THE UNITED States and China are locked in a fierce blame shifting battle to control the narrative of the coronavirus pandemic. But this contest for public diplomacy and soft power dominance is a symptom, not the cause, of the deepening hostility between Washington and Beijing. Over the summer, Sino-American tensions boiled over as the United States ramped up its campaign against Chinese telecom giant Huawei; slapped sanctions on China in response both to Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong and human rights abuses committed against China’s Muslim Uighur population; formally rejected China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea; and shuttered China’s consulate in Houston, TX for alledgedly serving as a base for Chinese espionage against the United States. At the same time, in a series of high-level speeches—capped off by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—the Trump administration escalated its anti-China rhetoric.

Two powerful forces are shaping the future of Sino-American relations: geopolitics—in the form of power transition dynamics—and America’s liberal ideology. If managed—guided by the tenets of realpolitik and classical statecraft—it is possible to keep even intense great power competitions from tipping over the precipice into war. However, a coterie of China hawks threatens to recast Sino-American relations as something quite different: a Second Cold War that is fast becoming an all-out ideological struggle reminiscent of the First Cold War that the United States waged with the Soviet Union. Unlike the First Cold War, however, there is a high probability the Sino-American Cold War will culminate in a real—hot—war.

Washington is coming to view the Sino-American rivalry through the lens of ideology—American Liberalism vs. Chinese Communism—rather than as a traditional great power rivalry. When ideology is inserted into the equation, it is all too easy to demonize one’s rival. Once that happens, it is difficult to employ diplomacy to adjust differences, because compromising with an “evil” state would be “appeasement.”

Even before the coronavirus pandemic, Sino-American relations were spiraling downward. Under President Donald Trump, the United States has initiated a trade war with China, and intensified the high-tech competition with Beijing by trying to cripple leading Chinese firms (especially Huawei, the leader in 5G technology). In the realm of geopolitics, the administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy declared that “after being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition” between the United States and China “[has] returned.”

THE CORONAVIRUS pandemic has accelerated the fraying of Sino-American relations, which have gone from bad to worse. According to a March 2020 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, two thirds of Americans have a negative view of China. Trying to deflect attention from its own bungled response to the pandemic, the Trump administration has tapped into this anti-China sentiment by blaming Beijing for coronavirus, and for covering up the seriousness of the disease’s outbreak in Wuhan. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has alleged—without providing any factual basis—that “there’s enormous evidence” that the coronavirus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Trump himself has insinuated that China deliberately released the coronavirus in order to sabotage his reelection prospects by damaging the U.S. economy. Although the administration is pressuring U.S. intelligence to back up Trump’s and Pompeo’s claims, they remain uncorroborated.

The Pentagon is leveraging the pandemic to request additional funds to counter Chinese military power. With respect to trade policy, the administration is using the pandemic to call for “re-shoring” manufacturing jobs from China back to the United States, and also is pushing American firms to reorient their supply chains away from China. The Trump administration already has taken some retaliatory measures against Beijing, including: curbing U.S. semiconductor sales to China; limiting the use of Chinese equipment in the U.S. power grid; limiting investments in China by the Thrift Saving Plan, a retirement and savings program for federal employees; and banning China Telecom from American telecommunications networks. And Trump and his senior advisors reportedly are looking for ways to compel China to compensate Washington financially—i.e. “reparations”—for the damage to the U.S. economy caused by the pandemic. Ideas that have been floated for this are withholding interest payments to Beijing on its holdings of U.S. Treasury bills, and repealing China’s sovereign immunity so that it can be sued in American courts to recover economic damages caused by the pandemic. Pursuing the former would risk the dollar’s standing as the international system’s reserve currency, and the latter would run afoul of one of international law’s foundational principles.

