It will be dumber the second time
into the cesspit of Second Cold War discourse
Last week I discussed some reasons for and against the label of “Cold War” to describe US-Chinese relations, but mostly ignored the ethical implications of this debate. Since then I’ve encountered some genuinely terrible takes on the subject, so I wanted to expand on the idea just a bit.
One thing I failed to mention is how the presence of Chinese-Americans in the US — something largely missing during the first Cold War — complicates the debate. If you’re a China dove, one argument might be that any criticism of China’s regime amounts to racism against Chinese-Americans:
I think this argument can be taken too far, and used as a cheap way to shield China’s regime from legitimate criticism. As Alex Hazanov points out, it’s the same patronizing conflation people make when arguing that any criticism of Israel must be an attack on American Jews.
The doves are right, however, that the presence of nearly four million Chinese-Americans makes cold war discourse more fraught than the first time around, when the Soviets were “white” and safely far away. Official statements and attitudes will have to take special care, but in general the US does not have a great history in this regard. I fully expect reactionary cranks to demand that Chinese-Americans publicly and ritualistically denounce the Chinese government. Still, I hope it should be obvious that characterizing any critique of China’s government as “imperialist” or “sinophobic” is silly.
I say this optimistically, but the ideological arguments are going to be terrible. I fully expect and dread, for example, a resurgence of Huntington-style analysis filled with civilizational pieties about China and the US. It will not be pretty, from either side:
Take first Cold War discourse, add a dash of racism, filter it through social media, and you are beginning to get a sense of how dumb the debates are going to be.
I joked on Twitter that if we’re going to do a re-run of the old Cold War debates, we should just skip straight to post-revisionism. But I mean that sincerely in the sense of needing to move beyond the dove-hawk dichotomy, a feeling that I’m sure is shared by many.
Let’s imagine the caricatured dove position as something like: criticizing China is an endorsement of US imperialism and should never be done. Anyway there is nothing to be criticized for, since China is merely reacting to aggressive US policy. Chinese domestic sovereignty and its territorial claims abroad should be respected.
Let’s imagine the caricatured hawk position as something like: the US is merely seeking to protect the rules-based order, which China is seeking to destroy; any increase in tensions is a result of Chinese provocation; the country must be isolated and its regime overthrown. (This is barely a caricature, mind you.)
And let’s please agree that neither position is going to be very helpful. That both China and the US have taken steps to worsen their relationship; that both are capable of taking steps to improve it; that both are driven by domestic interests that may preclude the effective resolution of tension; that both exist in an environment of uncertainty in which each sees the other as credibly threatening.
And, let’s agree that we can believe these things without adopting a stance of moral relativism toward the two regimes.
Still, it’s too easy to retreat into the shell of neutrality or to avoid the ideological or moral dimensions altogether. It’s true that when discussing US-China policy we are talking about the lives of millions of people, and not just in those two states. That’s probably part of the reason there were such antagonistic, almost visceral reactions to a recent Foreign Affairs piece that suggested Taiwan should essentially be given up to China to avoid a hegemonic war. (For a substantive critique see here).
I am not immune to these thoughts either. I have to admit, there is something morally odious in wishing for another great power conflict to solve America’s domestic problems. Last week I mentioned this as a provocation — the idea that a common enemy might restore bipartisan FP consensus and keep U.S. institutions from collapse. But it turns out this was a common enough view.
Yet the Cold War was a terrible time, full of conflict and civil wars, not to mention everyone living in the shadow of nuclear disaster. To wish for a return to such a time is to express desire for a political salve that, last time around, cost the lives of millions.
I suppose you could run a thought experiment: what if you believe that without the restoration of a new cold war consensus, US politics will slide into complete gridlock, leading to further polarization, violence, and eventually civil war. Could you then make a moral case for a second cold war? I guess it’s possible, in the sense that any counter-factual is possible, but it’s not especially persuasive.
(By the way, I reject the meta-critique that even discussing something like a cold war reifies the concept. This isn’t something like “the Axis of Evil” where we instantiate an imaginary enemy purely through rhetorical framing.)
In any case, I am still uncomfortable with framing the defining feature of our time as another Cold War. A better way might be to simply re-emphasize the role of democracy in our discourse — not the thin, procedural, Schumpeterian notions of democracy that have become dominant but the thick, substantive, everyday-life notion of democracy as freedom, community, and solidarity. As John Dewey put it, “A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living.” Rather than filtering everything through the prism of a rivalry with China, I would prefer to think of the coming decades as a re-establishing of the old mode of democracy.
And if we are going to pick a cold war “doctrine”, we should consider that neither Russia or China is looking great in the medium run. It seems that despite its supposed efficiency the Chinese regime is unable to resolve the information problem common in closed regimes, that regime personalization under Xi has worsened the problem, and that this, combined with structural/demographic problems, means the Chinese regime has a rough road ahead in the next 10-30 years.
If so, the best policy for US is certainly to avoid head-on confrontation in favor of something like neo-containment. But that’s another conversation.
I personally won't count Nigerian civil war, Iraq-Iran war or even Indo Pakistan war aka Bangladesh liberation war as product of cold war. Yes they occurred during it and last case involved 3 cold war antagonist, but I still feel it was a local affair.