The New Cold War E-Book

Robin Niblett

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 282

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'An illuminating book for the interested citizen as well as for those making policy' HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON 'An important, crystal-clear account of contemporary global geopolitics... Essential reading' PETER FRANKOPAN 'An excellent short guide: concise, informed, and full of insight' SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN We have entered a new Cold War. The contest between America and China is global and unbridgeable, and it encompasses all major instruments of statecraft - economic, political and military. It has its tinder box: Taiwan. And both protagonists are working hard to draw allies to their side from across the world. We stand at its beginning. But this Cold War is nothing like the conflict between the Soviet Union and the West which defined the second half of the twentieth century. We need new ideas to navigate its risks and avoid a globally devastating hot war. In this urgent and necessary book, Robin Niblett argues that only by looking back can we learn the lessons to guide us through this new reality: he goes through the ten ways in which the New Cold War is different and offers five rules for navigating its onset. How we manage this contest will determine not only whether there is still space for international cooperation to deal with our many global challenges, from the climate emergency to the technological revolution, but also who will lead the twenty-first century and, quite simply, the course of all our futures.

Leseprobe

Praise for

THE NEW COLD WAR

‘There’s a pressing need to put the contest between the US and China into its global context. Robin Niblett does precisely that in The New Cold War, showing how today’s geopolitical competition is upending international diplomacy, re-shaping multilateral institutions and challenging prospects for a more sustainable world. This is an illuminating book for the interested citizen as well as for those making policy’ Hillary Rodham Clinton, former US Senator and Secretary of State

‘An important, crystal-clear account of contemporary global geopolitics – by one of the UK’s leading strategic thinkers. Essential reading’ Peter Frankopan, author of The Earth Transformed

‘For those seeking to get their heads round the biggest geopolitical challenges of our time, and especially the developing conflict between China and the liberal democracies, this is an excellent short guide: concise, informed and full of insight’ Sir Lawrence Freedman, author of Ukraine and the Art of Strategy

‘In this timely book, Robin Niblett unveils the changing balance of power between the US and China and how it is re-defining international relations. Its clarity makes it essential reading, above all for Europeans seeking to chart a course to defend their interests and values’ Arancha González, Dean, Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po and former Foreign Minister of Spain

‘An insightful, sobering and essential analysis of a shifting geo-political landscape: the players and the challenges, but also fresh thinking on how we might manage the US–China confrontation and stop the new Cold War tipping over into catastrophe’ Isabel Hilton, writer, broadcaster and founder of China Dialogue

‘At a time when war, violence and geopolitical rivalry threaten to undo the progress of the past thirty years, Robin Niblett succinctly explains the drivers of today’s global instability and offers hope that democratic countries can regain their sense of shared purpose’ The Rt Hon Sir John Major KG CH

‘As the world becomes more turbulent, there is no more experienced or informed guide than Robin Niblett. He combines shrewd and detailed geopolitical analysis with a sobering but ultimately positive assessment of how the liberal world can get back on the front foot. Compelling reading for all who want to know where the world goes next’ Rana Mitter, author of China’s War With Japan, 1937-1945

‘Robin Niblett is one of the UK’s finest foreign policy minds and saw it all at Chatham House. As he rightly argues, war between the US and China is entirely avoidable. And while history provides us lessons for managing the relationship between these two great powers, it does not define their destiny’ Kevin Rudd, former prime minister of Australia and author of The Avoidable War

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Robin Niblett, 2024

The moral right of Robin Niblett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 80546 211 8

E-book ISBN: 978 1 80546 212 5

Printed in Great Britain

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Contents

Introduction

  1:   China is no Soviet Union

  2:   Reversing into the New Cold War

  3:   America is not all it was

  4:   Russia’s new ambitions

  5:   The ideological roots of the New Cold War

  6:   A renewed transatlantic partnership

  7:   America’s Atlantic and Pacific allies converge

  8:   The non-aligned are now the majority and finding their voice

  9:   The fight against climate change gets even harder

10:   The end of multilateralism

11:   How to survive and prosper in the New Cold War

Conclusion

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

Introduction

On 1 February 2023, Chase Doak, editor of the Billings Gazette, was scanning the clear blue sky above Billings, Montana, when he spotted a strange white dot, hanging there, stationary, like a daytime star. With the help of the Gazette photographer’s long-range camera, he saw it was a balloon. This giant descendant of its nineteenth-century forebears had been kitted out by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with a twenty-first-century payload of technology and a solar power array the size of three school buses. It was a shocking apparition, even though it posed no threat to people on the ground and, as a tool for aerial surveillance and signals intelligence, its impact was hotly debated.1

