Michael McFaul, Director, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies, Department of Political Science

The first argument is that the international order is determined by great power relations, not the other way around. Once they've been created, primarily by the United States in our current era, international institutions gain some autonomy And as David Gordon talked about in his remarks, when the United States pulls back from that system as the US did during the Trump era, the international system has been breaking down pretty quickly. China has not filled the void. 

World order really depends on the relationship between the great powers. 30 years ago, the old conventional wisdom was that the United States created and anchored “the liberal international order”. I put it in quotation marks, because I don't think it was all that liberal  and most certainly was not international. Mos of the Soviet bloc remained outside of it. There also was not a whole order during that period, because millions of people died during the Cold War, but that's what it's called. The old conventional wisdom was that China would join this liberal international order. Now, we have a new conventional wisdom in the United States that it was all a giant mistake, i.e., China was not trying to join it, and was just taking advantage, and instead we are entering a  new Cold War 2.0. My position on this debate is that both are right and both are wrong. I do not think we are destined to enter into a new Cold War with China. But I also don’t think it is right to argue that U.S.-China relations have nothing in common with the last Cold War.  That’s not an easily understandable position. But that’s the reality of U.S.-China relations today. Analytic oversimplification can produce bad prescriptions for policy in both Beijing and Washington. 

In the US, the argument about a new Cold War gained steam at the beginning of the Trump administration and really accelerated over last summer in a series of Trump administration speeches. US Secretary of State Pompeo demonstrated such on Twitter over the last weekend, with two dozen Tweets devoted to framing this confrontation the way he did. Secretary Tony Blinken said in his confirmation hearings that President Trump was right about a tougher approach. Confirmation hearings are one thing and policy is another, but there is this new consensus about the new approach towards China, which I actually think is oversimplified. There are some similarities between great power relations today between China and the United States, and the Cold War. There are some important differences. To ignore either the similarities or the differences makes it more difficult to manage the relationship. In similarities, the US and China are the tow world’s superpowers. Like the Cold War, both China and the United States have different political system. Like the Cold War, both countries engage in ideological competition, and the propagation of ideological models by both countries. Many in US only focus on Chinese ideological export. I want to stress that United States is doing that as well. The US is an ideological power. The US will be promoting human rights and democracy even more aggressively and actively in the Biden administration. 

But second, there's also differences. There is ideological competition today, but it's nothing like it was during the Cold War. Now there are two highly intertwined and tangled economies and connected societies, while the Soviet and American economies and societies were not connected. 

Third, thankfully, there are no proxy wars between China and the U.S. today. That is really important.

Fourth, there is a movement towards retrenchment and isolation in the US today in both the Republican and Democratic parties. That is a fundamental difference today in America compared to the Cold War. 

From the American point of view, some similarities are good regarding our national interests, but some things are more challenging; some of the differences are good, some of the differences are more challenging. If that sounds complex, that is because this bilateral relationship is complex. Again, overs implication is dangerous. 

Finally, some lessons about the Cold War that might be useful for thinking about US-China relations and global order today. First, threat misperceptions. Because of threat misperceptions, the US made some giant mistakes during the Cold War. The missile gap, which turned out not to be true; McCarthyism, which was a horrible one in the 50s; the Vietnam war, which was our most tragic mistake during the Cold War, fueled by a misperception about the communist threat. American support for proxy wars in Angola and other places in the world were not necessary to prevail, to defend the liberal international order and to contain communism. The US could have succeeded without those mistakes. The Soviets also made some giant mistakes regarding threat misperceptions. For instance, they believed that evolutionary political change in Eastern Europe was going to lead to the overthrow of the Soviet Union. Had they allowed for evolutionary change earlier, they might have avoided revolutionary change in 1989. 

Second, overreach. Both countries in the last century were involved in overreach that had very detrimental consequences to their national interests, particularly on the Soviet side in Afghanistan, but also on the United States’ side. Both China and the US could learn from studying the mistakes of overreach during the Cold War. 

Third, the US believed in the necessity of empowering and supporting so-called “good dictators” during the Cold War. That was a huge mistake. The U.S. did not need to support coups, ruthless military juntas, or the apartheid regime in South Africa to win the Cold War. In retrospect, that was a giant mistake during the Cold War. It made the US an ally with some very unsavory regimes and leaders around the world. Now the US seeks to deepen some bilateral relationships with autocracies , as it means to contain China. In my view, that would be a mistake. 

Fourth, “zastoi” is a word in Russian that I think is a very important lesson for China. It man stagnation, and it is used by historians to described the Brezhnev era.  There's been a lot of study of the collapse of the Soviet Union in China. You really also should be studying the 1970s. In that decade, there was relative military parity between the Soviet Union and the United States. Brezhnev was overreaching all over the world, and neglected domestic reforms inside the Soviet Union that had some pretty negative consequences for the next decade. It was the period of domestic stagnation and international overreach in the 1970s, especially in Afghanistan, that ultimately led to the Soviet Union’s collapse. 

But there are some positive lessons from the Cold War as well that are well worth remembering for managing U.S.-China relations today. We did cooperate as we competed during the Cold War among some important issues. That is important when talking about peaceful coexistence, competitive competition, and containment. Second, we developed mechanisms to reduce misperceptions and misunderstandings. In a lot of different ways, as an outside observer to the bilateral relationship right now between China and the United States, I am fearful about how little interaction there is between the two societies and governments most certainly. There is nothing worse than having conflicts occur and letting them grow because of misperceptions and misunderstandings. 

Finally, I have two big concerns. First, can the United States and Chinese governments get used to living with geopolitical and ideological tensions? My concerns comes from my experience working in the Obama administration, when the US was trying to do a very similar thing with Russia in 2009. The policy was called the “Reset”. In that period, we tried to cooperate and compete at the same time. This idea of competition and cooperation together worked for a while for two reasons. One, President Medvedev wanted it to work. But now it is clear to me whether Xi Jinping wants it to work. Then, Medvedev took some unilateral actions to try to improve US-Russian relations, while there are not any of those yet being planned between China and the US. But eventually Reset ended because the ideological differences ultimately overwhelmed the cooperative period. When Putin returned to the Kremlin with his ideological framework fundamentally seeing the United States as an enemy to his regime, it overwhelmed the cooperation before. Putin felt threatened by what he perceived as American ideological promotion in the Arab world, inside Russia, and later in Ukraine. Putin’s paranoia about perceived American pursuit of ideological objectives ended U.S.-Russian cooperation.  

Finally, my second concern, will linkage impede cooperation? Do actors in China and the U.S. have the same ability to compartmentalize cooperation and competition? Im not so sure. On the Chinese side, I worry about Xi’s overreaction to the US promotion  of universal values. China lectures the US about how we shouldn't be committed to universal values. But I think its impossible of the U.S. to stop caring about democracy and human rights. Even if Biden tried to do so (and he will not), other actors in the American political system – including most importantly the U.S. Congress – would not go along with it. Second, on the American side, as they try to manage competition with engagement, I worry that no matter what Biden does with respect to bilateral relations with China, a fraction, maybe the majority of the Republican Party, that will say he is weak on China. The closer we get to the next presidential election, the louder this criticism of Biden’s China will become no matter what he actually does. As a result of these domestic politics in both countries , and the impulse on both sides to link issues together, cooperation on even easy issues – on issues in which both China and the United States would benefit from cooperation -- will be difficult.