While it has become nearly axiomatic for observers of world affairs to contend that the U.S.-led postwar order is under growing, if not unprecedented, duress, there is little consensus about what architecture, if any, might replace it. A recent assessment ventures that

the successor to the global system of governance we have known since the Second World War [may be] not another order but the absence of one. It is possible that the world, squeezed between the incompatible visions of a retreating U.S. and a resurgent China, is already hurtling toward chaos.

Given this uncertainty about the path forward, it is not surprising that analysts seek to identify historical parallels to the contemporary era and distill what guidance those comparisons might offer to today’s leaders. Two of the analogies that have emerged from that undertaking have proven especially enduring: the 1930s and the Cold War.

There are three main reasons why some observers contend that we may be either witnessing a return to—or on the cusp of reprising—the 1930s. The first is democratic recession. Freedom House observed at the beginning of 2018 that 2017 marked

the 12th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. Seventy-one countries suffered net declines in political rights and civil liberties in 2017, with only 35 registering gains. Once-promising states such as Turkey, Venezuela, Poland, and Tunisia were among those experiencing declines in democratic standards.

The organization also warned that China and Russia “are acting beyond their borders to squelch open debate, pursue dissidents, and compromise rules-based institutions.”

There is also growing concern about the mobilization of disintegrationist elements within Europe. In a speech in April last year, French president Emmanuel Macron warned that “a sort of European civil war is reappearing,” observing that “our differences, sometimes our national egoisms, appear more important than what unites us in relation to the rest of the world.” Even more ominously, he concluded that a “fascination with illiberalism…is growing by the day.” Examples of that fascination abound. Italy’s interior minister has called for a census of the country’s Roma population. Austria’s chancellor has urged his country to form an “axis of the willing against illegal migration” with Germany and Italy. In a multifaceted effort to limit George Soros’ influence, Hungary has forced the closure of Central European University, a prestigious Budapest-based institution funded by the philanthropist; pressured the Open Society Foundation until Soros declared that its Budapest operations were no longer safe; and passed a “Stop Soros” law that effectively criminalizes efforts to provide humanitarian aid and legal assistance to undocumented immigrants. The country’s prime minister has declared that: “Rather than try to fix a liberal democracy that has run aground, we will build a 21st-century Christian democracy.”

Some perspective is in order. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a sufficiently confident and widespread authoritarian ascent that, according to political theorist John Keane, only eleven electoral democracies remained by 1941. Franklin Roosevelt warned in a speech in March of that year that the United States would have to furnish “fuel in ever-increasing amounts” to safeguard “the great flame of democracy from the blackout of barbarism.” Today there are 116 electoral democracies—down from 120 two decades ago, concerningly, but still an impressive number.

The authoritarian resurgence of the 1930s coincided with and derived momentum from the Great Depression, which gave proponents of relatively untested “isms”—fascism in Japan and Nazism in Germany, notably—grounds to argue that they had insights into the cultivation of order and the generation of prosperity that adherents of democracies either could not or refused to discern. Today, however, there is no phenomenon of comparable magnitude. While the global financial crisis that began a little over a decade ago was a major shock to the system, its principal ideological effect was to delegitimize Western-style democracy, not to lend credence to authoritarian alternatives. The distinction is an important one: skepticism about the former does not automatically translate into support for the latter. One can concurrently express alarm over the problems plaguing many democracies today—national-level political paralysis and ever-increasing income and wealth inquality—and reject the squelching of dissent and the persecution of minorities that occur under strongman rule. In brief, authoritarianism may be gaining renewed traction, but it is doing so from a lower baseline than during the interwar period; democracy, meanwhile, may be experiencing significant challenges, but from a higher baseline.

A second fear is the prospect of deglobalization. Cross-border capital flows fell from $12.4 trillion in 2007 to $4.3 trillion in 2016, a 65 percent decline. The United Nations Investment Trends Monitor reported a 16 percent decline in global foreign direct investment as well as a 23 percent decline in the value of cross-border mergers and acquisitions between 2016 and 2017. There is a growing risk, moreover, that trade tensions between the United States and China could destabilize the world’s most important economic relationship.