The pandemic also is impacting American domestic politics—in ways that will affect U.S. foreign policy. Trump’s reelection strategy aims at exploiting growing anti-China sentiment in the United States by pinning responsibility for the pandemic on China, and attacking former Vice President Joseph Biden (the Democratic presidential nominee) as being “soft” on China. In Congressional races, Republican candidates are being advised to follow a similar approach: blaming Beijing for the coronavirus crisis and the massive economic dislocation it has caused in the United States. As the New York Times has reported, “Republicans increasingly believe that elevating China as an archenemy culpable for the spread of the virus, and harnessing America’s growing animosity toward Beijing, may be the best way to salvage a difficult election.” The gop’s emerging stars—Senators Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and former un ambassador Nikki Haley—are vying with each other to stake out uber-hawkish positions on China, and playing up the idea that the United States is locked in an ideological struggle with Communist China. 

Whether China bashing is the path to electoral victory for Trump and the Republicans remains to be seen. However, this domestic political strategy is stoking the Second Cold War, talk of which already was commonplace in Washington well before the pandemic’s outbreak. It began shortly after Trump took office and steadily has grown in both volume and vehemence. In a July 2019 column, the Financial Times’ Edward Luce—a keen observer of American politics—confessed that “The speed with which US political leaders of all stripes have united behind the idea of a ‘new cold war’ is something that takes my breath away.” As Luce observed, less than two years ago the notion that the United States and China were locked in a new Cold War was dismissed as “fringe scaremongering.” But now, he says, “it is consensus.”

OF COURSE, from the American standpoint, great power rivalry with China, and the Second Cold War, should not be happening. When the First Cold War ended with the Berlin Wall’s fall (1989), and the Soviet Union’s implosion (1991), U.S. policymakers, foreign policy analysts, and pundits believed these events heralded the “end of history”—the final triumph of America’s liberal democratic/capitalist ideology. Similarly, Charles Krauthammer announced America’s “unipolar moment”—which in 2001 he amended to the unipolar era—which, perforce, meant the end of great power politics. In the First Cold War’s wake, American policymakers, and many security studies scholars, believed that a one superpower world would be long-lasting—“durable” and sustainable. Many of them still do. It is unsurprising, therefore, that since the First Cold War’s end, preserving America’s preponderant power—“primacy” has become the accepted code word—has been the overriding grand strategic goal of each administration beginning with that of George H.W. Bush. For the American foreign policy establishment this is not a commitment to an abstract theory of “unipolar politics” propounded by international relations scholars. Rather, it reflects their preference for a unipolar world in which the United States is the “uni.” 

With respect to China, after the First Cold War, a broad and bipartisan swath of the American foreign policy establishment harbored high hopes for future relations. They subscribed to the notion that China’s rise would be peaceful, and believed that, after its admission to the World Trade Organization in December 2001, China would liberalize—politically as well as economically. Rather than being conflictive, the Sino-American relationship—“Chimerica,” as some dubbed it—would be one of mutually beneficial cooperation. This would take place within the framework of the post-World War II, liberal, rules-based international order, with Beijing playing the role of America’s junior partner (or, as then-Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick put it, “a responsible stakeholder”). Even a risen China, it was believed, would accept the liberal rules-based international order rather than overthrowing it and replacing it with a more Sino-centric international order.

It should have been apparent even in the early 1990s that these beliefs—about the permanence of America’s ideological victory, the nature of U.S. power, and China’s geopolitical aspirations—rested on a flimsy intellectual foundation. The ballyhooed post-Cold War peace turned out to be a peace of illusions. Notwithstanding the American foreign policy establishment’s professed commitment to U.S. primacy, there is today an obvious cognitive dissonance in elite thinking: it’s hard to square claims of continuing American primacy with China’s emergence as a great power. Outward expressions of confidence in American primacy mask unacknowledged inner doubts about the changing balance of power. For example, the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia was an (at least) implicit recognition of China’s rise, and the shifting balance of power in East Asia. The same can be said of the Trump administration’s “Indo-Pacific” strategy. Similarly, the febrile Sino-American Cold War rhetoric sweeping Washington is difficult to reconcile with assertions of continuing U.S. geopolitical supremacy. The now fashionable contention that great power politics has “returned”—with Sino-American relations as the catalyst—clashes with the claim emanating from U.S. policy and academic circles that the international system remains unipolar. After all, great power politics can only “return” if there is more than one great power.

