A third Cold War?

“We will harness the power of democracy, freedom, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights to answer the biggest questions and overcome the greatest challenges.” G-7 summit communique issued at Cornwall, UK on June 13, 2021.

Back to back summits held last week reflecting the surge of American leadership in G-7 and Nato focused on dealing with Sino-Russian threat to western dominated world order, climate change and coping with the pandemic crisis. But, the most dangerous aspect of G-7 and Nato summits is the beginning of a third cold war. Unfortunately, both the summits failed to mention the Palestinian and Kashmir conflicts but supported the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Unlike former president Donald Trump who used to ridicule G-7 and Nato of their uselessness, President Biden has given new confidence and lease of life to US allies in dealing with what he calls the growing Chinese and Russian threats to democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

Is the warning of a new cold war given by the US president and shared by his Nato allies real or superficial? Can China be equated with former Soviet Union or Beijing will not fall into the trap of the West to be dragged into a cold war situation? The first cold war which began immediately after the end of the WWI and collapse of wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and other allied powers led to the ideological division of the world into Capitalist and Communist blocs. Based on psychological and propaganda warfare, the first cold war only ended when the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact collapsed and the Western world led by the US declared their victory over communism.

In between, there was a second cold war from 1979-1985 when there was a rupture in US-Soviet détente because of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan; support to anti-American regime in Nicaragua; support to the Vietnamese backed regime in Cambodia; suspension of arms control talks at the superpower level; and boycott of Moscow Olympics by the US and its allies in 1980 because of growing Soviet military involvement in different parts of the world. The second cold war ended in 1985 when there was superpower summit in Geneva between US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. That summit led to the resumption of détente between the US and the Soviet Union which lasted till the disintegration of the Soviet bloc in 1991. In present circumstances, a cold war can be witnessed between US and Russia; US and China; and India and Pakistan, but certainly China because of its clear and consistent policy of focusing on economic growth and development is not interested in plunging itself in a propaganda warfare with the US-led western world or exhausting its resources on excessive military buildup.

Since the US and the western powers cannot compete with China in terms of trade, investments and its BRI, their response is based on dragging Beijing in a cold war by raising issues of alleged Muslim persecution in Xinjiang and human rights violations in Tibet and Hong Kong. If China is a ‘dragon’ and is described as a major threat to US and Western interests particularly in global south, the idea fueled by the Biden administration is to pursue a policy of provocation and exerting pressures on countries relying on Chinese aid and investments to seek the option of G-7 investment plan called “Build Back Better World”. The multi-billion dollar infrastructure project pledges to ensure high quality, transparent and sustainable initiative to be offered to developing countries. Earlier, the former president Donald Trump had announced an alternate plan of BRI called Blue Dot Network (BDN), but it failed to take off. He was also suggesting that QUAD, a loose alliance composed of Australia, India, Japan and the US, should counter Chinese BRI.

A third cold war would be a non-starter because of three main reasons, as follows:

First, European allies of America, particularly Germany, is not keen to confront China because of its huge trade and investment ties with Beijing. China has augmented its trade with Europe by road and rail, and European markets are flooded with Chinese commodities. In the first cold war, the Soviet Union and its allies had no such trade or investments in the West and there were no economic stakes which both China and the West, particularly European countries, have on each other. A cold war only perpetuates in an environment of hostility, propaganda and psychological warfare which is not the case with China. If the Biden administration is trying to equate China with the former Soviet Union, it will be a wrong comparison.

Second, in view of its ‘open door policy’ launched by Deng Xioping in 1979, China will not fall into the trap laid by the US as it is set to overtake the US as the world’s number one economy in coming years. Adhering to the concept of ‘soft power’, the Chinese leadership is wise enough to focus on its policy of economic engagement rather than overt confrontation with neighbours or with America. China and India have contentious border issues and their relations briefly soured a year ago, but how can one undermine the fact that China is India’s leading trading partner with a yearly trade of more than 100 billion US dollars. Beijing is mindful to the fact that its huge foreign exchange reserves, investments and BRI will go down the drain if it reacts to what the US and its western allies are planning to. Likewise, China and Russia are able to mend fences with each other despite their unresolved border conflicts. Unlike the US which has consumed several trillion dollars in overseas wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the last war which China fought was against Vietnam in January 1979 and since then it has strictly followed the policy of non-interference and non-intervention in foreign policy matters. If the US has consumed several trillion dollars in wars which it was unable to win, China utilised its energies for trade, investment and BRI.

Third, despite the US strategic ambitions to hurt and damage China by pursuing a policy of containment, the image of Beijing is much better than America’s in majority of the Third World countries. If China through its investments has helped develop and modernise the infrastructure of many Asian, African and Latin American countries, the US and the West are blamed of exploiting the resources and not contributing to the industrialisation of developing countries. NATO summit communique targeted both Russia and China. In case of Moscow, the summit criticised Russia’s military buildup and offensive behavior vis-a-vis Nato’s eastern frontier as “contributing along Nato borders and beyond”. The US President during the Nato summit stated, “We have Russia that is not acting in a way that is consistent with what we had hoped, as well as China.”

It is yet to be seen how G-7 and Nato summits along with the meeting of Presidents Biden and Putin held in Geneva on June 16 will have an impact on the prevailing world order but certainly a third cold war seems to be out of question.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 27^th, 2021.

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