Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

The Dawn of a New Cold War

The growing tension between the United States and China boils down to a battle over resources.

In my youth, pop culture told me that the Cold War would end in one of two ways: a Soviet–Cuban invasion that would necessitate my taking to the hills and fighting a guerrilla war against the Communists, à la “Red Dawn,” like a young Patrick Swayze; or riding out an atomic winter after a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, as in “The Day After.” The only other hope was Rocky besting Drago in a proxy war held in a boxing ring (“In here, there were two guys killing each other, but I guess it’s better than 20 million”). Instead, in November 1989, I watched the Cold War end on a TV with an antenna, as the Berlin Wall came crashing down. Suddenly, there was only one superpower left standing.

Thirty-seven years later, the U.S. has parlayed that seemingly lopsided victory into a pyrrhic one. In the decades since, America has been hollowed out by the greed, grift, and graft of craven politicians, heartless corporations, and an ever-expanding class of would-be tyrant tycoons. As a topper, it has twice elected a vile, racist, megalomaniacal huckster who was, in those “Red Dawn” and “Rocky IV” years, nothing more than a local New York City joke. Like a reflection in a fun house, the instant implosion of the Soviet Union has been mirrored by the slow-motion collapse of the United States.

Now, China has stepped up to challenge the wobbling, ineffectual — if still exceptionally dangerous — last superpower. Asia’s economic behemoth recently circumvented Donald Trump’s tariffs on solar panels, to the tune of more than $100 million a month, via a hastily constructed 20,000-mile trade route running through Kenya and a tiny Indonesian island off the coast of Singapore, according to reporting by Bloomberg News. It was one of a seemingly endless string of small defeats by China that the Trump administration has endured. Today, John Feffer employs another staple of my childhood pop-culture consumption, Godzilla, to explain the current state of U.S.–China relations and what is likely to happen if these two monsters come to blows. 

— Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch

If you haven’t yet, sign up to receive TomDispatch in your inbox here.

When monsters square off, they are quick to showcase their asymmetrical superpowers.

Take Godzilla, for instance. Thanks to U.S. atomic testing in the Pacific, the dinosaur-like sea creature has explosive, radioactive breath that can destroy everything in its path. His archenemy Rodan, meanwhile, is a pterodactyl-like bird that can fly at supersonic speeds, a skill useful in avoiding atomic bad breath. Since the 1960s, the two giant monsters have duked it out across a series of Japanese films, causing much mayhem in the process.

Originally the product of Cold War fears of nuclear peril, these archetypal monsters can stand in for the principal geopolitical antagonists of today. Like their monster kin, China and the United States have very specific and complementary superpowers. China controls the majority of critical minerals in the world, with a special focus on rare earth elements. The United States has a technological edge when it comes to the most sophisticated semiconductors needed for artificial intelligence applications.

Put bluntly: China has the rocks, and America has the chips.

With these superpowers on display, the two countries have clashed in a series of trade negotiations, tense military standoffs, and high-level political meetings. They are engaged in a prolonged tug-of-war not to save the world — as in some comic-book universe — but in the service of their own national aggrandizement and transnational greed. While they dicker, the world slouches toward bedlam.

A Pause in Hostilities

When President Donald Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing in mid-May, the exchanges were unexpectedly cordial. The two countries had been engaged in an on-again, off-again war of tariffs since Trump had begun his second term, a conflict that threatened to spiral out of control. At the same time, the Chinese were deeply concerned about the impact of the U.S.–Israeli war against Iran on international stability, given spiking oil prices and their ripple effects on the global economy.

Yet, at this meeting in China, the two leaders converged on a common goal of “constructive strategic stability.” In order to forge this condominium of superpowers — a G2 — Trump was willing to delay arms deliveries to Taiwan. He also greenlighted the sale of sophisticated (though not the most advanced) Nvidia computer chips to China. In turn, China agreed to increase its purchases from the United States, including 200 Boeing aircraft and $17 billion of agricultural goods each year through 2028.

Anthropic Says We Must Stop Authoritarian AI. But What About Its Authoritarian Investors?

The hoopla surrounding the summit, generated by press offices on both sides, obscured the reality that the two countries completed few concrete bilateral deals. Trump did not secure long-term access to the critical minerals that China controls — specifically the rare earth elements that are essential to U.S. high-tech manufacturing and sophisticated military hardware — and the tech giants that accompanied Trump on the trip didn’t win any major concessions in the form of enhanced access to the Chinese market. Meanwhile, China failed to alter U.S. security policy in the Asia–Pacific region. The leaders of the new G2 might be expected to rethink or rework the global rules of the road, but this was not on the agenda in Beijing.

Still, the two superpowers stepped off the path of escalating confrontation. Perhaps more importantly, Trump has seemingly abandoned his earlier goal of decoupling the United States from the Chinese economy, which, along with ratcheting up containment of the “strategic competitor,” had become something of a bipartisan imperative.

For the time being at least, the world’s superpower monsters are not laying waste to the landscape around their feet. Given how much firepower they command, that’s no small achievement. The battle, however, continues to rage further afield in the........

© The Intercept