Not your grandparents’ Cold War: Why America should emphasize economic rather than military strategies in its rivalry with China

Scholars and policy makers often analyze the past as a means of understanding present circumstances and devising policy responses. This is, of course, a perfectly rational and prudent way to interpret current events. It is no surprise, then, that the US-China competition of 2022 has been drawing comparisons to the Cold War contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. In both cases, two countries in different regions of the world, with incompatible political and economic systems and powerful militaries, compete to increase their power and influence. Yet analogizing the situations too much can actually impede the US effort to devise policies to counteract China’s rise because lessons from the Cold War may be misapplied. This risk is exacerbated by three crucial differences in these great-power contests: Today’s China is more economically powerful than the Soviet Union was; the American and Chinese economies are more intertwined now than the United States’ and Soviet Union’s ever were; and US allies today are wealthier and more militarily capable than during the Cold War.

Because of these differences, the United States should approach its rivalry with China in a way that emphasizes economics and focuses less on the types of ideological and military struggles that characterized the Cold War.