For the past 20 years, the most important, consequential international relationship has been between a rising China and a powerful United States. That remains true today, and it will likely be the case for many years to come, even as the nature of that relationship changes over time. Never static, ties in the past few years have shifted from engagement with an undercurrent of wariness to wariness with an undercurrent of engagement. Yet talk of a new Cold War—and the idea that Chinese-U.S. relations are at their worst since the two countries normalized diplomatic ties in 1979—is its own form of frenzy. And that way of thinking is forcing a 20th-century template of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union onto a U.S.-Chinese relationship that could not be more different.
If ever there was a case of taking of simplistic view of the past and transposing it on the present, the Cold War framework applied to U.S.-Chinese relations is it. And it is not just a case of the misuse of history, although it is that. It also betrays a deep misunderstanding about what the actual dynamic is between the United States and China, one that appears to the shared even by U.S. officials. The two countries’ war of words is indeed hot. The technology competition is real, ranging from U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration’s intent to ban Chinese social media company TikTok from the United States and the long U.S. campaign against Huawei to the Chinese attempt to build its own internal telecommunications and Internet infrastructure. But the economic intertwinement between the two countries remains deep, complicated, and largely untouched by years of sanctions, tariffs, and bad words. 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.
