The US and China Can Achieve a Cold Peace
The world’s two biggest economies don’t need to agree with each other to work together.
Cold.
Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Few Americans are probably familiar with financier Bernard Baruch today, but two words from a speech he gave to the South Carolina legislature 75 years ago have come back to haunt us: “Let us not be deceived — we are today in the midst of a Cold War.”
But what makes a war “cold”? The obvious answer is a global rivalry that never reaches the point of direct armed conflict. But that understates the scope, stakes and severity of the struggle between the US and Soviet Union that lasted half a century. By that standard, are America and China engaged in one today? Henry Kissinger hedged his bets a bit when he famously told my colleague Niall Ferguson at the 2019 Bloomberg New Economy Forum that we have entered the “foothills” of Cold War II.