Unprecedented choice in history

The relationship between China and the United States is not the same as that between the US and the former Soviet Union. Neither is history doomed to repeat itself, with a rising power battling with an established power for supremacy.

The competition between the US and the former Soviet Union was a contest for global hegemony. It was an adversarial struggle between two ideologies, capitalism and socialism, that became locked into the Cold War and an arms race to acquire a nuclear strike advantage. There were almost no economic links between the two sides. The present-day relationship between China and the US is so completely different that there is no sense in comparing it with the one between the US and the former Soviet Union.

Neither China nor the US can deny there exist some difficult structural contradictions and strategic competition between them. But the relationship between them differs from all the historical precedents.