It would be premature to suggest, however, that globalization is reversing. The World Bank reports that “net capital inflows [into developing countries] entered positive territory in 2017, following two years of large contractions”—a development that “has been facilitated by the improving economic outlook in several large emerging economies.” There are hopeful signs on trade flows as well. Consider an oft-cited gauge of globalization, the ratio between the growth rate of world merchandise trade and that of real gross world product. Historically hovering at 1.5, it fell to an average of 1.0 between 2011 and 2016; in 2017, however, it rebounded to 1.5. The World Trade Organization (WTO) forecast last April that trade would grow at 4.4 percent in 2018 and 4 percent this year, compared to the post-crisis average of three percent.

Continued progress on bilateral and regional trade deals suggests that this pace may endure. Eleven of the twelve countries that were negotiating a Trans-Pacific Partnership have finalized the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, covering some 13.5 percent of gross world product (GWP). Japan and the European Union (eu) have signed a bilateral trade agreement, the world’s largest, that accounts for roughly 30 percent of GWP. Negotiations are also inching forward on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a sixteen-country arrangement that, too, would incorporate some 30 percent of GWP.

The third reason some observers see parallels with the 1930s—and also, incidentally, with the Cold War—is the return of great power competition, with Russia and China occupying center stage. But neither country is posing a frontal assault on the postwar order; the former is opportunistically obstructive, while the latter is selectively revisionist. Moscow is continuously challenged by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to its west and increasingly dependent on China to its east. Beijing’s ambitions, meanwhile, are constrained not only by an increasingly apprehensive Washington but also by strong powers in Canberra, Delhi, Seoul and Tokyo that seek to forestall the resumption of a Sinocentric hierarchy in the Asia-Pacific. While the current order is undoubtedly under strain, there is at least an order to defend. Today, moreover, despite the present vagaries in its foreign policy, the United States is the world’s lone superpower; in the 1930s, by contrast, despite commanding the world’s largest economy, Washington’s military and diplomatic influence beyond its borders lagged far behind its industrial heft.

Perhaps even more common is the suggestion that the United States is entering into a new Cold War. There is little agreement on the antagonist in this alleged confrontation: some say that it is Russia; others, China; yet others, a Sino-Russian authoritarian axis; and even some, the menace of terrorism, in its ever-changing structure and roster of outfits. That this number of actors can be characterized as America’s putative opponent in a new Cold War suggests an intrinsic limitation to the analogy.

To speak of a new Cold War is to suggest not only that the United States once more confronts a rival power with ambitions of global dominance and pretensions to a universal ideology, but also that that power can and will employ territorial aggression, proxy warfare and client states across the world in the service of its strategic objectives. Neither of the two supposed antagonists in this sequel, though, would seem to fit this description.

Russia is undoubtedly a major power, commanding the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, the world’s largest proven reserves of natural gas and a veto on the United Nations Security Council. But it is a pale shadow of the Soviet Union, which, upon dissolving, yielded Russia and fourteen post-Soviet republics, three of which—Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia—now belong to NATO. Russia’s population is slated to decline from roughly 144 million today to 133 million by 2050, a nearly 8 percent drop. Its energy leverage in Europe, while significant, is far less than it was at the end of the Cold War; where Moscow accounted for three-quarters of the EU’s gas imports in 1990, it now accounts for under two-fifths.

Russia has proven itself to be a skilled opportunist: it hived off Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia in 2008, wrested Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and has exploited the civil war in Syria to establish itself as an increasingly central external actor in the Middle East’s evolution. On balance, though, it remains a predominantly regional power whose ideology has limited international appeal, unlike Communism during the Cold War. Whereas the Soviet Union had national power at least partially commensurate with its revisionist intentions, Russia does not have the capacity to do much more than play the role of occasional spoiler. It is attempting to ride the coattails of China’s resurgence because it recognizes that Beijing, more than any other country, is capable of molding a postwar order more in line with its preferred norms and arrangements.