SINCE THE First Cold War ended, the U.S. foreign policy establishment has been divided into two camps with respect to China: hawks and engagers. Engagers have believed that China’s incorporation into international institutions, and integration into the international economy will foster economic and—ultimately—political liberalization in China. On the other hand, hawks see a rising China as a threat to American interests; militarily, but also economically, technologically, and—increasingly—ideologically. The Pentagon invariably has been hawkish on China. Much of the hawks’ worldview can be traced back to the so-called Blue Team that emerged at the tail end of the Clinton administration. Writing in the Washington Post, Robert G. Kaiser and Steven Mufson described the Blue Team as “a loose alliance of members of Congress, congressional staff, think tank fellows, Republican political operatives, conservative journalists, lobbyists for Taiwan, former intelligence officers and a handful of academics, all united in the view that a rising China poses great risks to America’s vital interests.”

Until recently U.S. policy towards China has incorporated both hawkish and pro-engagement perspectives, but with the balance between them shifting. The George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and Obama administrations leaned more toward engagement. The George W. Bush and Trump administrations have taken a harder line toward Beijing. Harking back to the premises underlying the draft FY 1994-99 Defense Planning Guidance, the George W. Bush administration sought to maintain unipolarity by dissuading China from modernizing its military. It warned Beijing that,

In pursuing advanced military capabilities that can threaten its neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region, China is following an outdated path that, in the end, will hamper its own pursuit of national greatness. In time, China will find that social and political freedom is the only source of that greatness.

Hammering home this point, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that any moves by China to enhance its military capabilities were necessarily a signal of aggressive Chinese intent because “no nation threatens China.” For emphasis, this point was restated in the administration’s report, The Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, which declared that “China’s military modernization remains ambitious” and that “China’s leaders may be tempted to resort to force or coercion more quickly to press diplomatic advantage, advance security interests, or resolve disputes.”

Until recently, however, Pentagon hawkishness was offset by the American business community’s, and the broader foreign policy establishment’s, pro-engagement stance. As already noted, this support for engagement largely has melted away during the Trump administration. Engagement has been displaced by an emerging Second Cold War consensus, which in many respects resembles the First Cold War consensus that coalesced in 1946–1947 as hopes for postwar cooperation with the Soviet Union gave way to implacable rivalry. American strategy seeks to ring China with U.S. military forces and alliances, just as Washington did with the Soviet Union following the Second World War. And the Sino-American relationship increasingly is depicted—as was the U.S.-Soviet relationship—as a clash between two irreconcilable ideologies.

The Trump administration has affirmed its determination to maintain America’s extra-regional hegemony in East Asia (a product of the U.S. victory over Japan in World War II). Indeed, it has widened the geographical scope of U.S. interests to encompass the “Indo-Pacific” (which now includes South Asia and the Indian Ocean in addition to East and Southeast Asia). As then-Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan said in June 2019, the United States is a “resident power” in the region. According to the Pentagon, the existing international order in the region—the Pax Americana established after 1945—is endangered by China’s growing power, and the ambitions that it fuels: “As China continues its economic and military ascendance, it seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and, ultimately global preeminence in the long-term.” The Trump administration’s strategic “vision” is that “no one nation can or should dominate the Indo-Pacific.” Administration officials fear that China is catching up to U.S. military power in the region and will use its enhanced capabilities to lock the United States out of the region economically. The Trump administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy makes clear that the United States will counter China by maintaining U.S. military superiority, strengthening America’s regional alliances and partnerships, and boosting the military capabilities of its U.S. regional allies. As part of its strategy, the Pentagon is developing a new intermediate-range ballistic missile intended for deployment in East Asia in response to China’s military buildup.

