The United States faces Russia and China again, and a second Cold War begins

Both in Washington, as in Beijing and Moscow, the authorities say they want to avoid a new cold war.. A recent article from New York Times suggests that they have little cause for concern. He says that “The current rivalries of the superpowers bear little resemblance to those of the past”. The article mentions Russia’s relative weakness and China’s technological prowess to highlight how things have changed since the late 1940s.

These differences exist, of course. But in my opinion, the parallels between current events and the early years of the Cold War seem increasingly convincing, if not disturbing.

Once again, the Russia-China axis faces a Western alliance led from Washington. Last week, US President Joe Biden spoke at a European Union (EU) summit, while his Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave a speech at NATO calling for the unity of the West to stop China’s military ambitions and Russian “aggression”. Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was in China, calling on Beijing and Moscow to stand up to American power.

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Tensions are growing between the two sides. The Chinese Air Force has just made its biggest foray into Taiwanese airspace. Last week, China also imposed sanctions on politicians in the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom who spoke out on human rights in Xinjiang. This month, Russia withdrew its ambassador from Washington in protest of what it called unprecedented actions by the United States. The first meeting between top officials of the Biden administration and the Chinese government turned into a public fight.

Beijing Says Current Rise in Tensions Is Due to Washington’s Failure to Accept China’s Rise. There is an element of truth in the idea that the United States is dependent on hegemony.

But Beijing’s narrative does not take into account the extent to which changes in China itself have resulted in attitude change in North America and Europe. The increased repression, the cult of personality around President Xi Jinping, and the deployment of Chinese military force have facilitated the introduction of hawkish views on China in the United States and Europe.

As in the early days of the first cold war, certain key events crystallized the growing unrest in Western capitals. In 1945 and 1946, the imposition by the Soviet Union of satellite regimes in Eastern Europe led to a fundamental reassessment of Moscow’s intentions.

Last year, the spraying of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and more detailed information on the persecution of Uyghurs by the Chinese authorities – now labeled genocide by the US government – have played a similar role in changing Western attitudes. The increasing shrillness of Chinese “wolf warrior” diplomacy is also sounding the alarm, because it plays a role similar to that played by various anti-Western speeches emanating from the USSR in the 1940s.

Until recently, it looked like Western Europe might try to stay unaligned in a new Cold War. The EU’s decision to sign a trade and investment agreement with China suggests that Beijing has succeeded in driving a wedge between Washington and Brussels. But China’s imposition of sanctions on prominent members of the European Parliament increasingly unlikely that the EU will ratify the trade deal with China.

Europe’s efforts to draw closer to Russia, intensively promoted by the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, neither did they bear fruit. The growing climate of repression in Russia, an example of which is the imprisonment of opposition activist Alexei Navalny, is narrowing the gap between European and American views on Russia.

In this second cold war – as in the first – there are regional hard spots where the conflict could intensify. In Asia, some of these issues are in fact unresolved issues since the First Cold War, especially the status of the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan. In Europe, the border areas to a conflict zone have moved east. Now it is Ukraine, not Berlin, at the center of tensions between Moscow and the West.

Under the Trump administration, the burgeoning rivalry between the United States and China often lacked the ideological dimension of the First Cold War.. Donald Trump was a transactional president who focused primarily on the United States’ trade deficit with China. According to John Bolton, his former national security adviser, Trump even privately encouraged Xi Jinping to continue his policy of mass lockdown in Xinjiang.

However, with the arrival of the Biden administration, the ideological competition. Biden said he wanted to call a democracy summit and clearly intended to reaffirm that the country wants to be the “leader of the free world.” Like Harry Truman, who was president at the start of the First Cold War, Biden is a former Democratic vice president and senator, once despised by his party’s intellectual elite, who unexpectedly finds himself in command of a crucial moment in history.

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Technological rivalries are again at the center of the clash between the superpowers. In the First Cold War, it was nuclear technology and the space race. Current superpower rivalries focus on 5G telecommunications and artificial intelligence.

But the technological confrontation occurs in a different context. Forty years of globalization have ensured the deep integration of the economies of China and the West. The bigger question about the New Cold War is whether this integration can survive the advancing rivalries between the great powers.

Traduccin: Mariana Oriolo