And what of China? Most U.S. observers now believe that it constitutes the central challenge to U.S. preeminence. While Beijing is not an adversary, the contours of an intense, long-term, multifaceted competition between the two countries are crystallizing, beginning with China’s military modernization. American observers are increasingly concerned that its growing investments in anti-access/area-denial technologies are intended to undermine the U.S. maritime presence in the Asia-Pacific, and that its growing reclamation and fortification of islands in the South China Sea will give it de facto control of an area through which over a fifth of the world’s maritime trade passes. While its emerging capabilities are still concentrated primarily on the Asia-Pacific, Xi Jinping wants Beijing to “turn itself into a modernized power by 2035” and possess “a top-tier military by 2050.” As its economic interests grow more global, so does its military presence. China established its first overseas military base in 2017, in Djibouti; is reportedly planning to build another one, near Pakistan’s Gwadar Port; and, according to the Afghan government, intends to finance the construction of one in Badakhshan.

China’s economic progress is arguably of even greater concern to the United States. Beijing is on track to displace Washington in absolute economic size well before the middle of this century. It appears intent on constructing and anchoring an expansive Eurasian economic order, especially as seen with its work on the Belt and Road (BRI) initiative. Having been included in the International Monetary Fund’s basket of special drawing rights, the renminbi is embarking on a slow but concerted push to become a global reserve currency. Finally, Beijing is taking significant steps to boost its indigenous economic capacity; its spending on research and development increased over thirty-fold between 1995 and 2013, and the government recently announced a strategy that aims to have China become the world’s foremost leader in artificial intelligence by 2030. There is also an appreciable risk that growing trade tensions between Washington and Beijing could yield security ones; the United States increasingly regards China’s technological ambitions as a threat to its national security, while China believes that its existing degree of economic dependence on the U.S. economy gives the United States an unacceptable measure of leverage over its economy. Given that trade interdependence has been one of the few restraints to date on their competition, an erosion of that connective tissue could thrust their relationship into a far more uncertain, potentially escalatory, phase.

Finally, an erstwhile muted ideological component of U.S.-China relations is acquiring more salience. The Chinese Communist Party’s move to end presidential term limits means that President Xi could well rule over China for as long as he lives. His policies to date suggest that Beijing’s increasing integration into the global economy, far from inducing it to temper its domestic illiberalism, has made it more confident in its authoritarianism. At the first session of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, he called Chinese governance “a great contribution to political civilization of humanity” and argued that democratic governance, “confined by interests of different political parties, classes, regions, and groups, tears society apart.” In “Document 9,” moreover, issued in April 2013, senior Party leaders warned that China had to counter “Western forces hostile to China,” including the promulgation of “constitutional democracy” and “universal values” of human rights. China is also becoming more aggressive in its crackdown on political dissidents and ethnic minorities.

In the aggregate, then, while most U.S. observers continue to emphasize both the competitive and cooperative elements of U.S.-China relations, they increasingly fear that the former are overtaking the latter.

Still, it is a leap too far to conclude that the United States is in a new Cold War with China. America’s confrontation with the Soviet Union spanned the entire world; today, however, Washington is the lone superpower, while Beijing remains a regional power, albeit one with an increasingly global footprint. Middle powers have far more room to benefit from U.S.-China rivalry than they did from U.S.-Soviet rivalry: they can increase their diplomatic and security ties with the United States while boosting their trade and investment relations with China. Beijing is not undertaking to export revolutionary ideology in the way that Moscow did. The United States and China have also achieved an extraordinary level of economic interdependence over the past four decades, and especially since China’s accession to the WTO in 2001. In addition, notes the Brookings Institution’s Cheng Li, even as the two countries

become increasingly suspicious of one another’s strategic intentions, contact between the two nations has never been broader, deeper, and more frequent than it is today—whether it be at the head of state, military, think tank, sub-national, commercial, educational, cultural, or tourism level.

Because the core of U.S.-China rivalry is economic and technological, not militaristic and ideological, there is greater room for pragmatic cooperation.

China recognizes that the Soviet Union erred by launching a frontal military and ideological assault on the prevailing order; it is more likely to develop its global footprint by building infrastructure than by deploying its armed forces or attempting to inculcate its ideology in distant countries. While it is pressing for greater reforms within the current system and developing a parallel architecture on the outside, it is not agitating for the system’s collapse. There is also little evidence thus far that China seeks to be a superpower in the U.S. mold.

