In March, historic rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia announced
that they had agreed to normalize relations. This news was significant because
it signaled a possible change in regional order in the Middle East. But–at
least for the Washington commentariat–what was more notable was that America’s fingerprints were nowhere near the deal. Instead, the rapprochement had
been brokered by China, in Beijing’s latest notable turn as international
negotiator. This move brought into stark relief a development that some experts
have been predicting for years: the end of the post-Cold War, unipolar moment and the beginning of a new multipolar era, in which the United States must
coexist with other powers.
When Biden took office, he had the chance to reorient his
foreign policy for this new age. The catchphrase of Biden’s foreign policy
vision on the campaign trail was “America is back“–by which he signaled an
effort to reverse the perceived ills of his predecessor’s worldview. While
Biden recognized the challenges posed by other powers, he pledged “to compete
from a position of strength.” He intended to “begin restoring American
engagement internationally and earn back our leadership position, to catalyze
global action on shared challenges.” Working with other countries to confront
international problems like climate change and public health was ostensibly a foundational principle of this foreign policy.
Yet, partly because of factors outside of his
control–notably Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022–and partly
because of an intentional shift in American national security strategy, Biden’s
foreign policymaking has been defined by great power competition. In this
framing, Beijing’s attempt to play peacemaker is a sign of rivalry rather than
an opportunity for collaboration.
Relations with China have been spiraling downward for years,
accelerated by aggressive actions taken by both powers. Donald Trump’s
inflammatory rhetoric and policies toward an increasingly powerful and
belligerent government in Beijing heightened tensions between the countries. In
a pertinent recent example, the discovery of a Chinese-operated spy balloon
flying in U.S. airspace in February led to the cancellation of Secretary of
State Antony Blinken’s planned trip to Beijing, and diplomatic relations were
very slow to recover, although Blinken and other U.S.
government representatives did eventually travel to China. Biden’s delayed
response to the balloon incident in June, in which he called the episode “a
great embarrassment for dictators”–referring to Xi Jinping–led to another
flare-up.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought relations with Moscow
to a new low, made clear that Moscow was intent on reasserting itself as a
great power, and solidified Biden’s position that this is a world marked by
division rather than cooperation: pitting, in Biden’s words, democracies against
autocracies.
Columbia University professor Michael Doyle tackles these
global shifts in his new book, Cold Peace:
Avoiding the New Cold War. He traces the domestic and international roots
of these tensions, analyzes the most combustible points of potential conflict
in the relationships, from economic warfare to territorial disputes in Ukraine
and Taiwan, and offers thoughts on how to maintain relations and avoid the
worst downsides of conflict. Like the first Cold War, a second would have
disastrous consequences for the world: arms races, proxy wars, an inability to
address pressing global concerns of security and inequality, and a looming risk
of deterioration into a hot war.
Great power competition is not quite inevitable, and, as
Doyle explains, Cold War is not a necessary outgrowth of great power
competition. But over approximately the last decade, militarism and nationalism
in both Washington and Beijing have increased–a trend accelerated by Presidents
Xi Jinping and Donald Trump–creating a destructive spiral. Each country accuses
the other of trying to recalibrate the international order against its interests and blames it for domestic problems. This cycle is
particularly noticeable among the political elite, but the impulse to blame
China for, say, the drug crisis or the loss of jobs in the United States eventually
makes its way to the general public.
Thus far, as Doyle lays out in great detail, direct
confrontation has been limited to cyber and economic policies. On economic
policy, the Biden administration has largely followed the Trump playbook,
adopting an aggressive stance toward Beijing, including explicitly working to
counter a number of China’s trade and development initiatives, and pushing
other countries to do the same, at the risk of jeopardizing their ties to the
U.S. The administration has taken steps in pursuit of this goal, including prohibiting
American manufacturers from selling semiconductors to any Chinese company.
Washington has been sanctioning Moscow since it first annexed Crimea in 2014,
but the economic pressure campaign has intensified in the year and a half since
the invasion of Ukraine–an effort that the White House has repeatedly referred
to as “unprecedented.” In the near term, the looming powder kegs are in Taiwan
and Ukraine, where Russian and Chinese territorial ambitions have led to
inflamed–if often inconsistent–responses from Washington.
Doyle lays out in detail how he would address these two
issues. He points out that each side has strong reasons to reach a compromise.
It is, Doyle argues, in the interest of the U.S. to keep
sea lanes in the western Pacific open and protect its allies, particularly to
avoid the invasion of democratic Taiwan. Meanwhile, it’s in China’s interest to
avoid war, to ensure “maritime security in its region, the principle of
territorial integrity, economic growth, and the national prestige of leading
its region.”
Keeping these interests in mind, Doyle sees five broad areas
for compromise between the two nations. They are: the continuation of strategic
ambiguity (Doyle calls it “constructive ambiguity”) over Taiwan’s territorial
status; the creation of certain zones barring military transit as a means to
maintain maritime and aerial security and reduce the chances of inadvertent
military confrontations; allowing Taiwan to acquire sufficient defensive
capabilities instead of the U.S. continuing to increase its own naval forces in
the Asia-Pacific; China halting its construction of artificial islands in the
South China Sea, in exchange for the U.S. informing Beijing of the movement of
its ships in the sea; and integrating China into more arms control treaties,
such as the New START nuclear arms negotiations.
On Russia and Ukraine, Doyle offers a similar list: Residents of Crimea would be allowed to vote on which of the two countries they
wish to be a part of; the Donbas would be returned to Ukraine, under the
condition that “Ukraine would pledge to implement minority rights to property
and education and local self-government”; the EU and the United States would
agree to recognize both of these arrangements; and Ukraine and Russia would
agree to a broadly defined agreement that would allow Kyiv to be incorporated
into a wider security framework, perhaps in exchange for a pledge that Ukraine
would not be invited to join NATO.
