America can’t refight the Cold War in Asia

The master of all he surveys, Chinese President Xi Jinping reviews his troops in Beijing. Picture: Reuters.

To those who remember it, there is something grotesquely nostalgic about the Cold War. Commies and capitalists, goodies and baddies, the Free World and the Evil Empire: it was terrifying but it was also simple compared with the 30 years that followed, with its soupy fog of Islamic terrorists, regional despots and protracted wars in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan.

So it’s with a kind of relief that some pundits are declaring the advent of Cold War II. In the long-awaited sequel, Russia has only a supporting role; this time around the leads are the US and China. The locations have shifted too, from Europe to Asia, allowing the introduction of glamorous new stars such as Japan, India and Australia. The Iron Curtain is to be replaced by one made of bamboo, but the plot is the same: two nuclear superpowers locked in a struggle for mastery over a neatly divided world.

“We are moving in a very dangerous direction,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the last general assembly, warning of a “future where the two largest economies split the globe in a great fracture”. Or as the American writer Robert Kaplan, one of the most enthusiastic of the New Cold Warriors, puts it: “The new cold war is permanent … This is because the differences between the US and China are stark and fundamental. They can barely be managed by negotiations and can never really be assuaged.”

It’s a seductive way of understanding what are undoubtedly great changes in the world’s power balances. By one reckoning, China overtook the US to become the world’s largest economy seven years ago and under President Xi Jinping its growing GDP has been matched by unprecedented displays of assertiveness and aggression.

China has fought Indian soldiers on the border in the Himalayas, sent fighter planes into the skies around Taiwan, and turned disputed coral reefs and sandbanks in the South China Sea into military bases. The US has responded by sailing its warships past them in high-risk “freedom of navigation exercises”. Britain’s new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth set sail this week on its maiden voyage to the Asian Pacific.

Japan, the world’s only constitutionally pacifist country, has been increasing its defence spending and joining the US, Australia and India in military exercises as part of the “Quad”, described by China as “an anti-China frontline … the mini NATO [that] reflects the Cold War mentality of the US”.

For all this, ageing nostalgists expecting a return to Cold War Cowboys and Indians are going to be disappointed — this sequel is going to be a complicated and messy business with few of the old certainties and convictions. The great economic and ideological struggle between America and the Soviet Union was settled long ago: the competition now is between two versions of free market capitalism. As the arguments over market access show, there is a great deal of economic interdependency between the two, and between all the other important countries of the region.

Compared with the countries of 20th-Century Europe, a compact land mass with a shared heritage of language and religion, 21st-Century Asia is dizzyingly huge and various. Consider Southeast Asia alone, whose small to medium-sized powers include relatively free democracies such as Indonesia and Malaysia, authoritarian fake democracies like Thailand and Cambodia, communist one-party states such as Laos and Vietnam, and one absolute monarchy (Brunei). The complexities of individual national interest make it difficult to agree on almost anything — no wonder they can’t make up their minds, for example, on what to do about the thuggish military coup in Myanmar.

Even for the region’s biggest and richest democracies, which have the most to lose from the rise of China, dealing with it is a delicate business. Japan and South Korea are US treaty allies that for seven decades have hosted tens of thousands of American troops. But China is the biggest trading partner of both countries, a status that Beijing has no hesitation in weaponising, as South Korea discovered four years ago when its deployment of a new US missile defence system unleashed ruinous retaliation upon its companies in China.

The notion of threading a Bamboo Curtain through the complexity of east Asia and neatly dividing its peoples into two teams is simple-minded and gravely premature. Xi is a ruthless and sinister dictator who is perpetrating a slow genocide on the Uighurs and crushing democratic opposition in Hong Kong. But he is no Stalin, at least not so far: whatever his ambitions for fulfilling a Chinese sense of historical destiny, they are a long way from being fulfilled.

The first Cold War emerged from a Europe that had been mired in hot wars for years. Asia has not seen one since 1979 when the People’s Liberation Army briefly invaded Vietnam, to be beaten off, bruised and bleeding. The rise of China could well end in bloody conflict, over Taiwan, the Senkaku islands or the South China Sea. It will be prevented by recognising that Asia as a whole is invested in peace, by seeking out the slow, difficult gains to be had from diplomacy as well as punitive methods such as sanctions, and by accepting that the military confrontationalism of the last century can only make this one worse.

The Times