AMONG DEMOCRATS and Republicans alike, there is growing recognition that the United States and China are engaged in Cold War II—a thesis that was still controversial only two years ago when I made the case for it in the pages of this magazine. Cold War II, however, is likely to be very different from Cold War I.

As appalling as they are, Xi Jinping’s return to a Maoist cult of personality, the creation of a nightmarish high-tech “social credit” surveillance system, and the cultural genocide of Muslim Uighurs in occupied East Turkestan would not in themselves threaten China’s immediate neighbors or the interests of the United States and its allies in East Asia and elsewhere. But while intensifying its totalitarian repression at home, the Chinese dictatorship has become ever more aggressive in its external policy, militarizing islands in the South China sea, slaughtering Indian soldiers along the disputed Sino-Indian border, and using aggressive “wolf warrior” diplomacy to bully other countries into acquiescing to Beijing.

Many of the countries bullied by China are standing up to it. A loose “Indo-Pacific” coalition of the United States, Japan, India, and Australia, along with others including Vietnam, has arisen to balance China. After the coronavirus epidemic, which itself originated in China, revealed the dependence of the rest of the world on Chinese manufacturing of medicines, personal protective equipment, and other essential goods, the United States, Japan, and other countries are pressuring companies to move industrial supply chains out of China—either to their home countries or to third countries which are not strategic threats. Escalating financial sanctions levied by the United States and China on each other’s officials are deepening the economic cold war.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that we are witnessing a transition from a unipolar world characterized by U.S. hegemony to a rigid bipolar system like that of Cold War I from 1946–1989. Far more likely as the result of the rise of China is the emergence of a kaleidoscopic multipolar world order, as many countries, including former U.S. allies, distance themselves from both China and the United States.

DESCRIBING U.S. domestic politics, political scientists distinguish “realignment” from “dealignment.” Under realignment, one or more groups of voters move from one of America’s two national parties to the other, but most voters still belong to one of the two parties. Under dealignment, constituencies leave one party but do not join the other party. Instead, they become free-floating independent voters and voting blocs. It is useful to borrow the concept of dealignment from domestic politics and apply it to world politics (Gerald Holden used the term in a different sense, applying it to European politics in the Ronald Reagan era in Dealignment: A New Foreign Policy Perspective in 1987).

Dealignment, in the sense in which I am using the term, is different from “nonalignment” during Cold War I. During the previous cold war, the nonaligned nations included many Latin American countries as well as recently-decolonized countries like India and numerous African states. These diverse countries at least pretended to form a nonaligned bloc, the Third World, distinct from the U.S.-led First World alliance and the communist Second World. There was even a formal Non-Aligned Movement, which brought together countries as dissimilar as Egypt, India, Ghana, and Yugoslavia, a communist dictatorship estranged from the Soviet bloc. Many weak developing countries sought to combine in order to pressure both the American and Soviet blocs to accede to their collective demand for a New International Economic Order. Unlike the nonaligned nations of Cold War I, however, the dealigned nations of Cold War II are likely to seek their own national interests separately, rather than to view themselves as part of a third bloc equidistant from both the United States and China.

International relations scholars distinguish a strategy of “hedging” from strategies of “balancing” and “bandwagoning.” Hedging strategies may take seemingly opposite forms like trading with both China and the United States and, on the other hand, maximizing national autarky. In practice, for medium-sized and small powers, a seemingly paradoxical combination of partial economic integration and military relations with both the United States and China, combined with a degree of partial self-sufficiency in basic military and economic sectors, may make the most sense.

In an age of dealignment, the more powerful countries of the second and third rank can hedge their bets by trying to create their own modest military spheres of influence and regional economic blocs. Russia has tried to maintain its hegemony within the post-Soviet space by waging limited wars in Georgia and Ukraine to prevent their incorporation into NATO or the European Union. At the same time, Russia has sponsored the Moscow-centered Eurasian Economic Union, a trade bloc it controls on much of the former territory of the USSR.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regime is similarly trying to increase the relative power and autonomy of Turkey, at the price of antagonizing its neighbors and other members of the NATO alliance to which it belongs. For other countries as well, dealigned strategies that include bids for regional military and economic hegemony may be more attractive than realignment, that is, choosing to side either with China or the United States in Cold War II.

Dealignment is incompatible not only with realignment but also with “alignment”—that is, legacy membership in established collective security alliances. NATO, established to prevent the USSR from intimidating or invading Europe, lost its rationale when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union dissolved. In the Iraq War of 2003, the United States was opposed by some NATO members such as Germany and France while supported by others including Britain in an improvised “coalition of the willing.” Today, two NATO members, Turkey and France, are on opposite sides of a proxy war in Libya, a state destroyed by the Obama administration and NATO in the 2011 war of regime change against the Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi. Meanwhile, long-simmering tensions between Turkey and Greece, both NATO members, have heated up. NATO may be an alliance on paper only, as a result of dealignment in Cold War II.

