In an easygoing, didactic style, Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman’s new book Cool War: The Future of Global Competition, discusses how China’s rise as a globally significant economic superpower has created an increasingly complex dilemma for the United States, both militarily and economically. Consequently, Feldman aptly coins the term “cold war” to describe a much more complex set of cooperation, competition, and tension between two enemies locked in an uneasy embrace of economic interdependence.
Feldman points out that the interrelationship of the two nations is new by historical standards. For example, throughout the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were clear military and political rivals, with little or no economic interaction. In contrast, communist-controlled China is currently America’s largest trading partner. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students study at American universities, and the two nations have become stakeholders in a shared cultural and economic experiment.
Furthermore, China quietly accumulated a staggering amount of US sovereign debt. Even in the 20th century, Feldman points out, nations never invested significantly in another country’s national debt.
Acting like the world’s last remaining superpower, Feldman rightly points out, means having to spend like one. And, after several costly misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US public is clearly not in the mood to spend trillions more on a massive military buildup, especially one that relies on borrowing from the very nation it is ostensibly against. seeks to defend itself, to finance that.
While China has not yet sought to achieve military parity with the US, that strategic goal is not out of the question. The bottom line, Feldman observes, is that a shooting war is not inevitable, but some form of ongoing conflict clearly is.
It illustrates how the status of Taiwan represents a major potential sticking point for both independent nations, as Taiwan’s current diplomatic posture involves an ambiguity that suits both Chinese and American wishes. On the one hand, China’s main ambition is to bring Taiwan back into its own orbit. On the other hand, a visible failure to defend Taiwan in the event of a crisis with China would effectively end any semblance of US global hegemony in the Far East. This imaginative moment may actually come sooner than anticipated, as many pundits have contemplated that the US may realistically have to abandon any hope of continuing to treat Taiwan protectively, in light of larger global realities to come. they involve North Korea and other hotspots.
China’s global ambitions are hidden in plain sight. The populous nation has already invested billions in a conventional military buildup. In practice, China’s foreign activities are in line with the government’s intention to eventually align its geostrategic position with its economic one.
Regarding China’s weaponry, Feldman astutely points out that such empowerment occurs over decades, not a few months. And, unlike the US, which vests its powers in officials after a publicly visible election in regular 2- or 4-year cycles, China’s military plans can be more gradual and without the need for sudden policy changes afterward. of a contested election.
Furthermore, China only needs to increase its military capability to the point where it is large enough that it does not have to use it. China ends up winning a war without even firing a shot, as the United States suddenly finds itself uninterested in fighting a serious war that it might actually lose.
Feldman also correctly points out that modern acts of “cyber warfare” are a non-traditional, asymmetric form of combat that allowed the Chinese to exploit non-traditional weaknesses in the US security infrastructure without a realistic threat of military retaliation. In addition, covert cyber warfare enables intellectual property theft and corporate espionage, where US company trade secrets and other valuable data are compromised and stolen. Feldman predicts that the regular and ongoing acts of cyber warfare emerging within China are likely to continue in this “cold war” phase.
Notably, Feldman’s book does not explore the prevalence of Chinese counterfeiting as a source of ongoing dispute with corporate America. Counterfeit products are widely viewed by American corporate interests as a serious and covert form of economic espionage that is causing significant harm to business interests. While human rights are certainly a major source of Chinese criticism from the West, China’s tolerance of intellectual property theft is a sore spot for thousands of US companies, who routinely push for harsher and harsher sanctions. against such violations of WTO rules.
Feldman also points out that nationalist sentiment exists on both sides of the coin, with Chinese citizens likely taking pride in China’s rise to global prominence, and Americans’ frustration with China’s currency manipulation and growing trade deficit. equally solid. He points out that economic interdependence does not eliminate this tendency toward silent conflict.
Another interesting area that Feldman discusses is the conflict between American and Chinese ideology, such as it is. The core ideology of today’s Communist Party represents a strange experimental pragmatism in economics summed up in Deng Xiaoping’s quote: “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white; if it catches mice, it is a good cat.” Even the goal of maintaining the communist party apparatus is viewed with such harsh pragmatism that it puts China in a very different ideological place than the Stalinist Soviet Union in the 1960s.
China’s ideological pragmatism leads to the result that it will gladly do business with countries like the United States, as long as American democracy respects the way it does things. Thus, the ideological divide between the United States and China is much less a moral chasm than the disagreements that separated Kennedy and Khrushchev. However, to the extent that Americans perceive China as unwilling to compromise Western values such as human rights and the rule of law, it is hard to imagine how continued ideological conflict is not inevitable.
cool war borders on an interesting theme: Feldman points out that as long as the United States can preserve the rule of law for itself, it doesn’t have an absolute need to export it. For example, he points out that Western investors have an interest in having their investments in China respected, but would still enthusiastically invest there if China’s legal establishment were based on coercion (or even outright corruption).
The problem with this observation is that it ignores the reality that in this current state of economic and fiscal interdependence, the American rule of law must be exported to other places, under the weight of its own legal system. Take, for example, when an American business executive invests in a Chinese-run factory to make his company’s devices. His business is subject to, among other things, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and a wide variety of statutory, contractual, and tort doctrines that would apply in US courts against him and his business.
Suppose your Chinese-run factory ends up hiring some underage workers to make some substandard gadgets, which are then imported and sold to American consumers, and your manager pays a Chinese official to avoid trouble. This situation can be rigor in Chinese business, but in America, it can lead to that executive being fired, sued, and even prosecuted. This cultural and legal clash is not academic.
Illustrating this culture clash through diplomatic events, Feldman also discusses the anecdotal example of Wang Lijun, the Chinese police chief who sought asylum in the West after uncovering a murder case involving Bo Xilai and a dead British expat involved in a bribery scandal. The story confirmed several widely held beliefs: first, that high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials engage in widespread corruption, and second, that these party officials and their families act as if they are immune from the rule of law.
The modern twist is that the Chinese party ultimately tried to use this scandal to strengthen its own party apparatus, citing the sordid affair as evidence in the alternative narrative that Chinese corruption will ultimately not hold. Whether anyone really believed in the party is another question entirely.