Neither Moscow, Kyiv, nor Washington (nor Beijing, for that
matter) has to date shown a desire for some version of a land-and-neutrality-for-security type of deal like the one offered by Doyle, though it does appear
most likely that the war will eventually be settled at the negotiating table.
And a deeper problem with these solutions is that cooperation does not happen
in a vacuum. On their own, these proposals are thoughtful and mostly
reasonable, and avoiding a hot war between great powers is understandably
Doyle’s overarching goal. But if all sides continue to perceive actions by the
other as hostile, then they will constantly be at the precipice of a military
confrontation. And adopting a Cold War-style, zero-sum framework, in which the
rest of the world is forced to choose sides, only reinforces this dynamic.
Instead, the sides need to create a world in which cooperative coexistence is
the norm.
One of Doyle’s most consistent–and most potentially
problematic–assumptions is that in the post-unipolar era, the world is divided
into blocs. Led by the U.S., the West stands for elections, human rights, free
markets, free speech, and other pillars of liberal democracy, while China and Russia seek a
world that is “safe for autocracy,” in which these principles are optional. The rest of the world, in this
division, will line up behind one of these agendas.
Yet that isn’t the way that relations have shaken out so
far. Trump and Biden are the first two presidents of the post-unipolar era.
Trump’s approach to the rest of the world was a strange form of assertive
unilateralism, an approach that explicitly disavowed the concept of global
leadership while flexing American power, especially military might. Biden’s method
has been his predecessor’s awkward opposite, an attempt to re-embrace American
leadership while working with other countries to confront global challenges,
though acknowledging the limits of military power.
Biden has celebrated his success in rehabilitating the
nation’s global standing, but evidence shows that much of the rest of the world
has not bought into his vision. While Biden continues to tout the unparalleled unity with
which the world has condemned Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine, much of the global south has remained unaligned during the first year of the war, choosing
instead to bemoan the consequences of the war while arguing for a diplomatic
solution and eschewing participation in the sanctions regime. More than 30
countries have abstained on United Nations votes condemning Moscow, and a
recent study from The Economist found that “although 52 countries comprising 15% of
the global population–the West and its friends–lambast and punish Russia’s
actions, and just 12 countries laud Russia, some 127 states are categorised as
not being clearly in either camp.”
Some of the world’s largest and most important democracies,
like India and Brazil, have not taken sides in the ongoing global conflict.
Brazil’s new President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in particular, has been vocal in his support to
find a quick resolution to the war, and insisted that blame for the war is
shared between Russia and the West.
The desire for nonalignment may be even stronger on China,
which maintains strong economic ties with most of the world. Even NATO, which,
to date, has stayed largely unified on the Ukraine question, may not be as
solid in a confrontation with Beijing. Already, French President Emmanuel
Macron has raised doubts over whether a possible crisis over Taiwan concerns
his country, telling Politico, “Is it in our interest to
accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No. The worse thing would be to think that we
Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the U.S.
agenda and a Chinese overreaction.”
This reality is squarely at odds with the concept of a world
divided cleanly into democratic states on the one hand and autocratic ones on
the other. Doyle’s suggestions are not quite so rigid, as he emphasizes that
the door to his proposed “caucus of democracies” should remain open to
autocratic states on an issue-by-issue basis, as well as to any country
considering a democratic transition. He nonetheless advocates that the “right
response” to the growing alliance between Moscow and Beijing is “to strengthen
the democratic coalition of states prepared to balance against the autocratic
coalition of Russia and China and their allies.” If recent events are any
indication, there is little appetite for such blocs to exist, and if they ever
do, they will be defined not by regime type or ideology but by other, evolving and more narrowly conceived national interests.
Washington can often find comfort in common enemies and
straightforward logic, whether that be the Soviet Union during the Cold War or
“global terrorism” in the post-9/11 years. Today, as the national security
establishment searches to give American power a purpose in this new age,
reclaiming old thinking is appealing, such that even Doyle and many others who
are clear-eyed about the dangers of a new Cold War can easily be tempted to
revert to that framework. But adopting that framework, even if to warn against
it, can be dangerous as it raises the stakes of the confrontation while making
the conditions necessary for coexistence unlikely.
One of the stronger portions of Cold Peace comes toward the end, when Doyle makes the case that
in order for the world to be safe for American democracy, American democracy
must be safe for the world. In other words, domestic renewal is a key part of
protecting international democracy. The “lesson of the grim politics of the
past years in both Europe and the United States,” Doyle writes, is “that
international security will not be achieved without first rebuilding the
economic foundations of liberal democracy at home.”
In Doyle’s telling, the way to defend liberalism and
democracy is not to directly confront autocratic regimes elsewhere in the
world but rather to focus inward. “Sometimes, the best defense is a good
offense,” he argues. “But today, in response to the threats from a new cold
war, the best defense is a good defense.” Lessons from the first Cold War
indicate that arguing that everyone must be on one side or the other can have
devastating consequences on our society, from McCarthyism to the persecution of already marginalized groups.
But that solution is not enough to avoid great power
conflict. So long as Washington is convinced that its task is to uphold an
ill-defined international order, rather than to navigate an increasingly
multipolar world, then rivalry, as opposed to cooperation, will continue to
define its strategy. Unless we are willing to directly confront the root causes
of democratic decay at home and hegemony abroad, we are bound to repeat the
mistakes of the Cold War.