IF TODAY’S Sino-American Cold War persists, other U.S. alliances may snap or wither away. The rise of China has set off far more alarms in Tokyo than in Berlin, whose leaders tend to view China not as a significant security threat, but as a large and growing market for German exports of goods and services. Under Angela Merkel, Germany has carried out a hedging strategy with respect to Russia as well, supporting the continued presence of U.S. troops on German soil even as German firms engage in profitable business with Russia, the supposed threat.

During Cold War I, the possibility that the Soviet Union would actually invade and conquer Japan and West Germany was never the most realistic threat. The major threat was “Finlandization.” The term referred to the danger that Japan and West Germany, the second and third largest industrial nations, would, like Finland during the Cold War, appease Moscow in foreign policy. Economic powers like West Germany and Japan might have strengthened the Soviet economy and, indirectly, its military power, through trade, investment, and technology transfers, while retaining their nominal independence, capitalist systems, and relatively conservative social orders. If America’s allies in Cold War I had been Finlandized in this sense, those allies, through trade and investment, could have built up the Soviet military-industrial complex, without a shot being fired—indeed, even as U.S. military bases remained on their soil.

Something like this perverse outcome is the situation that has now emerged among America’s East Asian protectorates. Japan’s top trading partner is the United States (19.9 percent of exports); its second top trading partner is China (19.1 percent). The United States continues its military protectorate over South Korea, which in 2019 traded twice as much with China (25.1 percent of exports) as with the United States (13.6 percent of exports). China in 2018 accounted for 22.2 percent of Vietnam’s exports and imports, while the United States accounted for only 12.6 percent.

This pattern is bizarre and almost certainly not sustainable. It is as though, during Cold War I, the major trading partner, or second-largest trading partner, of America’s NATO allies had been the Soviet Union. What, then, would have been the purpose of NATO? Clearly not to prevent Finlandization, because in that alternate reality the economic Finlandization of Western Europe already would have occurred. The sole purpose, then, of U.S. troops in an already-Finlandized Europe would have been to deter an actual physical invasion by the Soviet Union. But why would the Soviet Union have invaded its major trading partners and sources of foreign investment?

A similar question can be asked about America’s formal and informal East Asian military allies, both old, like Japan and South Korea, and new, like Vietnam. As China’s economy grows, driven by rising per capita income rather than rising population, so will the economic opportunities provided by access to China for firms among its East Asian neighbors, along with the penalties for opposing China’s regime, whatever form it may take in the future. According to the consulting firm PwC, Japan—the fourth-largest economy in the world in 2016—may sink down to eighth in 2050, under China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, and Mexico. Will a much smaller Japan, highly integrated with a much bigger Chinese economy, remain part of an alliance to balance China a generation or two from now? In 2050, the gap between China’s economy and Japan’s may be greater than that between the economies of the United States and Mexico. By that time, Sino-Japanese trade may be much higher than American-Japanese trade. In the medium to long run, it is difficult to imagine that the deepening enmeshment of China’s neighbors with China’s economy will not render their military alliances with the United States moribund.

What about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)? According to most of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, this would have weakened China by creating a bloc of the United States, Japan, and many Asian nations from which China was excluded. During the 2016 presidential campaign, however, under pressure from progressives and populists, both Hillary Clinton and Trump promised to withdraw from the TPP, and Trump made good on his promise following his election.

The truth is that the TPP would not have weakened China significantly. The claim that it would was just a bogus “national security” rationale designed to neutralize opposition to the treaty in the United States. The unacknowledged goal of the TPP, from the point of view of the U.S. special interests that supported it, was to impose bloc-wide rules favoring U.S. pharmaceutical companies and Wall Street financial firms on the weak developing countries of Asia. China is already the largest or second-largest trading partner of most of the countries included in the TPP, and the treaty probably would not have altered this.

In Cold War I, U.S. military alliance strategy was complemented by the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom), a U.S.-dominated institution that coordinated a half-century economic and technological embargo against the USSR. Nothing similar to CoCom seems possible in Cold War II. Will the East Asian allies of the United States, to say nothing of NATO members and other countries like India, agree to eliminate most of their trade and investment with China? The answer is no, unless China becomes far more aggressive than it has been. Even if China invaded Taiwan, there might be sanctions at first, but it probably would be only a matter of time before trade delegations from Tokyo, Seoul, Berlin—and perhaps Washington—made trips to normalize trade and investment with Beijing. And yet a strategy of military containment of China without economic isolation of China cannot succeed in Cold War II.

