*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

The unfolding crisis in the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine is troubling, but not simply for the reasons given by Western governments and the media. The crisis is the latest expression of a growing rivalry between the US and China, and the West’s refocus on Russia is a strategy to contain Beijing. This strategy appears to be failing, though, in that it is pushing China and Russia closer together. Will this ultimately serve to divide the world between two camps in a second Cold War, this time between the US and China?The conflict in Ukraine is not an aberration, but rather one of many inevitable conflicts that are playing out as a result of growing great power rivalries. In 1916, Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilych Lenin wrote a pamphlet titled ‘Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism’. In haste and while in exile in Zurich, he argued that imperialism is a global system of domination between major capitalist rivals who need to compete for markets and territory on a global scale. This means that conflict between those major capitalist rivals is inevitable.Though Lenin was thinking of and writing about global capitalism during the First World War, this is just as applicable to the present day. China, Germany, Britain, France, and Russia, based on their economic power, finance capital, political influence, and military spending are in competition with one another. But the US-China rivalry is the main rivalry. Indeed, China, as a rising global power, is inevitably competing with the existing and sole superpower, the US, over markets and territory. This rivalry threatens to explode, as it exposes itself for the logic it represents- the nature of the system of capitalism and the inevitability of war between the contending powers. Consider tensions in Taiwan, the South China Sea, Hong Kong, Africa and in a........

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