Over the past decade, there have been increasing warnings that the world is entering, or has perhaps already entered, a new Cold War era. On one side are the Western liberal democracies (‘the West’ or ‘the Global North’, if you’d like). The countries that ‘won’ the first Cold War.
On the other side are—who? Is it China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, which Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine term the ‘Axis of Upheaval’? Is it the newly expanded BRICS grouping that is allegedly “challenging the rules-based international order”? Or is it simply China, girding itself for world war while the West is distracted by Gaza and Ukraine?
There is no doubt that China’s economic rise has unsettled the old certainties of Western liberal democracy’s post-Cold War triumph. War and military conflicts between unequal forces in Eastern Europe and West Asia (the Middle East) have emphasised the limitations, hypocrisies, and inconsistencies of the rules-based order. Not because China has been challenging this order but because it has become clear that the USA and many of its allies have been seeking to implement its rules selectively. Francis Fukuyama’s End of History seems more distant than ever.
Does this mean a new Cold War?
There are two problems with this question. One is that it is often raised in a very passive sense: The West—the USA and its allies—is drifting into a new Cold War, whether it is prepared or not, so now is the time to prepare. This stance relinquishes responsibility for the purported new Cold War and regards it as an inevitability due to actions by the perceived opposing forces.
And yet the new Cold War rhetoric is in fact being pushed predominantly by the major Western powers. Chinese foreign policy, while arguably flawed and driven by self-interest, is not focused on existential or even zero-sum competition between state actors.
As Professor Ping Su and I have written in our book China and the Pursuit of Harmony in World Politics: Understanding Chinese International Relations Theory, the ideological emphasis of Chinese foreign policy is on win-win cooperation and formation of mutual dependencies, while its guiding principle is non-interventionism in the internal affairs of other states. This guiding principle arose out of the Bandung Conference (1955) and the Non-Aligned Movement, which were themselves responses to the Cold War ideological competition between the USA and the Soviet Union. One result has been a long-running insistence on separating economic cooperation from other issues (hence China’s long-term unwillingness to join sanctions regimes). It is this that has pushed China to strengthen BRICS as a bloc joined together by economic interests, irrespective of political ideology.
This approach differs from the USA’s post-Cold War win-lose, “either with us or against us” approach to world politics. It is this that causes China’s continued and deepening trade and relations with Russia to be interpreted in the West as a ‘choosing of sides’ in a new Cold War.
Legitimate criticisms can be raised concerning China’s non-intervention policy and the China-Russia bilateral relationship. China’s position has been that it is opposed to war and seeks de-escalation while not attributing the conflict to Russian aggression. It is nevertheless unhelpful that the USA insists on treating China and Russia as having the same foreign policy philosophies and objectives. China’s globally coherent, networked, strongly multilateral outlook, as represented by the Belt and Road Initiative, is quite distinct from the current Russian emphasis on regional consolidation. The rhetoric of equality, cooperation, and mutual benefit that the Chinese state uses to discuss its relations with Russia hardly differ from the rhetoric it uses to discuss its relations with other states, including with the USA.
China’s non-intervention policy is evident in the statistics. For all that China is represented as a forming a Cold War-style ‘axis’ with countries opposed to Western interests, it is difficult to see ideological currents in its trade policies. In 2023, Ukraine had trade revenues of US$12.85 billion with China, compared with trade revenues of US$3.39 billion with the USA. China exported more than 3.6 times as much to Ukraine as did the USA but also imported more than 4.6 times as much from Ukraine as did the USA.
It is concerning that the USA and its closest allies are pushing China, India, and other developing countries to explicitly take sides on international conflicts, to engage in an us-vs-them approach to world politics. Western commentators widely interpret China’s cautious reaction to the growing regional conflict in West Asia (balancing Israel’s right to self-defence with support for Palestinian lives) as an intentional effort to drive a wedge between the USA and the Global South, despite China’s non-interventionism being entirely in keeping with its decades’ long diplomatic practice. Similarly, China’s maintenance of trade and diplomatic relations with Iran is interpreted as proof of an anti-USA ‘axis’. This is despite the fact that China also maintains close relations with Saudi Arabia. It is also despite the fact that the USA is offering one-sided material and ideological ammunition to Israel, which has seemed intent on escalating military conflicts in West Asia. In fact, in an incredibly parochial leap of logic, China’s emphasis on balance and not choosing sides has itself been taken as evidence of a plot to turn the region against the USA.
Over the past months, China has been unilaterally implementing visa-free travel programmes for citizens from a range of European and Asian states, demonstrating a renewed desire for international openness, people-to-people exchanges, and the introduction of new ideas. Meanwhile, the USA and its closest allies have engaged in aggressively protectionist trade measures targeted at weakening Chinese exports and maintaining (or reviving?) Western industrial supremacy within renewables, electric vehicles, and AI. Such trade policies might well be justified on the basis of domestic or regional concerns, but it is crucially not China’s ‘axis’ that is seeking to raise barriers and split the world in two.
It is possible for countries to disagree on policy and fundamental values, to have different priorities, and to look out for their own people without engaging in existential, win-lose, or zero-sum competition. You do not need to agree with everything China or the USA does, do not need to support the governments in China or the USA, in order to believe that a new Cold War is a bad idea.
If China is today seen as threatening a new Cold War, it is because some people regard the USA’s global economic and political dominance as the baseline for ‘peace’, and it is because some government, media, and corporate actors benefit from the raising of geopolitical tensions. Similarly, those in China, particularly on social media, who benefit from whipping up anti-foreign sentiment would do well to consider the potential long-term consequences of their actions.
It is necessary to step back from the rhetoric of a new Cold War. In order to reduce conflict, we need to understand why countries act in certain ways. We need to try viewing these actions from the perspectives of those countries themselves—instead of from perspectives and strawmen that we invent for them.
Because countries do sometimes have divergent interests, mutual understanding will never produce complete agreement in world politics. It will, however, prevent us from automatically thinking the worst of those who are different from us.