The techniques of the original Cold War have been updated and adapted for a new enemy in a new century, and while the political essence is t
Since the launch of Obama’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ in 2012, the US has prioritised China containment over all other foreign policy commitments. This includes steadily increasing its presence in the South China Sea and encouraging China’s neighbours in their various territorial claims. Obama also initiated an expansion of US military, diplomatic and economic cooperation with other countries in the region. The overarching strategic goal of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was to isolate China and to draw East and Southeast Asia back into the US economic – and ideological – orbit.
The Trump administration, while dropping the TPP due to its domestic unpopularity, escalated the Pivot in other respects: launching a trade war in January 2018, imposing a ban on Huawei, attempting to ban TikTok and WeChat, spreading conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19, and turning ‘decoupling’ into a buzzword. Anti-China propaganda became – and has remained – pervasive in the West.
Alongside the economic and information warfare, there has been a rising militarisation of the Pacific and a deepening of a ‘China encirclement’ strategy that goes back to the arrival of the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Straits in 1950, just a few months after the establishment of the People’s Republic. Recent years have witnessed ever more frequent US naval operations in the South China Sea; increased weapons sales to Taiwan; the encouraging of Japan’s re-armament; the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile defence system in South Korea and Guam; the establishment of a US marine base in northern Australia; and the bulking up of the Indo-Pacific Command. [...]
Historians in the West typically regard the Cold War as an elaborate ideological struggle between two superpowers with comparable motivations – a ‘clash of civilisations’ in which the capitalists and communists slugged it out for supremacy. Such an interpretation ignores the fundamental class struggle dynamics at play. The Soviets hoped to avoid a return to hostilities following the shared Allied victory in World War II; rather they consistently proposed a system of ‘peaceful coexistence’ in which they – and other countries – would enjoy the right to build the society of their own choosing, without the constant threat of war. Vladimir Shubin, former head of the Africa section of the international department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, writes that the ‘Cold War’ was not part of our political vocabulary; in fact the term was used in a strictly negative sense… For us the global struggle was not a battle between the two ‘superpowers’ assisted by their ‘satellites’ and ‘proxies’, but a united fight of the world's progressive forces against imperialism. (V. G. Shubin. The Hot ‘Cold War’. London: Pluto Press, 2008, p. 3)
‘A man is judged by the company he keeps’, goes the saying. During the Cold War period, the Soviet Union’s allies included the people of Vietnam and Korea fighting against imperialist domination; the people of South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Guinea Bissau, Algeria and elsewhere, fighting against colonialism and apartheid; and the people of Cuba, Grenada, Chile, Nicaragua and elsewhere, fighting for the right to construct socialist societies.
The US and its allies fought a very different kind of Cold War: a global hybrid war against socialism and non-alignment. President Truman said fairly bluntly in 1947 that the Cold War was ‘designed to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish.’ (R.L. Walli. U.S. Foreign Policy of Interventionism. Social Scientist 4, no. 6 (1976): 41-48) The essence of the Cold War was thus a protracted struggle by the US and its allies to protect the long-term viability of the imperialist world system – and, by corollary, weaken the global socialist and anti-imperialist movement. And this war was not always very cold. From Vietnam to Angola to Chile, the Cold War wrought horrifying death and destruction.
The US won the Cold War by default when the Soviet Union ceased to exist on 31 December 1991. The USSR’s dissolution was not accompanied by the promised ‘peace dividend’. Rather, the removal of the Soviet Union as a bulwark against imperialist hegemony meant the launch of a new era of NATO expansionism and war; an untrammelled and invigorated US-led militarism, which has thought nothing of destroying Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. [...]
Along with expanding the US’s sphere of economic and political influence into the former socialist countries, strategists developed a new obsession: maintaining the new single-superpower status quo and forestalling the rise of any potential geopolitical challenger. [...] The adoption of the Pivot to Asia reflects a consensus in US ruling circles that the ‘future global competitor’ in question is China. This in turn reflects China’s emergence as the principal driver of global economic growth and the corresponding rise in its influence. [...]
