The Cross The Weekly : First, a question regarding the title of your book: The Other Cold War? The US/China confrontation. Why this question mark?
Pierre Grosser : As a Cold War historian, I am wary of this analogy to describe the current relationship between Beijing and Washington. The situations are quite different. Notably because today there is no opposition between two blocs: China, unlike the USSR, has no allies.
Another difference is the economic interdependence between China and the United States. However, the comparison is more relevant than a few years ago. China is indeed communist, even if it is not, like the USSR in the past, at the head of a world system of states and parties. It praises its model in the countries of the South. And again, the democracies are coming together in the face of a politico-ideological challenge. The rise of China is also reminiscent of the anxieties the West had about Moscow at the time of Sputnik (1957). We have the feeling that China can catch up with the United States, especially from a technological point of view.
How old was the perception of this new rivalry in the United States?
P. G. : From the mid-1990s, we began to hear some concerns in the United States. This discourse became more present at the end of the 2000s. But it was not until the Trump period that the competition became acute, and that the Americans judged that they had been naive in their policy towards Beijing for fifty years.
The debate today is as follows: was there deception? Namely: did the Chinese pretend, from the outset, to socialize in order to take maximum advantage of the globalization promoted by America, while having kept their ambitions to be “number one”, or is there- Was there any progressive hardening? I have no response. But I think around 2008, with the economic crisis and the American military difficulties, China began to think that it had the possibility of winning this competition, helped by the decline of the United States.
We often hear that, ultimately, Joe Biden, vis-à-vis China, is in the wake of Donald Trump. Do you share this analysis, especially after the episode of the Chinese balloon shot down in the American sky?
P. G. : It is true that there is a certain continuity. Some even see this issue as the only foreign policy consensus in the United States. Joe Biden left most of Trump’s trade measures in place. But there are still notable differences. The first is Joe Biden’s insistence on the issue of democracy.
The second element is the importance of allies, or countries that are close without necessarily being allies in the traditional sense. Particularly in Southeast Asia: it is not a question of creating a great anti-Chinese alliance, but of ensuring that China does not dominate the region and does not upset the rules, and that the countries of the Southeast Asia have alternatives.
We come to the question of a possible war, particularly about Taiwan. Is the confrontation between China and the United States inevitable?
P. G. : I think we should not deny the pacifying virtues of economic interdependence, it remains strong despite the economic war that is taking shape. In the United States as in China, people aspire to prosperity. And we know very well that we need Beijing for the environmental transition. And even for medicines… We also see the consequences of the real war, in Ukraine. It can calm the ardor. Neither country wants to go to war with the other. But sometimes, despite everything, it happens. The crisis in Taiwan this summer and the episode of the balloon show that tensions are high, and could degenerate. And for the moment, the crisis management methods are not very developed. This was less the case between Americans and Russians after the Cuban crisis.
The second concern is the perception of power relations. The worst, and it is very frequent in history, is this mixture of optimism (“We are the best, the future is ours”) and pessimism (“We have big difficulties, the another will pass us by, dominate us”). The combination of the two can be explosive.
How do you assess the Chinese side’s perception of American decline and the call to action among some Chinese nationalists?
P. G. : It is always very difficult to analyze the opinion of 1.4 billion Chinese. What is certain is that there is a nationalism used by the state to legitimize itself: the success of China would be due only to the Communist Party. But there is also a nationalism “from below”, visible on social networks, pushing to intransigence. Under these conditions, the Chinese government cannot be overwhelmed and appear weak.
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The author
Associate professor in political science, Pierre Grosser teaches at Sciences Po Paris. A historian of international relations, he has written extensively on the origins of the Second World War and on the Cold War. His book 1989. The year when the world changed (Perrin) earned him the Ambassadors Prize in 2010.
The challenge
The recent affair of the Chinese balloon in the American sky confirmed the growing tension between China and the United States. The reference to the “Thucydides trap” – an allusion to the causes of the Peloponnesian War, in antiquity, between Sparta, a declining power, and Athens, an emerging power – has become almost a classic among analysts… The conflict is not however not inevitable, Pierre Grosser tells us, despite the establishment of a “conflictual antagonism” and the differences in perception regarding security in Asia.
