Biden should resist calls to fight a new Cold War

The call for a cold war against China and Russia would have Americans take on enormous burdens not because specific U.S. interests require it but because U.S. primacy does. No longer able to maintain global military dominance at the current level of exertion, the United States is now supposed to plow ever-greater resources into the endeavor. Perhaps the country could get away with strategic excesses in the 1950s, when it accounted for some 27 percent of world economic output, nearly double the combined Soviet and Chinese share of 14 percent. In 2020, by contrast, the United States accounted for 16 percent of global GDP. China and Russia together came to 22 percent. China alone topped the United States. It is doubtful that sheer will can overcome the chasm between the United States’ material superiority during the Cold War and its shortfall today.

Coming out of World War II, the American public understood the implications of undertaking obligations to defend other countries. By contrast, most Americans alive today, having never seen a great-power war or paid tangible costs for smaller wars, are not used to enduring hardship for foreign policy choices. Their well-founded suspicion of far-flung military interventions creates uncertainty about how the United States would truly act if one of its dozens of defense commitments came due. It also raises doubts about whether high defense spending could be sustained indefinitely.

Rather than lock a new cold war into place, Biden should remember what produced the United States’ greatest successes during the original affair: a willingness to adjust to changing circumstances and weigh creative options without clinging to outmoded habits. The Marshall Plan, for example, broke with precedent by extending government funds to rebuild European countries that might have turned communist. Decades later, U.S. policymakers saw an opportunity to stabilize superpower relations and achieved détente, devising mutually beneficial arms control measures and stabilizing Europe through the Helsinki Accords. These achievements deserve to be emulated—and that requires eschewing misplaced nostalgia.