US-China relations: invoking the Cold War ignores the Covid-19 pandemic and wider context
- The lack of an ideological conflict or clear geopolitical point of contention, as well as the presence of Covid-19, are differences that must not be overlooked
- The looming threat of multiple waves of the pandemic, as in the 1918 influenza outbreak, could ultimately force the US and China into a more cooperative relationship
The first difference is that the US-China rivalry lacks an ideological conflict that even remotely resembles the ferocity of US-Soviet relations from the 1940s to 1960s. Second, US-China competition lacks a geopolitical point of contention on the magnitude of the “German problem” that heightened the risk of conflict during the early Cold War. Third, there exists a common danger – the Covid-19 pandemic – that should encourage cooperation that didn’t exist during the Cold War.
Unlike the Soviet Union, China is heavily integrated into the world economy and its businesses have expanded globally. There is no comparison with the Soviet Union’s socialist system, which quickly became an economic bloc with its member nations cut off from the rest of the world.
China does not control an economic bloc as the Soviets did, at least for now, so its rivalry with the West isn’t zero sum but it is competitive with a lower possibility of escalation to armed conflict.
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Not surprisingly, the German problem lay at the crux of the US-Soviet confrontation in Europe. Both sides feared that whichever way a united Germany might tilt would determine the future of Europe. When efforts at reuniting the nation failed, the US, Britain and France fused their zones to form West Germany while the Soviets created a communist East Germany.
The Kremlin grew increasingly concerned about the future of West Germany, especially after the United States and its Nato allies decided to rearm West Germany in 1950 and brought it into the transatlantic security alliance in 1955.
A series of crises over the status of a divided Berlin threatened war on several occasions, but it was the possibility of a nuclear-armed West Germany that especially alarmed the Soviets.
As historian Marc Trachtenberg argues, West Germany’s adoption of non-nuclear status in 1963 ultimately resolved the European crisis and led to a settlement over Berlin in 1971. However, by then, the conflict over Germany had led to the military rearmament of Europe and ignited a dangerous nuclear arms race that would last another 30 years.
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Even so, the Berlin example offers important lessons, namely that the US should respond to Chinese challenges as creatively as it did Soviet provocations against Berlin. Instead of direct military intervention, its famous airlift brought tens of millions of tonnes of supplies that kept West Berlin from succumbing to the Soviet blockade.
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International cooperation would be vital to lessen their potentially devastating impact. One might hope this possible cooperation proves lasting in the decades ahead.
Gregory Mitrovich is a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University