, by evidence that they’d collaborated with fascism. 

After WWII the United States locked in a series of European allies as well as a recently defeated Japan primarily through the logic of military necessity, rather than government spending. For example, the much-touted Marshall Plan accounted for only a small percentage of Europe’s governmental spending after the war. The rest of the world was divided up and fought over in a new imperialist push, which saw the US ally itself with murderous dictators and juntas from Chile to Myanmar, and with discriminatory regimes from South Africa to the American South. The Soviets did the same, allying with oppressive client states in Eastern Europe and, later, Cuba.

The US did this claiming that it was protecting democracy, while simultaneously stifling and pushing against the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Rights movement, the Gay Liberation Movement, and dozens of other domestic movements. This hypocrisy wasn’t an error—it was the logic of empire. The US government was in the business of stability, both at home and abroad, and not only accepted but actively endorsed discrimination, violence, and death if it served that purpose. The pressures of the Cold War did not help these efforts. In fact, the US government (both Democrats and Republicans) repeatedly cited the rivalry with the Soviets to push against calls for integration. Crackdowns on union organizing, on student activism, and on those fighting for racial justice were justified on the premise that these agitators were in the pocket of the Communists, either knowingly or ignorantly.

The Cold War conflicts the US did intervene in—Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Cuba, to name a few—were universally entered on the side of the status quo, despite the fact that none of the US’s allies in those conflicts were themselves democracies. Of course the US was not responsible for all the violence around the world during the Cold War, but neither were the Soviets. Suggesting otherwise would imply that the entire developing world is a puppet of the global north. Instead, Cold War conflicts such as the several wars between India and Pakistan, or the genocide in Guatemala, or the countersubversive campaign of forced disappearance in Argentina, or the fight to keep Apartied in South Africa, were all presented as the same struggle—the struggle against Communism and any “reform” that might precede it. Over the course of the Cold War millions of people died in these conflicts, often in ways that are so disturbing that they defy belief. 

This period isn’t something to be nostalgic for, and it cannot be a model for US foreign policy. The liberals of the 20th century agreed with this premise. The administrations of Richard Nixon (in many ways a liberal by today’s standards) and Jimmy Carter intentionally drew down the rivalry with the Soviets very intentionally and successfully. Nixon engaged the Soviets diplomatically in ways that would’ve been unthinkable even a decade prior and initiated the process of detente, a cooling off period in the Cold War. Carter changed how the US operated internationally, and stopped longstanding policies of supporting any government that was anticommunist, regardless of their own human rights credentials. It wasn’t until the triumph of the New Right with Reagan and Thatcher that the US’s commitment to the Cold War as a means of defeating communism returned.

Cold War today

A new Cold War between the US and China would not look like Rocky IV. Nor would it look like the supposedly principled and honorable rivalry of the conflict between the US and the USSR. There are several reasons for this.

One is that China does not represent the same kind of threat to the US as the Soviets did. Though they are currently arming, China doesn't have the nuclear capabilities of the Soviets, nor the possibility for global military projection. China’s territorial and ideological ambitions are more limited than the Soviets were, and are focused on its immediate vicinity rather than a global communist revolution. China is interested in acquiring Taiwan and influencing the Korean peninsula, whereas the Soviets had continental, if not global ambitions. One can hardly imagine Xi Jinping standing on the world stage and proclaiming “We will bury you!” as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously did. 

Another clear reason that any Cold War style rivalry between the US and China wouldn't neatly map on to the Cold War is that the US and Chinese economies are massively more intertwined than those of the US and the Soviet Union were. On the most basic level, whereas the US and USSR only traded, at maximum, about 1% of the total value of their country’s trade with each other, China is the US’s third most valuable trade partner. There is no way to separate the economies of the two countries without massive upheaval and suffering by millions, if not billions of people. The US and USSR could compete as different world systems because they were in different world systems. The US and China cannot do this.

Finally, any proxy military conflict between the US and China would not look like the wars of the Cold War. Instead they’d probably look a lot more like the US’s recent war with Iran, with a focus on air bombardment rather than the boots-on-the-ground fighting of the mid-20th century. When the Cold War did result in clear proxy wars between the US and the USSR (the conflict over Cuba, the Vietnam War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), the result was a lot of dead people and, often, the status quo or a defeat for the great power. This is because while the world’s major militaries have incredible tools for killing—or, in the words of the US military, “lethalitymaxxing”—they do not have effective tools for building or maintaining a lasting, productive peace. Strategic air bombing can win battles, but it does not win wars, and since the Vietnam War the US has demonstrated failure after failure in its efforts to rebuild a country after successfully toppling its government

War: What is it good for?

If we look back to the Cold War and see scientific and social progress, we should understand that the particular innovations that were made came hand in hand with imperial conflict. Our planet is ringed with satellites because rocketry improved because the US and Soviets wanted to be able to launch nuclear missiles at each other from great distances. On the global stage, the developmentalism of the Cold War benefited the countries that were already globally dominant. This resulted in a race to the bottom in the price of labor and environmental protections, especially in countries that started behind

If the US wants to remain powerful in the 21st century but not repeat the mistakes and crimes of the 20th, the Cold War is a poor model. The countries it would want as allies—from Europe to East Asia to Africa—remember how the US behaved in that time, how it worked with dictators and looked away from mass murder. Its economy was extractive, focused on getting what it could rather than building up allies, and its politics were exploitative, willing to work with anybody who said they weren’t a communist. Even the US’s more powerful allies, like France and the UK, regularly turned away from US leadership and forged their own foreign policy paths.

International development and international relations in the 21st century must be substantively different than those of the 20th. Development must empower those in the global south, and serve everyday people rather than empire. It must be sustainable. And if the US is to be involved, it must be as a partner rather than a leader. Even if we consider the Cold War as a battle over two types of leadership, it’s only by reframing US power in this more collaborative and globally developmental way that it could differentiate itself from other nation-states. And if we dream of something new in the 21st century, we cannot repeat the 20th century’s nightmares.

Featured image is "Maj. Gen. Suharto of Indonesia attending funeral of five generals slain in 30 September movement," 1965.