Why Trump will never win his Cold War with China

Even more stunning was the notion that Washington could win a Cold War with Beijing, former U.S. envoys told me. “We could win a Cold War with the Soviet Union thirty years ago, but we can’t win a Cold War with China today,” the anonymous Ambassador said. Unlike the Soviet Union, China is too integrated into the world economy, a point that Pompeo conceded. “Beijing is more dependent on us than we are on them,” he claimed. Yet America is also dependent on China for many basic commodities, including roughly half of its medical supplies. China is the U.S.’s second-largest source of car parts—surpassing Canada, and tripling in value since 2007. Many are made in Wuhan, nicknamed the Motor City of China, and the initial center of the pandemic. If China stopped exporting parts, it could close down multiple U.S. plants. In 2017, China provided sixty per cent of all imported electronics, including cell phones, to the American market. China even provides a significant share of bicycles sold in the United States. China is also a valuable market for American goods. China has provided “the greatest contribution to global growth and fastest-growing destination for U.S. exports for fifteen years, until the Trump Administration,” Robert Zoellick, the former World Bank president, said at the Aspen Security Forum this month. The former Ambassador who asked not to be named added, “They have a lot of leverage over us.”

Throughout the last Cold War, which spanned more than four decades, the U.S. had powerful allies on the European front lines to stand united, pool resources, and squeeze Moscow. Today, all major U.S. allies in and around Asia, including Australia, want to foster coöperation, not confrontation, with China—and don’t want to choose between Washington and Beijing. All of America’s old friends in the Asia-Pacific region—Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Taiwan—have more trade with China than with the United States, Roy said, which means that “Polarization doesn’t align with their interests.” Western allies don’t want confrontation, either. A U.S. Cold War with China could be quite lonely.

Unlike the last Cold War, which pitted Washington and Moscow against each other in proxy military conflicts on four continents, Beijing has expanded its influence largely by investing in development projects, from as far afield as Ecuador and Kenya. The projects are self-serving—pushing some countries, like Ecuador, into chronic debt, or making them virtual tributary states.