Nevertheless, the sheer brazenness of its intrusion over the American Midwest, near silos of the country’s arsenal of land-based intercontinental nuclear missiles, triggered a volcanic reaction in the US Congress. Republicans accused the Biden administration of failing to defend US skies. Democrats decried a deeply hostile act by America’s communist rival, despite the likelihood that the balloon had simply veered off course. By 4 February, once it had drifted over the South Carolina coast, President Biden ordered the slow-moving and defenceless intruder be shot down – by an F-22 fighter capable of flying at nearly two and a half times the speed of sound and hitting targets over 150 nautical miles away. The brutal mismatch of power provided a convenient distraction in Beijing from the embarrassment of the balloon’s discovery. The Global Times, mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), wrote that it was like ‘shooting a mosquito with a cannon’.2

The ‘balloon incident’ exposed for all the toxic state of US–China relations and the deep anxieties on both sides. US and Chinese governments have long engaged in aerial surveillance, but mostly through satellites in invisible geostationary orbit, or through equally invisible digital penetration of each other’s databases and national security infrastructure. It took the balloon, and the subsequent revelation that it was far from the first to traverse the US and its allies in the Asia–Pacific, to awaken US citizens to the scale of the growing contest.

It also served as a reminder of the ambiguities that riddle the relationship. Once the downed balloon was pulled to the surface off Myrtle Beach and the entrails of its payload dissected, they were found to contain US dual-use chips and other components; just as dismantling the F-22 that shot down the balloon would likely reveal Chinese-sourced micro-electronics and rare earth minerals buried inside its avionics and missiles.3 This is hardly surprising. After China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, US–China economic relations grew exponentially. Chinese companies supplied American consumers with well-produced and low-priced everyday goods and US companies with low-value but essential components. US companies supplied China with iPhones, computers and advanced semiconductors, as well as food and fuels. And both sides invested in each other’s economies, from established companies to start-ups.

But within ten years, political relations had begun to deteriorate, especially after the rise to power in 2012 of the more authoritarian and externally assertive CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping. Leaders in Washington and allied capitals in Europe and the Asia–Pacific have come to the realization that China’s growing economic power has translated into greater capacity for the CCP to quash any dissent or possibility of political pluralism inside China. And that they have been helping China on its journey to greater military-technical self-sufficiency, which in turn is empowering China to challenge them abroad. Since 2013, there has been a growing catalogue of near misses between Chinese and US aircraft and naval vessels patrolling the contested skies and seas around Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Any one of them could have easily resulted in deaths of servicemen and a far more dangerous fallout than from the balloon incident.

The last ten years have ripped the veil from the notion that closer economic relations between the US and China could be insulated from these growing political tensions. The hope was that, unlike the US and the Soviet Union, the US and China could each grow stronger together. Instead, they have slipped into what was first termed in 1951, four years after the start of the last Cold War, as the ‘security dilemma’, whereby the actions by one side to increase its security engenders new insecurity and counter-reactions in the other, pulling both into an inescapable vortex towards war.4 Four-star General Mike Minihan, head of the US Air Mobility Command, even warned in a memo in January 2023 that the US and China are on course to ‘fight’ over Taiwan in 2025. He is not the only senior member of the US military to have issued such warnings in recent years.5

Descent into the antagonistic, destructive rivalry that characterized the last Cold War could possibly be avoided by regular consultations, channels for crisis communications, and by agreements for military de-escalation and transparency. But the problem is that these two countries are on opposite sides of a profound and open-ended global competition between two political systems that are incompatible and mutually hostile.

As the Director of Chatham House for fifteen years, I travelled regularly to China to speak at conferences on international relations. I was always struck by my Chinese counterparts’ obsession with understanding the drivers of what they called today’s ‘great power competition’. Drawing on historical experience and the writing of American theorists of international relations, they believed they understood the central reason for US and Chinese competition: the rise of a new great power would inevitably be blocked by the existing great power, leading to what US academic Graham Allison first described in 2012 as the ‘Thucydides trap’, named after the Athenian general who wrote about the causes of the First Peloponnesian War in the late fourth century BC. Allison equates the US with Sparta, trying to resist the rise of China (Athens in Thucydides’ day), even if this leads to conflict.6

The solution, according to my Chinese interlocutors, was for China to demonstrate that it does not want to replace the US as the world’s dominant power, and for the US to accept China’s rise as its equal globally as well as in Asia. This would allow the two sides to co-exist peacefully and avoid a repetition of the world wars in the first half of the twentieth century, or of the Cold War in its latter half.