When it comes to U.S. policy toward China, great power politics is only part of the story. American policymakers are revisiting the First Cold War by characterizing Sino-American relations as a Manichean ideological struggle between freedom and communist authoritarianism. In his July 24 speech, “Communist China and the Free World’s Future”—delivered at the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California—Secretary Pompeo recycled the First Cold War’s harshest, most over-the-top rhetoric. He stated that Chinese president Xi Jinping is a “true believer in a bankrupt totalitarian ideology.” He asserted that unless the United States pushes back hard, the Chinese Communist Party will “erode our freedom.” For good measure, he stated that the United States “can’t treat this incarnation of China as a normal country, like any other.” Indeed, for Pompeo, China as a state does not exist. For him, the sole reality is the Chinese Communist Party.

When American policymakers and foreign policy analysts continually play up the fact that China’s government is communist, they do so with a purpose. At least subliminally they seek to: recall the direst First Cold War depictions of the Soviet “threat” (“the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin”); de-legitimize China’s government in the eyes of the American public; and create an “enemy image” of China as a bad actor in international politics. In short, they seek to unleash America’s “crusader state” mentality. While not—quite (or yet)—employing the kind of overwrought, lurid language of official U.S. pronouncements during the First Cold War, the rhetoric emanating from Washington about China does evoke memories of documents such as NSC-68. The Trump administration says great power politics is “defined by geopolitical rivalry between free and repressive world order visions...” Which means that for the United States, the Sino-American relationship is more about ideology than it is about the balance of power. Lest there be any doubt that ideology is a driving force in U.S. China policy, the Indo-Pacific Strategy report declares:

Yet while the Chinese people aspire to free markets, justice, and the rule of law, the People’s Republic of China, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, undermines the international system from within by exploiting its benefits while simultaneously eroding the values and principles of the rules-based order.

Similarly, Vice President Michael Pence’s October 2018 and October 2019 speeches on China also emphasized the ideological differences between the United States and China. And speaking in London in January 2020, Secretary of State Pompeo declared that the Chinese Communist Party—not China as a great power—is “the central threat of our times.”

The signs of the Second Cold War are hard to miss. In a rare display of bipartisanship, Congress passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. One of the bill’s sponsors, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said, “The United States and the international community must make clear to Chinese leaders and power brokers that their aggression toward Hong Kong risks swift, severe and lasting consequences.” Rubio warned that Hong Kong is not “simply China’s internal affair.” Gordon Chang, who comments regularly on China, has suggested that “contagion” from Hong Kong could spill over onto the mainland and cause the collapse of communism. Beijing’s policy toward Muslims in Xinjiang has been widely denounced in the United States. And Congress has passed veto-proof legislation to compel the Trump administration to punish China for its human rights violations. While geopolitics and economics play a role in deteriorating Sino-American relations, the salience of ideology is increasingly apparent on the American side.

Although the policy of engagement had widespread bipartisan support, it has given way to an almost equally widespread sense of disillusionment with China. As the Indo-Pacific Strategy report says, “At the turn of the 21st century, the United States advocated for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization, with the belief that economic liberalization would bring China into a greater partnership with the United States and the free world.” Instead, according to Pence, “China has chosen economic aggression, which in turn emboldened its growing military,” and it “has taken a sharp U-turn toward control and oppression of its own people.”

The growing disenchantment with China is a result of the American foreign policy establishment’s own naivete. There never was any realistic basis for believing China would change its economic growth model, or its political system, in response to American expectations. U.S. pressure on China to adhere to American norms and values serves only to heighten Sino-American tensions. This is not a new story. Chinese president Jiang Zemin’s October 1995 remarks to the UN Security Council are illustrative. In that speech, Jiang observed that “certain big powers, often under the cover of freedom, democracy and human rights, set out to encroach upon the sovereignty of other countries, interfere in their internal affairs and undermine their national unity and ethnic harmony.” It is commonplace for U.S. leaders to assert that American values are “universal.” Obviously, they are not, but when the United States acts on this belief, it is going down a path fraught with peril.

