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2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

6. The New Cold War: Sleep-Walking into Great Power Conflict

Author : Richard Javad Heydarian

Published in: The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China, and the New Struggle for Global Mastery

Publisher: Springer Singapore

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Abstract

The chapter discusses the emerging ‘New Cold War’ between the United States and China within a broader historical overview of bilateral relations over the past century. From the West’s “forgotten ally” during the Second World War, China became a major strategic adversary in the early Cold War period, especially during the Korea War. But the Nixon administration dramatically altered dyadic relations through a calibrated détente, which was designed to isolate and, eventually, defeat the Soviet Union. For the next four decades, Nixon’s successors largely embraced a policy of engagement towards China. The second decade of the twenty-first century, however, has seen a dramatic recasting in bilateral relations, which have taken an increasingly confrontational character, especially under presidents Xi and Trump.

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previous chapter The Belt and Road: China as the New Vanguard of Globalization
next chapter The Post-American World: Middle Powers and the Coalition of Deterrence
Footnotes
1
Lindell (2009).
 
2
Pence (2018).
 
3
Lau (2019).
 
4
Interview with the author, June 21, 2019, Taipei, Taiwan.
 
5
Agence France-Presse (2019).
 
6
Jennings (2019b).
 
7
Haynes (2019).
 
8
Aurelio (2019).
 
9
Johnson (2018).
 
10
Holmes (2013).
 
11
Johnson (2019).
 
12
Allen-Ebrahimian (2017).
 
13
Ranada (2019).
 
14
Ibid.
 
15
Perper (2019).
 
16
Doornbos (2019).
 
17
Heydarian (2018a).
 
18
Jennings (2019a).
 
19
Squitieri (2019).
 
20
Panda (2017).
 
21
Based on conversations with former senior Obama administration senior defense officials in Washington, DC, 2017–2018.
 
22
On Trump’s empowering of the Pentagon, also see Filkins (2017).
 
23
Gordon (2017).
 
24
See Heydarian (2018b) and Hayton (2014).
 
25
Pence (2019).
 
26
Ibid.
 
27
Ibid.
 
28
Pompeo (2019b).
 
29
Pompeo (2019a).
 
30
Ibid.
 
31
Zhenhua (2019).
 
32
Pompeo (2019a).
 
33
Ibid.
 
34
Panda (2019).
 
35
Liu (2019).
 
36
Ibid.
 
38
Labog-Javellana (2019).
 
39
Allison (2017).
 
40
Tuchman (2009, 1199).
 
41
Ibid., 114.
 
42
Brzezinski (2009).
 
43
Li (2016).
 
44
Exchanges with the author, July 27, 2018, Washington DC.
 
45
Li (2016), 137.
 
46
Babones (2018).
 
47
Sheehan (1989, 131).
 
48
The Economist (2015, August).
 
49
For further analysis see Shirk (2008), Kissinger (2012), Osnos (2014), and Pillsbury (2015).
 
50
Pillsbury (2015, 71).
 
51
Ibid., 73.
 
52
Osnos (2014).
 
53
Kissinger (2012, 321).
 
54
For further analysis see Andreas (2008, 2010, 2012), and Walker and Buck (2007).
 
55
See Shirk (2008), Kurlantzick (2009), Kissinger (2012), and Osnos (2015).
 
56
Zhao (1998, 287).
 
57
Heydarian (2015a, 28–33).
 
58
Shirk (2008).
 
59
For further analysis see Medeiros and Fravel (2003), Kurlantzick (2008), Shirk (2008), Fravel (2012), and Heydarian (2015a, 39–45).
 
60
Kurlantzick (2008, 4).
 
61
Mearsheimer (2014).
 
62
Brzezinski (1998).
 
63
Shirk (2008).
 
64
Kazianis (2014).
 
65
Shirk (2008).
 
66
Li (2010).
 
67
Barmé (2009).
 
68
See Colby and Lettow (2014), Pei (2014), and Allison (2015).
 
69
See Pillsbury (2015) and Luttwak (2012).
 
70
For the deeper analysis of the concepts of War of Position and War of Maneuver see Egan (2013).
 
71
Pillsbury (2015).
 
72
Assaunge, Julian. The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire, eds. Verso: New York.
 
73
Assaunge, Julian. The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire, eds. Verso: New York.
 
74
Nathan and Scobell (2012).
 
75
Kaplan (2014).
 
76
Kissinger (2012).
 
77
Garver (1992).
 
78
Kaplan (2013).
 
79
Chua (2009).
 
80
Pedrozo (2010).
 
81
See Shirk (2008), Johnson (2014), and Hayton (2014).
 
82
See Hayton (2014) and Holmes (2015).
 
83
A coastal state is only allowed to do so within its territorial sea and, at most, in its (non-overlapping) contiguous zone, provided its safety and interests are clearly in danger as specified by international law (see Part II of UNCLOS).
 
84
See Gill and Kleiber (2007) and Kaplan (2013).
 
85
Page (2014).
 
86
Luttwack (2012).
 
87
Actually, it isn’t yet clear whether China is claiming the entire South China Sea, or just the land features in the area and their surrounding territorial waters. The Philippines’ arbitration case against China was partly designed to force China to clarify this issue.
 
