Can The U.S. Fight A Cold War With China?

Members of a military medical team head for Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, on Jan. 26, 2020. (Xinhua/Cheng Min)

Hal Brands, Bloomberg: Can a Broke America Fight a Cold War With China?

The coronavirus has united Americans against Beijing’s aggressions, but it will also devastate the Pentagon budget.

America seems to be on the verge of declaring cold war on China, while simultaneously weakening its own ability to wage such a conflict. Across the ideological spectrum, U.S. hostility to China has surged just as financial fallout of the pandemic threatens to harm the U.S. defense budget for years to come.

The U.S. may thus be entering a period like the beginning of the original Cold War, when it decided to confront the Soviet Union on a shoestring. The U.S. ultimately won that Cold War, of course, but that analogy should be less comforting than it first seems because it reminds us that a cash-strapped approach to competition can be an extremely risky one.

For several years, American national security elites have mostly called for a more competitive strategy toward China, while the American people have not been so certain. Now the coronavirus has convinced many Americans that the Chinese government poses not just some nebulous threat to the U.S.-led international order, but a direct danger to their prosperity and well-being. Overwhelming majorities of Republicans and Democrats now favor a China policy as tough as or tougher than the Donald Trump administration’s current stance. With an eye to November, Trump and presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden are competing over who is the bigger China hawk. As economic decoupling accelerates, and rhetoric and policies harden on both sides, the U.S.-China cold war that pundits have been predicting may actually be unfolding.

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WNU Editor: I concur with the above analysis that there has been an enormous shift in US public opinion when it comes to China. Most Americans are now convinced that the Chinese do not only pose an economic threat, but a very real danger to everyone's well being. I guess the death of tens of thousands of Americans coupled with a lockdown that has impacted every American economically from a virus that came from China has put a nail in that coffin. As for China, the government does see the current chaos caused by coronavirus pandemic as a window of strategic opportunity than a reason for restraint, and are going to implement what it takes to assert its geopolitical objectives. But while I do not believe the U.S. is ready to fight a Cold War against China, I do not think China is ready to fight one either. That is why I think the focus from now on for both countries will be economic, and the country that can come out of this pandemic economically first will be the one best positioned to influence geopolitical events in the future.