While skeptical observers might not be as sanguine, China has real, increasingly manifest vulnerabilities at home and abroad. Protracted trade tensions with the United States have exposed frailties in Beijing’s economy, beginning with its gross debt, which grew from 171 percent of gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2008 to 299 percent in the first quarter of 2018. A confluence of phenomena—the aforementioned trade tensions, the recent collapse of a wave of peer-to-peer lending schemes, a grim demographic outlook and a scandal over tainted vaccines, among them—has dented the halo of invincibility around Xi’s rule.

Abroad, the BRI is encountering growing pushback, with a striking recent example coming from Malaysia. Announcing that he was canceling two Chinese-funded projects worth some $22 billion, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad declared: “We do not want a situation where there is a new version of colonialism happening because poor countries are unable to compete with rich countries.” While Taiwan continues to lose formal recognition, China has been unable to subdue its ambitions for independence; nor, as noted by Michal Thim of the Prague-based Association for International Affairs, has it been able to disrupt Taipei’s “extensive global engagement, including significant relationships with the United States, Europe and Japan.” Finally, its authoritarianism is coming under harsher scrutiny, with numerous reports detailing the intrusiveness of its surveillance apparatus and its widespread detainment of Uighurs.

If it is wrong to portray Russia as an aggrieved Eurasian player whose influence is selective and constrained, it is at least as unhelpful to characterize it as a resurgent global power whose influence is wide-ranging and ubiquitous. And if it is misguided to depict China as a fatally hubristic upstart, it cannot be constructive to imagine it an inexorably ascendant colossus. U.S. foreign policy would be better served by adopting more nuanced assessments of the Russian and Chinese challenges than by oscillating between these exaggerations: neither reflexive complacency nor indefinite consternation will enable U.S. competitiveness over the long term.

Nor, it should be added, will treating those two countries’ foreign policies as a joint strategic challenge. There is every reason to expect that their relationship will continue to grow along military, economic and political dimensions. Still, Moscow and Beijing are not allies: their relationship is rooted more in shared resentments—for example, of U.S. democracy promotion and the centrality of the U.S. dollar in global finance—than in a common vision. In addition, as the economic gap between the two has grown, so has China’s ability to establish a presence in Russia’s Far East, displace Russia’s economic influence in Central Asia and otherwise establish itself as the dominant partner in the relationship. Perhaps the surest way to hasten their alignment would be to treat them as a joint strategic challenge, as the White House’s new national security strategy and the Pentagon’s new defense strategy do on numerous occasions. While Washington may not be able to accentuate extant strategic fissures between the two countries, it can pursue alternatives to dual containment that appreciate the differences between the Russian and Chinese challenges to the postwar order.

On December 11, 1988, with the Cold War winding down, a top advisor to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev addressed a group of U.S. and Soviet scientists who had assembled at the University of California Irvine. Georgi Arbatov said to his U.S. colleagues: “Our major secret weapon is to deprive you of an enemy.” He explained: “So much was built out of this role of the enemy. Your foreign policy, quite a bit of your economy, even your feelings about your country.” What the 1930s and the Cold War both furnished was—and perhaps what the invocation of those periods today seeks to restore is—a sense of strategic clarity: an unequivocal adversary sharpens decisionmaking and galvanizes public opinion more effectively than opportunistic spoilers and selective revisionists.

In contending with Russia, America’s challenge is three-fold: to preserve a baseline of cooperation where vital U.S. national interests are at stake, to mitigate the irredentist tendencies of a country that waxes nostalgic for its imperial predecessors and to restore a sense of national cohesion that can resist external subversion. Whether the United States meets the China challenge over the long term, meanwhile, will depend on a number of factors: the durability of its economic growth; its ability to remain at the forefront of scientific and technological innovation; its creativity in conducting geo-economic diplomacy, especially in the Asia-Pacific; and its success in persuading long-standing allies that their national interests would be better served by helping to revitalize the postwar order than by conceding its erosion. China is a more nuanced, incremental competitor than the Soviet Union—and, for that reason, a more challenging one.

The absence of a decided foe has contributed to the lack of strategic discipline in U.S. foreign policy over the past quarter-century, and especially in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Some in Washington increasingly appears to have accepted the prospect of interminable war in the Middle East, a resignation that, if not revisited, could impose a permanent constraint on its ability to compete with China in the Asia-Pacific. The United States has now been in Afghanistan for more than seventeen years, and though it has made little to no net progress in reducing the Taliban’s share of territory in that country, there is growing controversy on whether it intends to extricate itself. The war in Iraq, meanwhile, is well over fifteen years old, and the United States still has some 5,200 troops there—plus another 2,000 or so in Syria—to prevent the reemergence of the Islamic State.

