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100 Foreign Aff. 10 (2021)
The New Cold War: America, China, and the Echoes of History

handle is hein.journals/fora100 and id is 1144 raw text is: The New Cold War America, China, and the Echoes of History Hal Brands and John Lewis Gaddis Is the world entering a new cold war? Our answer is yes and no. Yes if we mean a protracted interna- tional rivalry, for cold wars in this sense are as old as history itself. Some became hot, some didn't: no law guarantees either outcome. No if we mean the Cold War, which we capitalize because it originated and popularized the term. That struggle took place at a particular time (from 1945-47 to 1989-91), among particular adversaries (the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies), and over particular issues (post-World War II power balances, ideological clashes, arms races). None of those issues looms as large now, and where parallels do exist-growing bipolarity, intensifying polemics, sharpening distinctions between autocracies and democracies- the context is quite different. HAL BRANDS is Henry A. Kissinger Distin- guished Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University and a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great-Power Rivalry Today. JOHN LEWIS GADDIS is Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University and the author of On Grand Strategy. PACKAGE ILLUSTRATIONS BY BENEDETTO CRISTOFANI It's no longer debatable that the United States and China, tacit allies during the last half of the last Cold War, are entering their own new cold war: Chinese President Xi Jinping has declared it, and a rare bipartisan con- sensus in the United States has accepted the challenge. What, then, might previous contests-the one and only Cold War and the many earlier cold wars-suggest about this one? The future is, of course, less know- able than the past, but it's not in all respects unknowable. Time will con- tinue to pass, the law of gravity will still apply, and none of us will outlive our physiological term limits. Are similarly reliable knowns shaping the emerging cold war? If so, what unknowns lurk within them? Thucydides had such predictabilities and surprises in mind when he cautioned, 24 centuries ago, that the future would resemble the past but not in all respects reflect it-even as he also argued that the greatest single war of his time revealed timeless truths about all wars to come. Our purpose here, then, is to show how the greatest unfought war of our time-the Soviet-American Cold War-as well as other prior struggles, might expand experience and enhance resilience in a Sino-American rivalry whose future, hot or cold, remains unclear. That history provides a frame- work within which to survive uncer- tainty, and possibly even thrive within it, whatever the rest of the twenty-first century throws our way. THE BENEFITS OF BOUNDARIES Our first known is geography, which continental drift will in time alter, but not in our time. China will remain 10 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

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