The New (& Old) Cold War: When Conflict is Collusion
An After Empire Series
Over recent years, a number of entities from diverse political trends have confidently declared that the world now exists within a new cold war configuration. From Foreign Affairs to Breakthrough News to National Review to The Nation, the idea that a new cold war exists between the United States and China (and even Russia) is well established.
In 2017, the United States government produced its National Security Strategy document, warning, “after being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition returned. China and Russia began to reassert their influence regionally and globally.” In 2018 the National Defense Strategy document doubled-down, “the central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by what the National Security Strategy classifies as revisionist powers.” Once again, China and Russia were named the central belligerents or “revisionists” to be opposed.
According to Michael Hirsh in Foreign Affairs in June 2022, the new cold war is “marked by a multidimensional relationship where China and the West trade and invest with one another even as they compete and where Russia, China’s partner in authoritarianism and anti-Americanism alike, stays viable—though heavily sanctioned—by supplying oil, gas, and grain to the other side.” For Hirsh, the economic integration between today’s adversaries makes this new cold war an altogether different prospect from the cold war of yesteryear between the U.S. and U.S.S.R..
Considerable effort has been made to push the concept of “long-term, strategic competition” to be the organizing framework of geopolitical thinking and action. Joe Biden poured cold water onto the explicit cold war rhetoric in his September 2021 speech to the United Nations, stressing, “We’re not seeking, I’ll say it again, we are not seeking a new cold war or a world divided into rigid blocs.”
So, what is going on with all this cold war talk?
In school, we learn about the Cold War as an historical epoch. In this conventional understanding, the Cold War has a beginning, sometime around 1946, and an end, when the Soviet Union officially collapses in 1991. This conflict is said to be “cold” because, according to popular narrative, neither the Soviet Union nor the United States used their own military forces directly against the other.
Typically, these school lessons emphasize the key policies and concepts underpinning the U.S. posture across this period: domino theory, Truman doctrine, Marshall Plan, Reagan’s evil empire, mutually assured destruction, and so forth. This conflict is pitched as an existential threat to humanity, one that the United States definitively won due to the superior moral and economic virtue of the Free World. The standard approach to the Cold War has its merits, largely that it conditions U.S. citizens along with the residents of allied countries to accept the necessity of U.S. global power while also providing a basic civic vocabulary to justify and legitimize that authority.
It is this conventional understanding of the Cold War, seemingly rearticulated as the struggle of “democracy vs. authoritarianism” and “long-term strategic competition,” that has captured the political imagination of the moment. However, hardly any of this commentary ever bothers to push beyond the limits of the standard Cold War catechism.
The conventional narrative of the Cold War fails to describe the structural function of a cold war as a geopolitical maneuver. A cold war is one means by which an interstate system structures great power rivalry within its domain. A cold war is a form of order, one that cajoles lesser powers and subjugated peoples to uphold the existing hierarchy by compelling them to take sides within it. A cold war does not threaten the order, it sustains it. There are, of course, genuine conflicts between the rivals. However, the mutual denunciation between cold war rivals obscures and enables their systemic collusion, ultimately guaranteeing the status quo.
The United States emerged from the 20th century Cold War not as a swaggering conqueror, but as a crisis-riddled purveyor of chaos. The disastrous 2003 War in Iraq, the discrediting 2008 financial collapse, and over a decade of populist rebellion that included 2020’s nationwide riots and the January 6th coup attempt – this perpetual instability is what one would expect of the vanquished and not the victor of the Cold War struggle.
When we understand that the 20th century Cold War served a stabilizing and legitimizing function for the liberal international order, then a strange truth becomes apparent: the United States lost the Cold War. Major sections of the U.S. ruling class desperately want it back.
Within the context of a global structural crisis, the reemergence of alarmist cold war rhetoric carries significant weight. Taking this as our starting point, what political possibilities does this framework foreclose, and what does it make possible?
Over the coming months, After Empire will dig deep into the contours of the so-called new cold war, exploring topics ranging from China’s financing of BRICS to nostalgia for developmentalist politics. We will also review key incidents from the 20th century cold war, challenging the conventional narratives and helping us ascertain what is to be done today to build a world after empire.
After Empire is a partisan think tank and cultural institute dedicated to resolving the big contradictions of our shared world and advancing social life beyond the exploitation, degradation, and exclusion fostered by imperialism. After Empire seeks to unite with all people who desire a liberated society.