China, US row belies level of cooperation

The language of a new Cold War is being heard quite often these days when foreign policy experts talk about China-United States relations.

But Zachary Karabell, a US author, columnist and consultant, does not agree that there is a Cold War.

He wrote in a blog published on the website of The Foreign Policy on Friday that applying 20th-century analogies to the US-China relationship is a misuse of history and betrays a deep misunderstanding about what the actual dynamic is between the two countries.

"The United States and China are not in a Cold War. They are in a bad marriage, with no current option for divorce. That will remain the case for many years to come," he wrote.

Karabell added that the Chinese-US economic relationship is so much more connected and intertwined than the US-Soviet one ever was. "That alone renders the Cold War template almost completely irrelevant as a guide to our present and future."

The economic intertwinement between the two countries, as he put it, remains deep, complicated and largely untouched by years of sanctions, tariffs and angry words.

Karabell said that even with two years of US tariffs on Chinese imports and mass disruptions to global commerce and the movement of people due to the pandemic, bilateral trade in goods between the two countries is likely to be around $450-500 billion this year, with almost $100 billion in services.

Still, China holds $1.1 trillion in US Treasury securities, and there are hundreds of billions of dollars of capital stock and factories in China either owned and constructed or maintained by US companies.

"The interlocking economies of the two countries, which the historian Niall Ferguson and economist Moritz Schularick once dubbed 'Chimerica' and which I have called an economic 'superfusion', both enriched and imperiled US companies and consumers," Karabell said.

US manufacturing took a hit in China, just as it had taken a hit from Japan in the 1980s and from Mexico in the 1990s, but US consumers benefited from a slew of cheaper products that made middle-class life more affordable, Karabell said.

Call for new tactics

"Navigating tensions is hard work, and the history of other great powers in the past is of little help," Karabell concluded. He suggested that new tactics be learnt to manage a new rivalry for a different century.

However, John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, believes that the real Cold War started before the novel coronavirus, and ideology does not matter much.

Mearsheimer told Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun that "what matters is the balance of power".

Mearsheimer said China has become powerful over the past 20 years and is likely to increase its influence in Asia. The US does not tolerate peer competitors, he said.

China has repeatedly said it will never seek hegemony even as it grows in strength.

In an article published in the online magazine The Diplomat on Aug 3, Zheng Wang, the director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies and a professor at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, called for cool heads in the US and China.

"The US-China relationship is reaching its most dangerous point. We could hope that the fragile relations suddenly become more durable and harder to break despite the recent upheavals," Wang wrote.

But he believed that the two countries still share huge common interests. The administration of US President Donald Trump, in Wang's words, has appointed a large number of senior officials to positions that they "shockingly lacked credentials or experience for".

"A major concern today is the fact that when sensitive and fragile relationships are in the wrong hands, nothing is impossible," Wang said.

"When senior officials display significant carelessness toward a relationship, it is almost impossible to expect lower level officials－such as warship commanders and air force pilots－to treat their own interactions with dedicated caution and commitment."