But I argued that they were missing the point. Sure, the security dilemma between the US and China could possibly be attenuated by confidence-building measures and negotiated frameworks for economic cooperation and competition. But we need to recognize that the conflict between the two sides is also ideological. It is rooted in the fear that the leaders of two very different political systems have of the other. The single-party system represented by the CCP rejects any internal challenge to state power, while the liberal democratic system championed by the US places checks and balances on state power, and the rights of the individual are at its centre. The United States and China have different visions not only for the best form of domestic governance, but also for international order. Both want their system to dominate the twenty-first century.

This is why they are now engaged in a contest that is global and unbridgeable. Why we have entered a new Cold War and are no longer just in its foothills.7 Why this Cold War’s tinderbox is Taiwan, a democratic outpost next to the communist behemoth. Why its two protagonists are working so hard to draw allies and friends to their side from across the world, especially countries outside the northern hemisphere that together constitute what is now called the Global South. And it is why the contest encompasses all major instruments of statecraft: diplomacy, technology, military power, intelligence, foreign aid, culture and, critically, trade and investment. After all, if two well-matched and nuclear-armed powers are involved in such deeply rooted rivalry, then the battle for economic and technological supremacy will be paramount, and companies will be on the front line, whether they like it or not.

We stand at the very beginning of the New Cold War, with no sense of how or when it will end. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rash decision to undertake a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and Xi’s decision to remain faithful to the spirit of the declaration that he signed with Putin just before the invasion stating there are ‘no limits’ to the friendship between the two states, have welded China to Russia in a conflict with no discernible solution.8 It has also knitted America and its European and Pacific allies together in opposition. The March 2023 agreement between the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom to develop cutting-edge dual-use technologies, including a new fleet of Australian nuclear-powered submarines to patrol the Pacific, measures its milestones in decades, not years.9 Meanwhile, President Xi has set 2049 as the target for China to complete its process of national ‘rejuvenation’ and to overcome America’s policy of ‘all-round containment, encirclement and suppression’.10

But the New Cold War will be nothing like the last one between the Soviet Union and the West, which ran through to 1990 and defined the second half of the twentieth century. Its geographic shape and internal dynamics are different, which can offer us hope for the future. Above all, its two sides have travelled far down the road of economic integration. Unless there is a cataclysmic event, a complete U-turn is impossible for both. Instead, they are reversing carefully into the New Cold War, trying not to sever all their connections and hoping that, once they have backed away from each other far enough, they can map a new route that will sustain some of the mutual benefits they enjoyed over the last twenty-plus years.

Understanding this and the other main differences between the two Cold Wars is an essential prerequisite for avoiding an accidental or conscious transition into a globally devastating hot war. This book asks: how is China different from the Soviet Union? How is the US of the twenty-first century different from that of the late twentieth? What are the priorities of countries in the Global South, and which international institutions will be most effective in a more divided world? Answering these questions matters if the two sides are still to cooperate on shared global challenges, and if the world’s liberal democracies are to design a strategy for the New Cold War that enables them to defend their freedoms as successfully this time as the last.

With this goal in mind, the book also lays out five rules to manage the risks inherent in the early stages of the New Cold War and prevent a complete breakdown in US–China relations. They offer the possibility that when it finally ends, more countries and peoples will have embraced the freedoms enshrined in democratic systems of governance than do today.

1

China is no Soviet Union

Understanding the differences between China today and the Soviet Union during the last Cold War is a good place to start when assessing the main differences between the geopolitical contest that defined the second half of the twentieth century and the one that will define the first half, at least, of the twenty-first. As the Soviet Union did before, China today constitutes the dominant magnetic pole of a form of government and international outlook that is the rival of the community of states, led by the United States, that define themselves as liberal democracies. But, as we shall see, China poses a more significant structural challenge to the US and its allies than did the Soviet Union. Why? Because China is still at the beginning of marshalling its growing power to the service of its foreign policies, and its sources of power are more extensive and diverse than those of the Soviet Union.