The techniques of the original Cold War have been updated and adapted for a new enemy in a new century, but the political essence is the same. The US and its allies still seek to maintain the overall stability and long-term viability of the imperialist world system. This system is under threat from China, which is coalescing forces throughout the world in support of a new, multipolar world order; by definition a negation of the US hegemonist project for military and economic control of the planet. Thus, much like the original Cold War, the New Cold War is a sustained conflict, initiated and led by the US, between the forces of imperialism, hegemony and unipolarity on the one hand, and the forces of socialism, sovereignty and multipolarity on the other.
Much is made of the ‘China threat’, which forms the basis of a new McCarthyism in the West. This threat is real enough, albeit not in the sense it’s used by bourgeois politicians and journalists. China does not seek to rule the world, nor does it seek to ‘undermine democracy worldwide’. It is however increasingly challenging the established imperialist world order – economically, strategically and ideologically.
To the extent that China’s extraordinary growth was driven by low-cost, low-margin, low-tech, large-scale manufacturing within US-led supply chains – and to the extent that the abundant supply of cheap, competent and well-educated Chinese labour has made a lot of Americans very rich – the US cautiously tolerated China’s emergence from generalised poverty. [...] But China’s long-term strategy was not aimed at permanently playing a subservient role in a globalised economy dominated by the US. [...]
China’s economic structure gives the Communist Party of China (CPC) government various powerful levers for directing production. In particular, the publicly-owned banks, the dominance of state-owned enterprises in the ‘commanding heights’ of industry, and the enforcement of a strict set of regulations on private business have allowed the government to steadily rise up the global value chain and construct an advanced economy. ‘China is the only authentically emergent country’, wrote Samir Amin. Chinese scientific research is increasingly world-class. China is the biggest trading partner of most countries in the world, and has become a major source of investment in developing countries. It’s leading the way in the battle against climate breakdown – the sort of thing the West expects to dominate, that feeds into a pervasive (albeit largely subconscious) assumption that the predominantly white nations of Western Europe and North America are fundamentally more ‘civilised’ and ‘enlightened’ than the rest of the world.
If China’s progress were occurring within a framework of US-led imperialism, if US finance capital were able to exercise meaningful control over the process, it would be less of a problem. Japan, Germany, and South Korea have all become significant players in the global economy in the post-war era, but since their rise has occurred within the boundaries of the imperialist world system, it hasn’t provoked any strategic crisis in Washington. These countries largely play by the US’s rules, and are to a greater or lesser degree militarily and politically beholden to the US.
As a non-white country – a country that consistently aligns itself and identifies with the Global South, a country with a Communist Party government, a country that rejects the neoliberal consensus, a country where the capitalist class does not dictate policy – China represents a substantial threat in the battle of ideas. China’s unprecedented increase in economic strength and geopolitical influence has provoked a renewed resolve in the US ruling class to ‘contain’ China; to apply the methods of Cold War against it in order to limit its rise and to secure a ‘New American Century’. [...]
With Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential elections, many hoped for an easing of tensions between the US and China. Five months into the Biden presidency, such hopes have to all intents and purposes been dashed. The New Cold War has become an invariant of a declining US capitalism determined to hold on to global hegemony via whatever means it can muster. Hostility towards China is a consensus, bipartisan position in the US. [...]
A crucial difference between the original Cold War and the current one is that the US is very unlikely to ‘win’ the New Cold War. Compared to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, China is much stronger economically, much more integrated into the global economy, and frankly has much stronger leadership and a more coherent vision for the future of socialism.
Soviet GDP never exceeded 40 percent of US GDP, but China will surpass the US in absolute GDP terms in the next couple of years. China has been able to avoid an arms race, and has not been involved in direct military confrontation with the imperialist powers – having made a strategic choice to prioritise the strengthening and defence of its own revolution over taking a leading role in the promotion of global revolution. Meanwhile its deep integration into global value chains, and the fact that it is the largest trading partner of the majority of the world’s countries, mean that stability in China is crucial for the global economy. As such, in economic terms, even the capitalist world has a clear vested interest in the People’s Republic of China not collapsing. [...]
‘Decoupling’ from China would be highly detrimental to the US economy, as it would mean losing access to a Chinese market of 1.4 billion people and increasing the production cost of a vast array of commodities. Tariffs on Chinese goods have a direct and immediate impact on US businesses that rely on these products (most are intermediate goods, used in the production process for consumer goods). Even Foreign Affairs magazine, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, has described the trade war as ‘unwinnable’, noting that ‘tariffs have hit US consumers harder than their Chinese counterparts.’ [...]
