Don't let US-China economic rivalry turn into Cold War 2.0

AGAINST the backdrop of the sharpest downturn in decades in US-China relations, much of the focus of the foreign policy debate in Washington and elsewhere has been on whether the world is witnessing the start of new Sino-American Cold War.

Indeed, economic protectionists, military hawks and conservative nationalists in Washington have been urging the Trump administration to plan for Cold War 2.0, suggesting that not unlike the former Soviet Union, Communist China is posing more than a geo-strategic and economic threat to the United States. They insist that it should also be seen as a global ideological challenge to American democratic and liberal values. In response, Chinese nationalists have also depicted the growing tension between the two world powers as a clash of ideologies. According to their narrative, the American model of democracy and unconstrained capitalism has failed to respond effectively to the economic and political problems of the 21st century. In their view, China's authoritarian system and state-controlled economy is the wave of the future.

It is true that the former Soviet Union and its communist satellites, including then Maoist China, believed that their historic mission was to ensure that American capitalism would end up buried in the ash bins of history. Moscow not only took active measures to spread its communist model worldwide; in some instances, it even tried to foment political unrest in the US and Western Europe.