Here we see the influence of “offensive liberalism” on American foreign policy. At its core, Wilsonianism—American-style liberal internationalism—holds that the world is divided into “good” states (democracies) and “bad” states (non-democracies). The latter are deemed incorrigible, expansive, and aggressive. As Pence put it when speaking about China, “History attests [that] a country that oppresses its own people rarely stops there. And Beijing also aims to extend its reach across the wider world.” There is an eliminationist impulse imbedded in Wilsonianism: if “bad” states are troublemakers, regime change is—ostensibly—the path to peace because, so it claimed, democracies: don’t fight other democracies; uphold an open international economic system; and respect liberal values both at home and abroad. This eliminationist impulse was very much on display in U.S. relations with the Soviet Union: American intervention in the Russian Civil War; early First Cold War documents such as NSC 20/4; U.S. “psychological warfare” efforts in the Baltic States and Ukraine during the late 1940s/early 1950s; and, of course, NSC-68. American liberalism’s eliminationist impulse was a leitmotiv of Pompeo’s Nixon speech, which was a virtual call for regime change in China. Pompeo decried engagement because it has not brought political change inside China. That is, engagement did not result in China’s “evolution to freedom and democracy.” Echoing NSC-68’s hyperbolic rhetoric (“the world cannot exist half slave and half free”), Pompeo declared that if the United States does not change China, China will change the United States. “Securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party,” Pompeo said, “is the mission of our time.” American policymakers ought to have learned from the First Cold War that an important—and perilous—threshold is crossed when a great power competition is converted into a titanic ideological struggle. The former can be modulated with adroit diplomacy but the latter invariably become a zero-sum contest.

CHINA’S RISE has fueled doubts—seldom acknowledged openly—about the trajectory of the United States’ power, and, even more fundamentally, about whether America’s model of economic and political development remains superior to China’s. As the Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer and David Gordon have argued, “China’s rise and state-capitalist model present the most significant commercial and geopolitical challenge that the U.S. has faced in two decades” and “China’s state capitalism challenges the future of democratic capitalism.” Indeed, as Princeton University professor Aaron Friedberg argues, “For Americans the success of a mainland [Chinese] regime that blends authoritarian rule with market-driven economics is an affront.”

China is a problem for the American foreign policy establishment because it taps into their deepest fear: that a powerful non-liberal state will be able to close off the world (or a least its key regions) from ideological and economic penetration by the United States. This fear of “closure” is inextricably rooted in American liberalism and explains why the United States has such a difficult time co-existing with non-liberal states. The last thing we should want, however, is for the Sino-American relationship to degenerate into a new, highly ideological Second Cold War. When power transition dynamics are added to America’s liberal ideology, Sino-American relations are highly combustible. Security studies scholars agree that power transitions are powder kegs because of what is at stake: nothing less than the leadership, and nature, of the international (or regional) order are up for grabs. Power transitions, are about whether the status quo can prevail over the forces of geopolitical change (revisionism). When rising challengers near parity with the declining dominant power, invariably their dissatisfaction with the existing international order bubbles up (as it did in the pre-1914 Anglo-German rivalry, which has been compared to today’s Sino-America relationship). After all, the existing order was constructed by the declining dominant power during better days to privilege its own interests. Rising challengers, on the other hand, want to revise the existing order and bring it into line with what they perceive are the new relative power realities. They seek, as the political scientist Robert Gilpin said, “to change the international system in order to advance their own interests.”

If the United States really wants to avoid a head-on collision with China, it will have to make difficult—even painful—adjustments and adopt a policy that accommodates China’s rise. In this sense, the United States and China are rapidly nearing what could be called an “E. H. Carr Moment.” The Carr Moment occurs when the power relations that underpinned—and gave birth to—the prevailing international order have shifted in favor of the rising—revisionist—power. Carr analyzed the international political crisis of the 1930s caused by the breakdown of the post-World War I order enshrined in the Versailles Treaty (1919). The Versailles system cracked, Carr argued, because of the growing gap between the order it represented and the actual distribution of power in Europe.