The inherent limits of Soviet power

The Soviet Union’s elevated position in international affairs after 1945 had much to do with its role as one of the main two victors, alongside the United States, at the end of the Second World War. By most measures, the USSR reached its relative peak during the first decade of the first Cold War. In December 1945, it occupied all central and eastern Europe and, by 1948, had engineered communist party rule throughout the region, with most governments indirectly controlled from Moscow. These countries then came together along with the Soviet Union in 1955 under the umbrella of the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance led by Moscow and supposedly designed to protect its members from attack by the US-led NATO alliance. The Warsaw Pact and its economic counterpart, Comecon, provided the Soviet Union with a large geographic buffer to its west, from which the principal invasions and threats to its territorial integrity had emanated for the previous five centuries. And they gave the Soviet Union an economic and strategic weight well beyond its own intrinsic human and material resources.

The Soviet Union’s role as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and as a leading nuclear-armed state also enhanced its security and global standing. And its self-sufficiency in natural resources – especially oil, gas, coal and food – added to its ability to follow an autarkic path, much like the US had done until it was drawn into Europe’s two major wars. But as former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski presciently wrote in 1986, ‘the Soviet Union is like a giant with steel hands but rotten innards. It can crush in its grip weaker opponents but a spreading corrosion is eating away at its system.’1 Its centrally planned economy was unable to match the technological innovations and gains in productivity in the United States and Europe.

Between 1973 and 1990, Soviet GDP per capita grew from approximately $6,000 to a little under $10,000, while that in the US grew from $16,600 to $23,300, leaving the USSR stuck at a ratio of 35 per cent of the US level over this period, despite having a population 16 per cent larger than that of the US (290 million to the US’s 250 million in 1990).2 To try to sustain its competitive position in relation to an ever more technologically dynamic United States, the Soviet leadership concluded that it needed to transform its economic model. But Mikhail Gorbachev’s programmes of glasnost (openness and transparency) and perestroika (economic restructuring) instead ended up exposing the depth of the Soviet Union’s weakness and its tenuous hold over its satellites. After the collapse of communist governments in central Europe and of the Warsaw Pact in 1989–90, the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Union through 1991 led to the fledging of fourteen independent states around Russia’s periphery, and Russia’s retreat into a still geographically vast but much smaller country of some 140 million people.3

China is still starting its journey as a superpower

China’s gestation as a great power following the end of the Second World War has been more difficult and convoluted. On paper, despite the huge loss of civilian and military lives, second only to that of the Soviet Union, China was also one of the winners in 1945. But the subsequent civil war between the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) and the communists led by Mao Zedong meant that the People’s Republic of China did not come into being until 1949. And, with US support, the anti-communist KMT held on to China’s seat at the UN, as well as the island of Taiwan, to which its leadership decamped after their defeat, creating a separate political entity and the tinderbox for the New Cold War seventy years later.

That China has taken so long to reach superpower status is a reminder that Mao’s chaotic rule – which included the devastating Great Leap Forward in 1958–60 and the violent and tumultuous Cultural Revolution from 1966–76 – held China back, even as he cemented the country’s sovereignty and independence after nearly 200 years of foreign intervention. In 1980, China had the largest population in the world, but its GDP per capita averaged only $195. Compare this to Mexico, also a newly industrializing economy at that time, where the GDP per capita was $3,000.4

It is also a reminder that, unlike the Soviet Union, which began the last Cold War protected by a ring of allied, buffer states, China has none. Instead, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has spent much of the last seventy years consolidating control over China’s periphery, from Tibet to Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and defending its external borders, often through conflict, as in the case of the Korean War (in 1952) and the wars with India (in 1962 and 1967) and their continuing border skirmishes. Today, the CCP is trying to assert control over islands and waters in the South China Sea that it claims are part of its sovereign territory. And it is intensely focused on ending Taiwan’s political separation from the mainland.

Unlike the Soviet Union, therefore, which imploded just some forty years after achieving superpower status, China is still near the beginning of a much slower journey to being a leading world power. In 2023, China’s 1.4 billion people accounted for nearly 18 per cent of the world’s total, five times as large as the Soviet Union at the time of its collapse, and ten times as large as Russia’s and four times as large as America’s today. And yet, China’s GDP per capita still averaged only $12,500, a fifth of America’s, and this figure conceals vast differences in wealth: those in rural and inland areas had average disposable incomes of about a fifth of those in the wealthier coastal areas, and over 35 per cent of workers, nearly 300 million, live precariously as internal migrants.5

China started its run of consistent GDP growth only after 1980, when Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, launched his policy of market opening along with an emphasis on mass education and urbanization. Nevertheless, after four decades of almost uninterrupted growth, China’s GDP is close to overtaking America’s in gross terms. And in certain, more qualitative domains, China is well on its way to matching or even surpassing the US and Europe.

