Could the New Cold War turn hot?

In 1914, Europe was more economically integrated at any time in its history; received wisdom held this made war near-impossible. Technology, military thinkers asserted, made long, grinding wars impossible. Ensconced in an elaborate system of continental alliances, Europe’s leaders thought the balance of power between their blocs was assured. Little imagination is needed to see the New Cold War will shape geopolitics in coming decades. Effective thinking on the consequences of this contestation must begin with liberation from conventional wisdom.

Faced with the realisation that China will not be a benign collaborator in a world order where the United States has primacy — the cherished hope of Presidents since Richard Nixon reached out to Mao Zedong in 1972 —Washington has begun to turn to a programme of strategic containment.

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The United States 2018 National Defense Strategy asserted that powers like China, which seek to revise the global order, pose the “central challenge to US prosperity and security.” The country’s goal was to “remain the preeminent military power in the world.”

From trade to technology, the United States has begun to mount pressure on the emerging Asian superpower to ensure this end — hoping pressure on China will coerce it to comply, in return for continued prosperity.

Growing numbers of nation-states on China’s peripheries, increasingly worried by Beijing’s military aggression, are backing the United States’ efforts. New Delhi’s pushback against Chinese power is from exceptional. Tokyo is paying companies to pull production out of China, and relocate it elsewhere in Asia. Even Australia—for which China is a critical trade and technology partner—has seen its relationship with Beijing deteriorate.

Even among the major Asian democracies—Australia, India and Japan—there is, however, no consensus on what the military backbone of an alliance with the United States might actually look like. As containment moves forward, this issue must be addressed.

First up, there is no way to predict whether China will respond to containment by backing down—or escalating. Left a strategic orphan by the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, China learned baring its claws could deter more powerful geopolitical predators. Beginning in 1965, the Soviet Union began to mount pressure on China—even proposing a joint strike with the United States to cripple its nuclear-weapons programme. From 17 divisions in 1965, Soviet forces facing China in the far-east grew to 27 divisions by 1969. The Chinese estimated that Soviet mechanised forces reach Beijing inside of two weeks.

The threat lead China to engage in the second of its post-split border wars, attacking Soviet border guards on Damansky island on the Ussuri river—the first-ever skirmish between troops of nuclear powers. The Soviet Union suffered 58 dead to well over 200 People’s Liberation Army fatalities.

Yet, the border attack was a strategic success. It persuaded the Soviet Union that ill-equipped as the PLA might be, its sheer numerical force could inflict significant losses. Soviet nuclear could annihilate China, but Beijing’s own rudimentary liquid-fueled nuclear missiles could deliver some devastation too—and victory would yield an ungovernable, continent-sized begging-bowl.

The same calculations had led the United States to avoid war with China in 1950-1953, and again in Vietnam from 1955-1975. For Chinese strategists, the lessons were clear: escalation suited the side with less to lose. Faced with a second period of strategic isolation—this time, by the breakdown of the Sino-United States alliance—China could try and teach the same lesson to the new alliance seeking to contain it.

For India, the potential threats in such a scenario are vast: limited wars in the Himalayas, wars-by-proxy involving Pakistan, escalated insurgencies in the North-East, naval contestations posing threats to Indian energy security. Each of these must be anticipated—and addressed, bearing in mind that the country’s resources are not infinite.

Perhaps as important, no-one knows what the United States would be willing to risk actual war—a war potentially involving nuclear weapons. This question haunts all alliances with great powers. France, notably, acquired its own nuclear weapons, uncertain that the United States would risk its cities to protect Europe from attack by the Soviet Union.

For now, the United States has shown no interest in enmeshing itself in Asian conflicts, like those over territorial claims in the South China Seas—restricting itself to largely-symbolic assertions of the right to transit ships through international waters.

This strategic reluctance could grow in a world where the United States’ means are diminishing. In 2017, the United States’ National Security Strategy called for “overmatch”—a “combination of capabilities in sufficient scale to prevent enemy success and to ensure America’s sons and daughters will never be in a fair fight”.

Few experts believe the United States will enjoy “overmatch” in the foreseeable  future. In a thoughtful study of budgetary constraints on the United States military, scholars  Eric Gomez and others recently noted that the “international order faces many challenges, and these cannot be reversed by attempting to restore US dominance across all domains and in all regions”.

For the nation-states engaged in the New Cold War, it’s important to remember its earlier iteration was regularly punctuated by searing heat. From the Korean war to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the United States and Soviet Union regularly went to war through proxies. Even though nuclear weapons deterred both sides from direct conflict—knowing that the inevitable annihilation of their population-centres would render the very idea of victory meaningless—millions were trampled to death in the course of their contest.

Even though China’s rise might be leaving powers like India with no option but to join in alliances aimed at its containment, there ought be no illusion that this enterprise will necessarily have bloodshed-free outcomes. As important, the First World War teaches us that our estimations of what such conflicts can look like could be wildly wrong.

Banker and part-time war theorist Jan Bloch, in an 1898 book, had predicted that future wars would end only with the utter wearing out of nations. “The future of war”, he wrote, “is not fighting, but famine, not the slaying of men, but the bankruptcy of nations and the breakup of the whole social organisation”.

He was laughed out of court by the experts. In 1910, having studied the Japan-Russia war, Spanish general Manuel Fernández Silvestre y Patinga concluded future conflicts would be, “concluded in one day’s hard fighting”. New technologies like rapid-fire field guns and repeating small arms had raised the prospect armies could become locked in entrenched, positional warfare. For him, like for most contemporaries, the Japanese victory showed élan would overcome the machine:

The General had drawn the wrong lesson: In fact, Russia had been brought to its knees by economic crisis and political revolution. Even at the battle of Mukden, the collapsing Russians inflicted 70,000 casualties while losing 20,000 to the attacking Japanese.

A century after the end of the First World War, the intellectual hubris which underlay these beliefs seems self-evident today. The habits of thought which enabled it remain embedded in the world’s institutions, core among them, the illusion that we can reliably deduce consequences from causes. As the New Cold War gathers pace, Asia’s future will depend on our ability to think through the unthinkable.