How will US win the second cold war?

Communism aided the West because it saddled an imperialist Russian state with an unworkable and unpopular economic system that could not keep up with its free-market competitors. “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” — the quintessential Russian joke about working life in the workers’ paradise — goes far to explain why a regime with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads simply petered out.

Now we are entering the Second Cold War, this time with China. That’s the takeaway from this month’s U.S.-China summit in Anchorage, in which both sides made clear that they had not only clashing interests but also incompatible values. Secretary of State Antony Blinken bluntly accused China of threatening “the rules-based order that maintains global stability.” Yang Jiechi, his Chinese counterpart, replied that the U.S. had to “stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world.”

A few days later, China and Iran signed a 25-year, $400 billion strategic pact, including provisions for joint weapons development and intelligence sharing. As challenges to the U.S.-led “rules-based order” go, it’s hard to get more frontal than that. Maybe things will get better. But it would be foolish to count on it, much less suppose that conciliatory behavior by the Biden administration will do anything other than embolden Beijing. Say what you will about either the Trump or the Obama administrations, but they did not provoke China to crush democracy in Hong Kong, or brutalise Uyghurs in Xinjiang, or violate international law in the South China Sea, or help North Korea subvert international sanctions, or use military force to bully its neighbours, or undertake campaigns of cyberwarfare and industrial espionage against American targets on a previously unimagined scale.

So it’s worth thinking about what, if anything, our secret weapon might be this time around — not the overt strengths that we can bring to bear on China, like trade sanctions or naval power, but rather the inner weakness that the regime can’t get rid of because it’s part of its DNA. These candidates come to mind. The first is nationalism. Since China’s leaders abandoned orthodox Marxism, nationalism has been one of the two pillars of the regime’s legitimacy (the other is the rising standard of living). Nationalism explains Beijing’s truculence when it comes to its maritime and territorial claims against its neighbours, its massive arms build-up, its escalating threats to Taiwan and its habit of wearing out its welcome even in countries it seeks to woo.

But the problem with assertive nationalism is how the neighbours react. Japan is engaged in a major military build-up, with China topmost in mind. Australia is moving, a little awkwardly, to curb Chinese influence. Vietnam keeps edging closer to the US. Washington doesn’t have to encourage nationalism in order to benefit from it. But the best thing the administration could do to solidify this quiet containment is re-enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which the Trump administration so heedlessly trashed.

The second is cult-of-personality politics. Xi Jinping has consolidated power like no other leader since Mao Zedong. In some ways this has made Chinese authoritarianism more efficient, in ways that can seem enviable when compared with the West’s shambolic governance in the face of a crisis like Covid. But Xi cannot overcome the inherent weaknesses of hyper-centralised power. Xi is creating the critics and enemies who may someday be the regime’s undoing.

Finally, there is China’s ever-expanding campaign to regulate, monitor and control God — not in the sense of a higher power, but of an inner voice. China’s leaders have always been ferocious in their repression of spiritual and religious movements because religion cultivates a moral conscience free of political control.

None of this is to say that containing Beijing won’t also require actively building alliances, exerting economic pressure and preserving a powerful military deterrent. But as we imagine how we might bring a Second Cold War to a peaceful end, it helps to consider how China’s regime could become a partner in its own undoing.