"Quemoy-and-Matsu" Watch: Can the US really not live for more than a few years without a "new Cold War"?

The "New Cold War" narrative about conflict between the US and China rolls along, with a disturbing supply of that sacred Bipartisanship (on dubious military policies) on hand. Rajan Menon of the Quincy Institute writes in How U.S.-China ‘competition’ could lead both countries to disaster Los Angeles Times 11/22/2021.

Compare the China policies of Donald Trump and Joe Biden and you’ll find many more similarities than differences. Four months after Biden’s inauguration, Kurt M. Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs at the National Security Council, declared that engagement, the approach American leaders have adopted toward China since the 1970s, had failed and that “the dominant paradigm is going to be competition.” A much-praised book by Campbell’s top deputy, Rush Doshi, warns that China’s goal is nothing less than supplanting the United States as the world’s premier power.

Left unsaid by both officials is what this future U.S.-China “competition” will look like, and what will prevent it from turning violent.

Both sides would incur massive losses in blood and treasure if their rivalry intensifies untempered by any sense of shared interests, and leads to war. Ditto the rest of the world.

Deutsche Welle brings this report, U.S. lawmakers vow 'rock solid' commitment to Taiwan 11/27/2021:

Note in this video that the DW interviewer comments that China has "sent in more than 150 warplanes into Taiwanese air space," with no mention of the crucial difference between Taiwan's "offshore" Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) and Taiwan's sovereign airspace. Reporting on this without noting that distinction is not only lazy but irresponsible, because war hawks and defense contractor lobbyists are using a very deceptive talking point here for purposes that hardly limited to legitimate national security concerns.

After nearly a year of Biden's New Cold War policy against China, the more convinced I am that it is just a continuing of the same great-power arrogance and triumphalism that has plagued the US since the Second World War and especially since 1989.

And on this, he so far has accomplished the bipartisanship he promoted as one of his most important political assets during the 2020 Presidential campaign. Yukon Huang of the Carnegie Asia Program sketches the (bipartisan) background of the current policy this way (The U.S.-China Trade War Has Become a Cold War Carnegie Endowment 09/16/2021):

What began as a trade war over China’s unfair economic policies has now evolved into a so-called cold war propelled by differing ideologies. U.S.-China bilateral relations took a nosedive in 2018 when then U.S. president Donald Trump’s obsession with trade deficits led him to impose punitive tariffs on China. The tariffs were followed by restrictions on both China’s access to high-tech U.S. products and foreign investments involving security concerns and by allegations of unfair Chinese commercial practices.

Despite pleas from the U.S. business community to ease tensions, U.S. President Joe Biden so far has amplified his predecessor’s policies by strengthening anti-China alliances and implementing additional sanctions. Biden now characterizes the U.S.-China conflict as “a battle between the utility of democracies in the twenty-first century and autocracies.” Putin's Russia and the 'New Cold War'-Interpreting Myth and Reality 2008 But the logic underpinning the U.S. trade war was flawed, and the more recent, politically driven restrictions are counterproductive given the damaging long-term economic consequences for both sides. Nonetheless, there have been few signs to date that Biden is likely to change course. In the meantime, then, Europeans may be in a better position for productive give-and-take discussions with China on economic policymaking. [my emphasis]

The hope that the EU countries can establish some kind of offsetting policy to that of the US on China looks like a long shot, when we think about how sadly and scandalously the EU just allowed Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukachenko to send them into a panic with a few thousand refugees on the borders of Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania.

It's worth remembering that not so long ago, entrepreneurs of war were promoting the "New Cold War" - but with Russia.

The original Cold War of roughly 1947-1989 wound up spilling a lot of blood and came perilously close to a nuclear apocalypse at least a couple of time. But patriotic providers of the weapons of war made lots of money on it, so the nostalgia for a New Cold War is understandable. See, for instance, David Galbreath's review, Putin's Russia and the 'New Cold War': Interpreting Myth and Reality Europe-Asia Studies 60:9 Nov 2008. Note: In 2008, rising world oil prices were providing a substantial boost to petrostates including Russia. And this was years before the events that culminated in Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Now we're on to a New Cold War with China. Since Russia and China have a generally good relationship at the moment, it can't be too long before enthusiasts are talking about the new "Sino-Soviet bloc", right?

The "new Cold War" and China-Russia relations

Charles Kupchan is recommending a bit more realism on this whole new-cold-war-with-China thing (Biden’s Foreign Policy Needs a Course Correction Project Syndicate 05/14/2021)

In this emerging world, democratic governance will still retain its intrinsic advantage: humans prefer freedom. But for the first time since its emergence as a global power in the 1940s, the US now faces in China a full-spectrum competitor. And because the US needs China’s help to rein in North Korea, arrest global warming, and tackle other transnational issues, it had better start mapping out a strategy that is not just about “us versus them.”