88
Pomfret (2010).
 
89
The term “core interest” is widely believed to mean that China is willing to risk military conflict and completely shuns any compromise.
 
90
Buckley (2013).
 
91
The ‘Five Dragons’ are China Marine Surveillance, General Administration of Customs (under the State Council), the Maritime Border Police (formerly under the Ministry of Public Security), the Fishing Regulation Administration (FRA, formerly under the Ministry of Agriculture), and the Maritime Safety Administration (under the Ministry of Transport) under the supervision of the State Ocean Administration (SOA). Until Xi’s reforms in early 2013, which placed SOA as the lead agency to oversee China’s maritime law enforcement bureaucracy, these agencies precariously jostled over jurisdiction in the South China Sea, injecting tremendous unpredictability into the picture.
 
92
Confronting fisheries shortage due to overexploitation in their adjacent waters, local governments units such as Hainan encouraged its fishermen to venture deep into the South China Sea, as far as 670 miles to the south and deep into waters off the coast of Indonesia and the Philippines, providing fuel subsidies (US$320–US$480 per day) for larger vessels, renovation grants of up to US$322,500 for vessels fishing Companies, and advanced GPS gadgets for tens of thousands of fishermen.
 
93
See Ruwitch (2014) and Erickson and Collins (2013).
 
94
See De Koning and Lipscy (2013), Walton (2014), Kang (2014), and Bitzinger (2015).
 
95
Holmes and Yoshihara (2017).
 
96
For more discussion on ADIZ see Welch (2013).
 
97
Kaplan (2014).
 
98
Obama (2011).
 
99
Clinton (2011).
 
100
Campbell and Ratner (2014).
 
101
Campbell (2016).
 
102
Ibid., 2.
 
103
Wikileaks (2007).
 
104
Conversation with the author October 2014, Manila. The conversation was in a Middle Eastern language, hence the quote is a rough translation by the author.
 
105
See Ross (2012) and Kaplan (2014).
 
106
Summers (2015).
 
107
Agence France-Press (2015).
 
108
Wikileaks (2007).
 
109
Cooper (2015).
 
110
Heydarian (2015c).
 
111
Wolf et al. (2013).
 
112
Finnegan (2015).
 
113
The Economist (2015, October).
 
114
Nye (2004, 5).
 
115
Ibid., 11.
 
116
Chua (2009).
 
117
Kurlantzick (2008).
 
118
See Kurlantzick (2008), Sharma (2012), and French (2014).
 
119
Heydarian (2015a).
 
120
Tiezzi (2014).
 
121
Bitzinger (2015).
 
122
Page (2014).
 
123
See Kaplan (2014) and Heydarian (2015b).
 
124
See a summary of the speech at China Council for International Cooperation and Environment and Development (2013).
 
125
Shambaugh (2015).
 
126
Heydarian (2015a).
 
127
Article I of the US–Japan MDT declares that ‘Japan grants, and the United States of America accepts, the right … to dispose United States land, air and sea forces in and about Japan. Such forces may be utilized to contribute to the maintenance of international peace and security in the Far East and to the security of Japan against armed attack from without.’
 
128
Walt (2014).
 
129
Wu and Green (2014, 201).
 
130
Ross (2012).
 
131
Ibid.
 
132
Kaplan (2010).
 
133
Economy (2013).
 
134
White (2014).
 
135
Article IV of the Philippine–U.S. MDT states: ‘Each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on either of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common dangers in accordance with its constitutional processes [author’s own emphasis] …’. Article V states: ‘an armed attack on either of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack on the metropolitan territory of either of the Parties, or on the island territories under its jurisdiction in the Pacific or on its armed forces, public vessels or aircraft in the Pacific’.
 
136
See for instance analysis of former US Navy rear admiral Michael McDevitt (2013) on the limits of American commitment to Philippine-claimed features in the South China Sea, particularly the Scarborough Shoal.
 
137
See Vitug (2018).
 
138
Campbell and Ratner (2014).
 
Literature
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Campbell, Kurt. The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia. New York: Twelve, 2016.
Chua, Amy. Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—And Why They Fall. New York: Anchor, 2009.
French, Howard. China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa. New York: Knopf, 2014.
Hayton, Bill. The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.
Heydarian, Richard Javad. Asia’s New Battlefield: US, China, and the Struggle for Western Pacific. London: Zed, 2015a.
Heydarian, Richard Javad. “Genealogy of Conflict: The Roots, Evolution, and Trajectory of the South China Sea Disputes.” In Sumit Ganguly, Andrew Scobell, and Joseph Chinyong Liow (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Asian Security Studies. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018b.
Kaplan, Robert. Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2014.
Kaplan, Robert. The Revenge of History: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflict and the Battle Against Fate. New York: Random House, 2013.
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Sharma, Ruchir. Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012.
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Metadata
Title
The New Cold War: Sleep-Walking into Great Power Conflict
Author
Richard Javad Heydarian
Copyright Year
2020
Publisher
Springer Singapore
Book
The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China, and the New Struggle for Global Mastery

Print ISBN: 978-981-13-9798-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-981-13-9799-8

Copyright Year: 2020

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9799-8_6

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