If the world is neither revisiting the interwar period nor embarking on a sequel to the Cold War, where exactly is it heading? There is no shortage of answers: a new era of U.S. preeminence, Chinese preeminence, a U.S.-China “G2,” multipolarity, regional spheres of influence, nonpolarity and a vacuum in order are just a few that observers have offered. Perhaps the most accurate answer is also the most banal: it is hard to say. While the postwar order is eroding, there is no readily apparent replacement in the offing. The National Intelligence Council posits that “[t]he net effect of rising tensions within and between countries—and the growing threat from terrorism—will be greater global disorder and considerable questions about the rules, institutions, and distribution of power in the international system.”

Perhaps the biggest question involves the role of the United States. In the 1930s it was an emerging power in a world without a clearly defined order. During the Cold War it was one pole of a generally bipolar order. There was a fleeting, roughly seventeen-year period between the end of the Cold War and the onset of the global financial crisis in which, possessing a level of preeminence that it is unlikely to ever reclaim, it proactively sought to diffuse the norms and bolster the institutions it established at the outset of the postwar era. Between the downturn and the inauguration of President Donald Trump, an even shorter interval, it tried to adapt the order in view of the grievances, capabilities and ambitions of core emerging powers. Today, however, under the Trump administration, the United States is both a central pillar of today’s order and one of its principal challengers—a duality whose oddity is difficult to overstate.

Financial Times Chief Economics Commentator Martin Wolf notes that Trump

has identified a large and resentful part of the U.S. body politic whose state is unlikely to get any better, while the gerrymandering of the U.S. vote is likely to get even worse. Not least, a growing number of Americans agree that China is a cheat and a threat and Europeans are carping freeloaders.

While a Trump presidency was a possibility to be weighed, not a reality to be managed, long-standing U.S. allies could reassure themselves that Washington was simply having a more open debate about foreign policy than that which occurs during a typical election cycle. No longer, though. No matter how strenuously Trump’s successor undertakes to pursue the reverse of “America First,” those allies will wonder if, and when, the United States might again elect someone with a similarly bilateral, transactional approach to world affairs. That is, where they previously had only to contend with oscillations that occurred under the auspices of a bipartisan conviction—that U.S. investment in the postwar order was a net strategic benefit—they now have to factor in the possibility that a future U.S. president, too, will depart from that conviction. Should that scenario materialize, they will rightly begin to wonder whether the aberrations have become the new principles.

During his campaign as well as his time in office, Trump has stressed that external uncertainty about the direction of U.S. foreign policy would allow him to negotiate more effectively with his counterparts abroad. In an April 2016 address to the Center for the National Interest, to cite an early instance, he declared that the United States “must as, a nation, be more unpredictable.” There are esteemed proponents of this stance: Jerry Hendrix, the former director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program at the Center for a New American Security, for example, explains that the president “has reintroduced strategic ambiguity and uncertainty, to create diplomatic, economic, and military options with regard to the nation’s interactions with the outside world.”

A degree of such ambiguity invariably inheres in any administration’s foreign policy: top officials neither publicize all of their internal debates nor telegraph every instance in which there may be gaps between America’s declared and actual policies on a given issue. Countries expend enormous effort—parsing official government documents, conducting private diplomacy, producing intelligence assessments and so forth—trying to discern others’ intentions. But execution matters more than intent: while Trump has rightly interrogated the nature and scope of America’s involvement in the postwar order, such is the momentum that often accompanies fundamental recalibrations that it risks producing overreaction. The continuation of an “America First” policy will compel long-standing allies to be more proactive in fashioning arrangements and institutions that circumvent America’s reach; consider, for example, the German foreign minister’s call for a new payments system independent of Washington, the aforementioned Japan-EU free trade deal, the establishment of an EU-China-working group that will consider how to update the WTO and growing coordination between the EUand China to write the rules that will govern global internet policy. A United States that is increasingly alone will be increasingly incapable of advancing its national interests.

Ali Wyne is a policy analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.

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