Premising US policy on a clash between democracy and autocracy would not just fail to contain China. Worse, it would actually encourage China’s recalcitrance by consolidating its unholy [sic] alliance with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. China and Russia have been rivals historically, and China’s rise should naturally alarm the Kremlin. But the two autocracies have instead formed a marriage of convenience to resist what they see as the West’s encroaching ambition. [my emphasis]

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs provides some recent background on the still-improving relations between China and Russia (Russians See Greater Reward than Risk in Closer Relations with China 03/21/2021):

Russia and China deepened economic ties in 2014 after the United States and European countries slapped sanctions on Moscow following the annexation of Crimea. Xi Jinping attended Russia’s 2015 Victory Day celebration, where he and Vladimir Putin signed agreements to increase economic and strategic ties. This included a formal link between the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (specifically the Silk Road Economic Belt).

Since then, cooperation has expanded into a variety of domains. Russia has leaned on China economically during the COVID-19 pandemic. China has also found a welcome partner in Moscow as it faces tensions with the United States over trade, human rights, and security issues. During a three-day visit to Moscow in 2019, Xi Jinping stated in a press conference that “Russia is the country that I have visited the most times, and President Putin is my best friend and colleague."

Trump's "America First" legacy is a grim, militaristic one

The most toxic and urgently dangerous legacy that the Trump's very Republican Administration is leaving us is his militarism.

Some people who are (rightly or wrongly) considered part of the left will point to elements of Trump's foreign policy as evidence of an isolationist dovish-ness as a way to warn about the establishment foreign policy assumptions that we can reasonably expect to be extremely influential in the Biden-Harris Administration.

As a polemical device, this is understandable. I'm not promising never to use it myself.

But substantively, I've been critical for, well, as long as I can remember of rightwing isolationism, especially the brand of it associated with the America First tradition. Some people who associated themselves with the pre-Second World War America First movement were acting from a genuinely peace-oriented from pacifist or labor-left motives. An interesting example of a boo expressing such a view us Theodore Dreiser's 1941 book, America Is Worth Saving. Dreiser was attracted to the Communist Party's views, and at that time of the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact, Soviet diplomacy was calling the British and German war against Germany an imperialist war and took a very anti-British position. A reminder of the complications peace politics can encounter. (A contemporary review in the Communist Party's literary magazine of Dreiser's book gives a flavor of it, Dreiser's J'Accuse)

But rightwing "isolationism" from Charles Lindbergh to Barry Goldwater to Pat Buchanan to Donald Trump has always been based on a hardcore nationalist, militaristic worldview. Woody Guthrie got the gist of it in this song, America First (Woody Guthrie):

"They say America First, but they mean America Next."

Michael Klare, We won’t miss Trump’s two-faced military policy Responsible Statecraft 12/07/2020

Michael Klare gives a good overview of Trump's military orientation in We won’t miss Trump’s two-faced military policy Responsible Statecraft 12/07/2020:

The Pentagon’s annual spending authority climbed every year between 2016 and 2020, rising from $580 billion at the start of his administration to $713 at the end, with much of that increment directed to the procurement of advanced weaponry. Additional billions were incorporated into the Department of Energy budget for the acquisition of new nuclear weapons and the full-scale “modernization” of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Far more important than that increase in arms spending, however, was the shift in strategy that went with it. The military posture President Trump inherited from the Obama administration was focused on fighting the Global War on Terror (GWOT), a grueling, never-ending struggle to identify, track, and destroy anti-Western zealots in far-flung areas of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The posture he’s bequeathing to Joe Biden is almost entirely focused on defeating China and Russia in future “high-end” conflicts waged directly against those two countries — fighting that would undoubtedly involve high-tech conventional weapons on a staggering scale and could easily trigger nuclear war. [my emphasis]

There was plenty for money for military contractors of various kinds to be made in the GWOT. But a shift to a massive new armament program to confront China and Russia in conventional and nuclear warfare brings far more. Trump had the populist instinct to talk about getting out of endless wars. But his program is based on hardcore militarism.

But this was barely an issue at all in the Presidential election. And even that probably overstates the role it played. Klare writes:

Supporters of the new administration and even members of Biden’s immediate circle (though not his actual appointees to national security posts) have advanced some stirring ideas about transforming American military policy, including reducing the role military force plays in America’s foreign relations and redeploying some military funds to other purposes like fighting Covid-19. Such ideas are to be welcomed, but President Biden’s top priority in the military area should be to focus on the true Trump military legacy — the one that has set us on a war course in relation to China and Russia — and do everything in his power to steer us in a safer, more prudent direction. Otherwise, the phrase “forever war” could gain a new, far grimmer meaning. [my emphasis]

His article originally appeared at TomDispatch 12/06/2020, with an introductory comment by Tom Engelhardt that includes, "As it turns out, America’s forever wars (still ongoing, though perhaps finally winding down) may be succeeded by wars that none of us will ever forget."