User:Osunpokeh/Essays/Second Cold War/Section Write Up

You can find the original source for this write-up here.

In January 2021, Joseph R. Biden was inaugurated and assumed the office of President of the United States, succeeding previous president and electoral rival Donald J. Trump. In the months since Biden's inauguration and the current time of writing, he and his administration has attempted to reverse nearly every position of the previous Trump administration, including immigration, climate change policy, and public healthcare. That is, nearly every aspect.

In this context, it struck me as bizarre at first that Biden assumed a similar position to Trump regarding foreign policy on China, that is, recognizing China as a strategic competitor rather than a partner. Previously, Trump had broke from his own presidential predecessor, Barack Obama, and had shifted United States policy from recognizing China as a trade partner to recognizing China as a competitor and even an adversary. The Trump Administration would go on to engage in a series of trade wars, imposing tariffs, sanctioning Chinese companies over concerns of alleged IP theft, and acting to contain the expansionist advances of China around the globe. As Biden assumed the office of the Presidency, he maintained the United States's aggressive foreign policy against China inherited from Trump. During his administration, the United States has, for example, refused to roll back sanctions, deployed two aircraft carriers to the South China Sea and warships to the Taiwan Strait, and appointed China hawk Kurt Campbell to direct Asian policy on the National Security Council.

In fact, Biden called China "our most serious competitor" and has described Trump's China policy as disastrously weak, which either may be just another partisan attack, or, a statement to the government of China that Biden is going to make their lives a lot worse — perhaps both. Ultimately, this all comes as a surprise when we account for the fact that the same man had been serving as Vice President under Obama and his cooperative China policy, and that the Biden political family had previously engaged in business dealings with Chinese firms.

The fact that both a Republican and a Democratic president have adopted policy positions recognizing China as an opponent rather than a partner points us towards recognizing that U.S. foreign policy on China is perhaps not a partisan issue but a national one, and that if both sides of the political spectrum are beginning to adopt policies recognizing China as an adversary, then China–U.S. relations are unlikely to grow better anytime soon.

The Second Cold War
The term "Second Cold War" is not new, but it has gained relevance to describe growing tensions between the United States and China (and to a lesser extent, Russia). Citing deteriorating relations in general and recent phenomena such as the ongoing trade war and increasing Chinese militarism in particular, both scholars and journalists alike have stated that the two nations are on course for a Cold War-like scenario, or even characterized the relationship between the U.S. and China to be a Cold War outright. However, this

If global tensions today may be described as a Second Cold War (or on the verge of one), it is crucial to identify their distinctions.

The First Cold War has been characterized as a largely military conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, with both nations building up their militaries and engaging in proxy wars — Korea and Vietnam being prominent examples. But while the Soviet Union achieved parity with the United States militarily (both nations' nuclear weapons arsenals were comparable), the USSR's communist system could not ever match the market-based United States economically — in 1989, the poverty rate in the Soviet Union was twenty percent, compared to fourteen percent with the United States.

The Second Cold War, by contrast, is far more of an economic contest than a military conflict, as China is an economic competitor rather than a military adversary. At the World Economic Forum in 2017, Chinese head-of-state Xi Jinping put an emphasis on global economic growth, with China playing a leading role. Xi's words are substantiated by action, namely through the institution of the Belt and Road Initiative, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. When Donald Trump took action against China, he targeted their economy, instituting tariffs and blacklisting several Chinese technology firms.

Some believe that the use of "Cold War" in Second Cold War is unwarranted, as the Second Cold War is not a military conflict. Although China maintains a large military presence and exerts its power across the Asia-Pacific region, China and the United States are nowhere near military parity. Returning to our example of nuclear weapons, China's nuclear arsenal numbers in the low hundreds compared to even the vestiges of the United States's Cold War stockpile, numbering in the thousands.