There has been a tortuous debate in Washington foreign policy circles for several years now about whether to call the intensifying rivalry between the United States and China a “new cold war”. Those in favour argue that only the language of the last Cold War captures the scale and the stakes of the struggle now underway between the world’s two most dominant powers. Those against point out the many ways in which this contest – and the geopolitical context in which it is being waged – is different from the last great superpower stand-off and worry that using the phrase will only antagonise Beijing and accelerate the confrontation.
Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national security adviser under Donald Trump and is widely seen as the architect of his China policy, says this debate misses the point. “I would argue that we are now in the foothills of a great-power hot war,” he told me on 12 July by video call from his home in Park City, Utah. This was a reference to a comment by the late Henry Kissinger, who acknowledged in 2019, after resisting the comparison for many years, that the US and China were in the “foothills of a cold war”. But that was before Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping declared their “no limits” partnership in February 2022, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine later that month, before the US had ramped up tariffs on imports of Chinese high-tech goods, and before the scale of Xi’s ambition to remake the global order had become clear. Pottinger argues that a new cold war is now the best-case scenario.
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