By Francis P. Sempa
Three recent articles in important American journals reveal that Sino-U.S. relations—that have since the end of the U.S.-Soviet global struggle shifted between engagement and competition—have reached the stage of Cold War. The three articles may signal—like Winston Churchill’s famous “iron curtain” speech on March 5, 1946, or George Kennan's "X" article in 1947—that another “long twilight struggle” (to use President John F. Kennedy’s description of U.S.-Soviet relations) has begun. This will have consequences for the defense postures of the United States and its allies.
The first article, entitled “The Party That Failed,” appears in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. It is written by Cai Xia, a former Professor at the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The author broke with the CCP because she gradually learned that "the highly centralized, oppressive version of Marxism promoted by the CCP owed more to Stalin than to Marx." She had hoped that China, under Jiang Zemin's leadership in the early 2000s, would evolve into a constitutional democracy, but Jiang's successor Hu Jintao moved "in the opposite direction." China, under Hu, the author writes, "entered a period of political stagnation, a decline similar to what the Soviet Union experienced under Leonid Brezhnev."
When the current CCP leader Xi Jinping took power in 2012, Cai Xia and her fellow advocates of reform hoped that Xi would emulate his father, whom she describes as a former CCP leader "with liberal inclinations." Instead, Xi has promoted a Mao-like "cult of personality" and imposed "neo-Stalinist" rule on China. The atmosphere in China, she writes, is “growing darker.” It is a repressive “totalitarian” state. Cai Xia managed to travel to the United States on a tourist visa. She has since been accused of “anti-China” activities and is subject to arrest if she returns.
It is this China—not the mildly authoritarian capitalist state described by Western foreign policy elites—that confronts the world with growing military power (especially naval and nuclear) and a long-term goal of replacing the United States as the geopolitical organizer of the world order.
The second article, which appeared on December 3rd in the Wall Street Journal, is by John Ratcliffe, the current U.S. Director of National Intelligence. Ratcliffe’s message is blunt: “Beijing intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically.” The CCP, he writes, is engaged in massive economic and technological espionage, cyber and information warfare, and plans to “make China the world’s foremost military power.” To meet this unprecedented challenge, Director Ratcliffe has “shifted resources” in the intelligence bureaucracies to “increase the focus on China.” He urges other nations to understand the threat posed by the CCP. “The world,” he writes, “is being presented a choice between two wholly incompatible ideologies.” Echoing Cai Xia, Ratcliffe writes that “China’s leaders seek to subordinate the rights of the individual to the will of the Communist Party. They exert governmental control over companies and subvert the privacy and freedom of their citizens with an authoritarian surveillance state.”
Ratcliffe concludes his article with a paragraph reminiscent of George Kennan’s “X” article in Foreign Affairs in which Kennan urged Americans to confidently face the challenge of Soviet communism. “This is our once-in-a-generation challenge,” Ratcliffe writes. “Americans,” he explains, “have always risen to the moment, from defeating the scourge of fascism to bringing down the Iron Curtain. This generation will be judged by its response to China’s effort to reshape the world in its own image and replace America as the dominant superpower.”
The third article, entitled “Cold War II,” is by the prolific British historian Niall Ferguson and appears in the current issue of National Review. Ferguson reminds us that Cold War I began in the late 1940s and ended in the late 1980s, “[a]nd now we are in Cold War II.” He acknowledges that Cold War II is not the same as Cold War I, but they are similar. Those scholars and statesmen who expected globalization to usher in a new world order without great power conflict underrated the ability of the CCP to “achieve sustained economic growth while at the same time maintaining the [communist] political system.” “The belief persisted—in defiance of all the evidence after Xi Jinping’s accession to power in 2012—that economic modernization would be followed by political liberalization,” Ferguson explains. Both Democrats and Republicans in America succumbed to this “self-deception.” He is especially critical of President Obama, who in his 2015 National Security Strategy welcomed "the rise of a stable, peaceful, and prosperous China."
Ferguson contrasts the Obama approach with the more realistic Trump approach, which appreciates in the 2017 National Security Strategy that "China seeks to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region," and is "using economic inducements and penalties, influence operations, and implied military threats to persuade other states to heed its political and security agenda.”
Like the Soviet Union in Cold War I, Ferguson explains, China in Cold War II has “both regional and global ambitions.” The CCP seeks “predominance in East Asia,” and with its Belt and Road Initiative seeks geopolitical goals that look “a lot like the old Soviet imperialism.” Like the Soviet Union, China also has the ideological objective of curbing the spread of Western ideas and replacing them with the efficiency and effectiveness of totalitarian one-party rule. As in Cold War I, China and the U.S. are engaged in an arms race, especially a naval arms race, and that competition now extends to the Arctic Ocean.
Ferguson notes that while most American officials shy away from calling U.S.-China relations a Cold War, Chinese officials are not so reticent. He warns Western leaders that “the longer cold-war denial persists, the more likely . . . a hot war becomes, precisely because the West continues to underestimate the seriousness of the Communist threat.”
To win Cold War I, the United States used its military, economic, and political power to form and support alliances to deter communist aggression and undermine the Soviet-led communist empire. But it only did this after the intellectual foundations for containment and later victory were constructed. Ideas and concepts translate into doctrine and force structure. We may be at one of those pivotal moments in world history, when democratic countries discard illusions, face unpleasant facts, and muster the courage and will to meet an existential challenge to their way of life.
Francis P. Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21stCentury, America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War, and Somewhere in France, Somewhere in Germany: A Combat Soldier’s Journey through the Second World War. He has written lengthy introductions to two of Mahan’s books, and has written on historical and foreign policy topics for The Diplomat, the University Bookman, Joint Force Quarterly, the Asian Review of Books, the New York Journal of Books, the Claremont Review of Books, American Diplomacy, the Washington Times, and other publications. He is an attorney, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a contributing editor to American Diplomacy.
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