Gone are the days when China was the sweatshop to the world. Its education system trains almost all Chinese to a high standard, and its universities are currently producing each year between two and four million graduates in science, technology and engineering.6 China has achieved revolutionary breakthroughs in cutting-edge areas of high technology, such as quantum computing and building the world’s most powerful supercomputer, and now matches Germany in many areas of advanced manufacturing. Leveraging its enormous domestic market, China is also the only country apart from the US to have constructed its own large-scale digital companies, combining mobile and online payments platforms such as Alipay alongside multi-service digital providers such as WeChat. With ready access to the private data of over a billion citizens, China stands at the forefront of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence applications, from speech and image recognition to self-driving cars.7

In other areas, however, the Chinese economy continues to operate, at best, at the level of an emerging market or, sometimes, of a developing economy. Obstacles to growth include still immature capital markets; over-reliance on the property sector and construction as a motor for growth; under-developed social welfare programmes, whether in health, education or pensions; and a rapidly ageing society. In January 2023, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that there were 850,000 fewer Chinese at the end of 2022 than there were at the start, raising the fearful prospect that China will grow old before it grows rich.8 The lack of a reliable social safety net drives most young Chinese to save anywhere between 30 and 50 per cent of their monthly income, which, in turn, puts a cap on private consumption as a generator of growth.9 Young Chinese have also emerged from the shock and stress of the COVID lockdowns rejecting the workaholic lives of their parents. On social media, they celebrate the heretical ideas of ‘lying flat’, rather than working from nine to nine for six days a week, or ‘letting it rot’, which implies not bothering to work at all.10

Making sure China stays safe in the world

China’s course is set by a small cadre at the apex of the CCP and, whatever their differences over tactics, they generally avoid the frequent shifts in direction that are the hallmarks of an openly competitive democratic process. What then are their priorities as they map out the country’s future and the journey to arrive there?

President Xi Jinping has stated that, by 2049, the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the country should have regained its place at the apex of the world, where it stood, as the largest country in terms of economic capacity, for several centuries during the second millennium, until the West launched its Industrial Revolution early in the nineteenth century.11 China’s rejuvenation should also involve major improvements in the living standards of the majority of Chinese citizens, thereby ensuring the CCP’s continued legitimacy at the helm of the country.

Unlike the USSR, China could prove successful in achieving its goal. Given the sheer size of its population and economic output, China has the potential to outmatch the old Soviet Union at its height and usurp America’s position at the top of the superpower ladder. But, despite delivering consistently high levels of economic growth since the mid-1980s, China’s decline in the early nineteenth century and a hundred years of humiliation at the hands of occupying European powers and Japan between 1840 and 1945 has left deep scars among the CCP leadership, as well as the Chinese people.12 As recently as March 2023, Xi bitterly complained that, ‘bullying by foreign powers and frequent wars tore the country apart and plunged the Chinese people into an abyss of great suffering’.13 The fear of external interference and internal chaos that would undermine China’s journey to national rejuvenation is profound.

Two elements lie at the core of their concern. The first is that the United States, which has been the dominant power in the Asia–Pacific region since the end of the Second World War, will block China’s rise. Responding to this risk lies at the heart of China’s two-decade long investment in its armed forces. Having relied on the People’s Liberation Army to protect its land borders since 1949, the CCP has invested its ever-growing military budget into building what is now the world’s largest navy, even though it possesses only three aircraft carriers so far to America’s eleven. And, after contenting itself with a minimum nuclear deterrent force of 200 nuclear warheads for several decades, China is now racing to match the US and Russia, which each have some 1,500 warheads deployed, and could have over 1,000 operational warheads by 2030.14

Importantly, China is also building its asymmetric strength, in other words its capacity to negate America’s qualitative military superiority through alternative means. The best example is its early development of hypersonic anti-ship missiles, which can travel at five times the speed of sound, making them more difficult to intercept. US naval forces in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait, two areas where the US contests China’s territorial claims, are now more vulnerable to attack. China also shocked the US in August 2021 with the successful test of the first ever ‘hypersonic glide vehicle’, which detatched from a ballistic missile and circled the globe before reaching its target.15 The message was clear – Washington cannot count on its anti-ballistic missile systems to protect their forward-deployed forces based around China, from Guam to Japan. In many other areas of defence-related high technology – such as supercomputers and AI, drone ‘swarms’, cyber warfare and anti-satellite systems – China already either matches or outmatches the US.16

