Throughout the summer, we’re sharing essays from the Foreign Affairs archives that explore historical parallels of today’s pressing issues. Next up is “The Sources of Chinese Conduct,” a 2019 essay by the historian Odd Arne Westad that considered what the twentieth-century Cold War could tell us about U.S.-Chinese competition today. Now, as then, the United States faces a communist challenger that is “seeking regional dominance and global influence,” Westad wrote. And China’s economic strength in particular makes it “more of a match for the United States than the Soviet Union was.”
Westad also pointed out important differences between the Cold War and Washington’s rivalry with Beijing. “Chinese society is more similar to American society than Soviet society ever was,” he wrote. And, unlike the Kremlin of the past, today’s Chinese Communist Party “does not believe that the United States or its system of government has to be defeated” in order to achieve its aims. The global context has also changed. “Today, the world is becoming not more bipolar but more multipolar,” Westad noted, so “the more the United States and China beat each other up, the more room for maneuver other powers will have.”
As for managing U.S.-Chinese competition, “fast-moving economic and technological changes will make a traditional containment policy impossible,” Westad argued. The stakes are different, too. Compared to the Cold War, “the risk of immediate war is lower, and the odds of limited cooperation are higher,” Westad concluded. But “the danger that nationalism will fuel ever-widening circles of conflict is probably greater, and China’s determination to hack away at the United States’ position in Asia is more tenacious than anything Stalin ever attempted in Europe.”
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