At stake in the Sino-American rivalry is which power will be the hegemon in East Asia, where China seeks to supplant the United States. This competition is inherently dangerous. Aficionados of American Western movies will easily recognize what can be called the “Dodge City syndrome:” two gunslingers confront each other in the saloon, and one says “This town ain’t big enough for both of us.” We all know what happens next: the shoot-out on Main Street. For those inclined to physics rather than the cinema, there is the Newtonian Law of Geopolitics: there cannot be two hegemons in the same region at the same time. Chinese culture has its own way of making this point. As a Chinese expression puts it, two tigers cannot live on one mountain. Or, as the Emperor Wen-Di said, “When two emperors appear simultaneously, one must be destroyed.”

Whether the United States can, or will, peacefully cede its dominance in East Asia is an open question. As is the question of whether the United States can, or will, acknowledge Beijing’s push to be accorded status and prestige equal to that of the United States. There is little reason to believe Washington is disposed to do this. As Dartmouth professor William C. Wohlforth reminds us, “U.S. decision makers value their country’s status of primacy.” Members of the American foreign policy establishment dismiss Beijing’s status claims because “China has not earned a voice equal to that of the United States.” As already discussed, since the end of the First Cold War successive administrations have sought to rein in a rising China by employing both carrots (engagement) and sticks (containment).

On the American side today, carrots are out and sticks are in. Even advocates of “restraint” in American grand strategy take a hawkish position on China. None more so than University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, who argues that: “Realism dictates that the United States should seek to remain the most powerful state on the planet ... and make sure that no other power dominates its region.”

Doubtless, going forward, many U.S. policymakers and analysts will agree with Mearsheimer, invoke fears about the balance of power, play up the ideological differences between China and America, and raise the specter of 1930’s-like “appeasement” of China. As will leading U.S. political figures—such as Senators Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley, and former un ambassador Nikki Haley—who have taken strong, ideologically-infused anti-China stands. Haley argues that “China is a dangerously different power because it is steadfastly committed to a Communist ideology that views its system as superior and seeks its advancement in every way.” For instance, Hawley warns that China has demonstrated “its eagerness to impose authoritarian principles on America...” He also has asserted that “the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for the coronavirus pandemic—and it knows it.” Cotton has declared that, “The Chinese Communist Party is our enemy.” And, for good measure, he says “China is a pariah state.” In a wonderful example of the psychological mechanism of projection, former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster explained with unconscious irony why engaging China failed: “We had undervalued the degree to which ideology drives the Chinese Communist Party.” It is not China’s ideology that is propelling the United States and China towards a train wreck; it is America’s.

AMERICA’S ANTI-CHINA hawks wrap themselves in the mantle of “realism.” But this is a peculiar form of realism, and one at odds with the thoughtful forms of realism that opposed the Vietnam War, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Moreover, it is a potentially dangerous form of “realism,” because once the genie of public opinion is released from the bottle, it can be difficult to control. Both parties—the Democrats also are jumping on the anti-China bandwagon—will be compelled to out-bid each other in taking a hardline against Beijing. It will become increasingly difficult for the voices of pragmatism to be heard in American discussions about relations with China. And it will be ever more difficult for the United States to walk back from a conflict with China. 

“Restraint”—strategic self-discipline—is not a new concept. It has deep roots as an American foreign policy tradition that has counseled prudence, and the moderation of America’s external ambitions. It is a tradition that leaves open the possibility of accommodating the interests of rival great powers. After all, as the noted journalist and foreign policy commentator Walter Lippmann wrote at the Cold War’s outset:

The history of diplomacy is the history of relations among rival powers, which did not enjoy political intimacy, and did not respond to appeals to common purposes. Nevertheless, there have been settlements. Some of them did not last very long. Some of them did. For a diplomat to think that rival and unfriendly powers cannot be brought to a settlement is to forget what diplomacy is about. There would be little for diplomats to do if the world consisted of partners, enjoying political intimacy, and responding to common appeals.

Regrettably, Lippmann’s words were dismissed in Washington, and the First Cold War was the result.

This is, to be sure, a time of renewed great power competition. But there is a big difference between rivalry and war. In the coming decades, it will be the United States that controls the exit ramp from a Sino-American war.

Christopher Layne is University Distinguished Professor of International Affairs and Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at Texas A&M University.

Image: Reuters