But the CCP’s sense of strategic vulnerability does not originate only from historical experience and the size of the national territory and seas it must protect against the US and others. Whereas the Soviet Union rose to superpower status partly on the back of its massive natural resource endowments, China is dependent on commodity imports to feed its growing economy. It currently imports over 70 per cent of its oil, nearly 50 per cent of its gas, and over 70 per cent of its iron ore.17 Ensuring the future security of these supplies is a primary motivator for Beijing’s investments in its navy, for its strategy of taking control of the South China Sea, and for wanting to draw Taiwan back into the fold as quickly as possible. If it fails, China’s security will continue to be hostage to the goodwill of the US and its regional allies – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines – that constitute the ‘first island chain’ of US bases and basing agreements strung along China’s coast.

Overcoming China’s lack of natural resources also lies at the heart of the CCP’s foreign policy. The Chinese government has assiduously developed its power and influence in resource-rich and strategically located countries far beyond its immediate periphery, which are critical to ensuring its access to stable supplies of natural resources in the future. Since Xi Jinping announced the launch of the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ in 2013, China has signed a plethora of bilateral agreements and invested up to $1 trillion to help develop physical infrastructure in countries that connect it with those supplies – above all in Africa, Central Asia and Latin America.18 China has also constructed a so-called ‘string of pearls’, a series of port facilities from Gwadar on Pakistan’s coast with the Arabian Sea, to Djibouti, near the entrance to the Red Sea, and Hambantota in Sri Lanka. On 4 February 2022, twenty days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, China announced its ‘no limits partnership’ with Russia, which will be an essential source of energy and critical minerals to help feed China’s voracious economic appetite. And it played a key role in mediating the resumption in March 2023 of the security agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, two of its main suppliers of crude oil.19

The nucleus of the first Cold War lay in Europe, where the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact faced off against the US and NATO. The peripheries of the Soviet–US contest, whether in Cuba and Central America, Vietnam or Angola, were mostly about demonstrating global influence and credibility to their allies, probing for weaknesses, or distracting the other side from the pivotal European theatre of their competition. In contrast, the combination of China’s size with its economic vulnerability means that the contest for influence between the US and China will be truly global. And the New Cold War will be played out above all in what is now termed the Global South: in Africa, in Latin America, in the Middle East, and in South and Southeast Asia, all regions where China is challenging America’s long-standing position as the leading power situated at the strategic intersections of the world.

Preserving stability at home

The challenges facing China are not only external. Like the Soviet Communist Party, the CCP may appear to possess almost limitless autocratic power, but it still carries within it the DNA of a secret, revolutionary movement, motivated by a profound and instinctive sense of insecurity. With an eye to China’s long history, the CCP leadership fears popular upheaval and ethnic separatism in equal measure. With an eye to China’s century of humiliation and, more recently, the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, it believes these are weaknesses that the US can exploit.

A central tenet for the CCP leadership, therefore, is absolute intolerance of political opposition or other form of political contestation – whether from individuals, lawyers, unions or NGOs. Under Xi Jinping, the CCP has tightened even further its control over public information and deployed an iron fist against any form of dissent. It has deployed tens of thousands of officials to man the ‘great firewall’ that aims to seal the Chinese population from the global internet. And it is constantly experimenting with new forms of digital tracking and surveillance that mix positive protections for citizens from unscrupulous businesses with elaborate programs targeted at monitoring and controlling dissidents and minorities, using tools ranging from DNA databases to facial recognition.20 For the CCP, political conformity ranks alongside law-abiding behaviour, and it seeks to mould people’s behaviour towards the party line through a mix of inducement and punishment.

But the CCP knows that control gets you only so far and will fail unless the party also delivers to the Chinese people the future that they expect. One part of that expectation is that China is becoming great again; that it will be treated with the respect the Chinese people believe their country is due. In this sense, the CCP’s ability to reabsorb Taiwan into a greater China is as much a test of the CCP’s domestic credibility and legitimacy as of its management of China’s security. The other part of the contract between the party and the people is for Chinese citizens to achieve a level of personal wellbeing at least equal to that of other developed nations around the world.

Achieving this second part of the contract lies at the root of one of the most profound differences between this Cold War and the last. The CCP learned an important lesson watching the collapse of the Soviet Union. From Deng Xiaoping onwards, the party’s overriding priority has been to accelerate China’s economic growth without permitting any challenge to the power of the party. To do so, they have focused their efforts on domestic economic reform, without the parallel process of political opening and transparency that Gorbachev believed was reform’s necessary precursor.