AT SOME point, the perversity of stationing U.S. military forces in China’s major trading partners to protect them from a largely imaginary threat of Chinese invasion and occupation will be too obvious to be denied. The result is likely to be the pulling up of the leftover tripwires in the Korean peninsula and in the South China Sea, and the withdrawal of America’s unilateral promise to go to war with China over Japan, South Korea and Taiwan—a promise that nobody in any country will believe to be credible. The United States may remain engaged in a naval rivalry with China in the Pacific, but the strategy of encircling China’s borders with U.S. bases to protect China’s trading partners from China may be abandoned. In time East Asia is likely to become a de facto Chinese sphere of influence, as North America has been a U.S. sphere of influence since the 1900s. In contrast to America’s East Asian protectorates, India exports much more to the United States (16.8 percent of exports) than to China (5.3 percent). China’s growing regional assertiveness may tilt India toward the United States.

In the near future, India will become the world’s most populous country, surpassing China. And while it has a long way to go, by the end of this century or perhaps in the next, India could have the world’s largest economy, even though its per capita income and standard of living would remain below those of North America and Europe.

Before we celebrate the might of a hypothetical Indo-American alliance, however, caution is in order. During Cold War I, India pursued a policy of nonalignment between the Western and communist blocs, with a slight tilt toward the Soviet Union. And since its independence, India has sought to maximize its economic self-sufficiency by means of socialist or dirigiste economic policies.

Would a richer and more powerful India consent to enduring U.S. hegemony in the newly-christened “Indo-Pacific?” Classical realists would suggest the answer is no. Just as China today is trying to end America’s post-1945 hegemony in East Asia, nationalists in tomorrow’s more powerful and assertive India may insist that the Indian Ocean must be an Indian lake and demand the return of the strategic U.S. naval base in Diego Garcia, which the United States obtained from Britain. The United States, after all, bloodlessly drove the British navy out of the Western hemisphere, more than a century ago, after the United States surpassed Britain in population and industrial strength.

Indeed, it is not inconceivable that the United States and China, engaged in strategic rivalry today, in the future might set aside their differences to unite to check the power of a rising India. In the twentieth century, the United States sided with the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan, only to ally itself after 1945 with West Germany and Japan against the Soviet Union. Late in the Cold War, the United States was even allied informally with communist China against the USSR. With the disappearance of the shared threat of the Soviet Union, mutual suspicion on the part of China and the United States has produced a new cold war.

To return to the projection by PwC mentioned earlier: between 2018 and 2060, China’s GDP may grow from 18 to 20 percent of the global economy (measured in purchasing power parity) while U.S. GDP may decline from 16 percent to 12 percent. The other poles in the global economy in 2050, according to PwC, will be India, 15 percent, and Europe at 9 percent. The specific numbers will almost certainly be wrong, but the trajectory is clear.

In a game of Risk, it would be easy and fun to imagine a “realignment” scenario in which a U.S.-European-Indian alliance with 36 percent of combined GDP overawes China with 20 percent. Go, Alliance of Democracies! But in a “dealignment” scenario, a rich, aging Europe—embroiled in controversies over immigration and inter-regional wealth transfers—might be neutral in a conflict between the United States and China. For its part, a richer and more powerful India might be jealous of its sovereignty, tilting toward the United States when its leaders feel threatened by China but otherwise maintaining its distance from both and intent on building its own regional sphere of influence.

MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE of South Asia, most of the population growth in this century will take place in Africa. By 2100, one in four people on earth may be African. There may be success stories, as falling fertility and rising per capita create a “sweet spot” for economic growth in some countries and regions. There may also be civil wars and independence movements, as increasing prosperity fuels the pride and nationalism of ethnonational minorities in multi-ethnic states created by long-dead European colonial empires.

In a realignment scenario, zero-sum, bipolar Sino-American competition might be transposed to Africa, as Soviet-American competition was. But in a dealignment scenario, the situation would be far messier. The United States, China, India, and individual European great powers, along with Russia and Middle Eastern nations, perhaps, might compete opportunistically for markets and contracts for their firms, or arm rival sides in local wars. The result might look less like Cold War I than like the late nineteenth-century Scramble for Africa, with alliances and trade deals replacing formal colonization. At the same time, the more powerful African states might try to create spheres of influence and trading blocs in their own neighborhoods, as Russia has done in the post-Soviet space.

My aim is not to propose a grand strategy for the United States in Cold War II. It is simply to point out the inadequacy of Cold War I as a model. Rather than a bipolar world of tight alliances like those of the Cold War, the rise of China may produce—indeed, already is producing—a dealignment in which power diffuses and many countries seek to minimize their dependence on both the United States and China.

All of this suggests that the central feature of U.S. grand strategy during Cold War I—a deeply integrated core bloc of allies in Europe and Asia, based on unilateral U.S. military protection and a shared economy—would be difficult to replicate in Cold War II, if the conflict persists for years or decades. The geopolitical landscape of Cold War I was symbolized by frozen conflicts along highly-visible frontiers—the Berlin Wall, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the former border between North and South Vietnam. The geopolitical landscape of Cold War II and whatever period follows will be volcanic, unstable and fragmented among spheres of influence and trading blocs created by lesser powers as well as major powers. The penalty for failure to understand this may be severe.

Michael Lind is a professor of practice at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and the author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite.

Image: Reuters