The outlook for the New Cold Warriors is not promising. China is not internationally isolated, is not suffering economic stagnation, and is not facing a crisis of legitimacy. The Chinese government enjoys enormous popularity at home, the result of ever-improving living standards at all levels of society. Wages are rising, social welfare is improving. [...]
It seems that every Cold War must have its own ‘third camp’ in the Western left. During the original Cold War, in particular in Britain, a significant proportion of the socialist movement rallied behind the slogan Neither Washington nor Moscow, withholding their support from a Soviet Union they considered to be state capitalist and/or imperialist. [...] A few decades later, this slogan has been resurrected as Neither Washington nor Beijing, with China taking the place of the Soviet Union as the evil ‘social imperialist’ power to be opposed. Presenting the New Cold War as an inter-imperialist conflict means that a number of prominent organisations and individuals on the left are failing to take an effective anti-war position. If China is ‘an emerging imperialist power’; if ‘socialists should side with workers — not the Chinese or American ruling class’; such socialists are unlikely to take a strong position against the rising US-led militarisation of the Pacific, or the China containment strategy, or economic ‘decoupling’, or against the varied forms of hybrid warfare being leveraged against China by the US and its allies.
Particularly under the Biden administration, phoney human rights allegations form a centrepiece of the attack on China. These allegations are being used to attempt to cut China out of global value chains, to disrupt the Belt and Road Initiative, to diplomatically isolate China and to generate anti-China sentiment worldwide. Unfortunately, much of the Western left – even if it has a stated position of opposing Cold War – is parroting this slander unquestioningly. [...]
The situation is reminiscent of the Western left’s failure to effectively oppose the NATO war on Libya. In theory, these pseudo-socialist groups claimed to be against bombing (with a few dishonourable exceptions that supported the No Fly Zone), yet they simultaneously echoed idiotic and unsubstantiated claims about the Gaddafi government which were clearly designed to build public support for war. [...] Similarly, the Western left largely failed to build an effective movement against the war in Syria, instead participating in the propaganda campaign against the Syrian government. [...]
Anti-China sentiment is at an all-time high, to the point where it is fomenting a rise in anti-Asian racism [...]. For the left to echo imperialist propaganda against China in the context of a burgeoning Cold War is to comprehensively abdicate its most basic responsibilities in the global struggle against imperialism.
The original Cold War was waged by the US and its allies not just against the Soviet Union but against the forces of socialism and national sovereignty worldwide. It was a protracted and multifaceted struggle to ensure the preservation of an imperialist status quo. The same is true of the New Cold War. It’s being waged by the US and its allies not just against China but the entire Global South, against the very notion of multipolarity, against the possibility of a democratic system of international relations and the end of hegemony.
China is a strong and increasingly consistent supporter of multipolarity – an international order in which there are multiple centres of power, creating an equilibrium that increases the costs of war and conflict, and promotes peaceful cooperation and integration. [...] Multipolarity provides a path for the defeat of modern imperialism; it involves weakening the forces of polarisation of wealth and power; it deprives the imperialist bloc of its power to determine the fate of the rest of the world through military action, sanctions and destabilisation. Because it enhances the sovereignty of the non-imperialist countries, it also by corollary helps to create appropriate conditions for those countries to pursue socialist experiments. Thus Samir Amin: ‘Multipolarity will provide the framework for the possible and necessary overcoming of capitalism.’ (Samir Amin. Beyond US Hegemony? New York: Zed Books, 2006, p. 149) [...]
Such a situation is precisely what the US ruling class is trying to avoid. This is the most powerful driver of the New Cold War. The imperialist powers – particularly the US, but generally supported by Canada, Britain, Western Europe and Japan – seek to maintain a unipolar status quo which provides maximum benefit to the US (with some crumbs to its allies) at the expense of the rest of the world. China by contrast is leading the construction of a multipolar world in which each country can choose its own development path and all countries are free to build mutually beneficial relations.
Those that oppose imperialism must therefore resolutely and consistently oppose the US-led New Cold War in all its manifold forms. To sit on the fence would be to uphold the imperialist status quo. (Article's date: 24/06/2021).
