The New Cold War on China

John Bellamy Foster

On March 24, 2021, a high-profile article proclaiming “There Will Not Be a New Cold War” appeared in Foreign Affairs, the flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, the principal think tank for U.S. grand strategy. The author, Thomas Christensen, a professor of international affairs at Columbia University and former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the George W. Bush administration, went so far as to acknowledge that “the [Donald] Trump administration basically declared a cold war on China.” Nevertheless, no New Cold War, Christensen optimistically indicated, would actually materialise, since Washington under Joe Biden would presumablyback away from Trump’s extreme policies toward China given its“vital position in the global value chain.” Beijing could not be seenas an aggressive power in ideological or geopolitical terms, but was simply interested in economic competition.

Yet, what Christensen’s analysis excluded was any mention of the imperialist world system, crowned by U.S. hegemony, which is now threatened by China’s seemingly inexorable rise and pursuit of its own distinctive sovereign project. In this respect, the Trump administration’s prosecution of a New Cold War on China was no anomaly, but rather the inevitable U.S. response to China’s rise and the end of Washington’s unipolar moment. Just as the United States declared the interest of maintaining that same imperial hegemony.

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