Cold War II Is All About Geopolitics

In Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War, Michael Doyle writes that he remembers with nostalgia the optimism of the early 1990s. So do I: Serving as a junior officer in the Norwegian armed forces toward the end of the Cold War, I can still recall the sense of euphoria watching the Berlin Wall fall and Europe’s geopolitical divide crumble down. The post-Cold War order that followed was certainly not perfect, but it provided peace and prosperity around much of the world on an unparalleled scale. Yet now, we are on the verge of another cold war, and global security and stability are at risk—with serious implications for democracy and human rights, economic growth, and climate change. Cold Peace engages with three major questions concerning the emerging Cold War II.

Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War, Michael Doyle, Liveright, 336 pp., $30, April 2023

First, it asks why another cold war is looming. Doyle posits that we are now paying the price for lack of creativity in the 1990s—and that with less U.S. and Western arrogance, it could have been possible to incorporate Russia into a common European security architecture and build more democratic regimes in both China and Russia. It is fascinating to see how Doyle, who belongs to the liberal school of thought in the study of international relations, to a large degree echoes the arguments of the ostensibly opposing realist school, including the claim by University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer that the United States’ unwavering faith in advancing liberal hegemony is a major reason for the rise of nationalism in China and Russia. Today, however, as the Kremlin attempts to dismember Ukraine and publicly threatens other Eastern European countries, barring former Warsaw Pact members from NATO would clearly have been a larger mistake than extending the alliance. U.S. policy on China, too, may have been just right, with neither too much nor too little engagement. Still, exploring whether alternative paths might have led Beijing and Moscow to be stronger supporters of the liberal order, like Doyle does in Cold Peace, is a meaningful exercise.

Second, comparing the emerging cold war to the original one, Doyle concludes that Cold War II is unlikely to be as extreme as the first Cold War, due to a common interest in mutually dependent prosperity and because contemporary Russia and China are authoritarian, not totalitarian, with less interest in ideological crusades than their Stalinist and Maoist predecessors. Doyle accordingly suggests that the current state of affairs requires another label than cold war, thus the title of his book. “Unlike cold wars, cold peaces do not include proxy wars, covert sabotage, or attempts to destabilize the political independence of rival states,” he writes.

An East German checkpoint marks the border between West and East Berlin, on Oct. 13, 1976. Ralph Gatti/AFP via Getty Images

Third, the book debates how a cold war can be avoided. Doyle argues that the best bulwark against a Cold War II, let alone an escalation to a hot war, is for the United States and other liberal countries to pursue responsible leadership at home and protect their own democratic institutions. To achieve this, Doyle suggests a second New Deal to address the domestic inequalities that fuel populism in contemporary democracies.

Cold Peace is an important book, but it has one major weakness: It fails to address geopolitics as the main factor molding the new cold war. Doyle states that “it is geoeconomics, rather than geopolitics, in which the contest for world leadership will play out.” Omitting geopolitics, though, tells only half the story of the emerging cold war. It reminds me of the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid!” coined by then-U.S. presidential candidate Bill Clinton during his 1992 campaign. The phrase has since come to encapsulate the supremacy of economics over politics. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, however, we have seen governments gradually reassert themselves over the economy with industrial policy, emissions regulation, and new limits on globalization. Similarly, with the return of great-power rivalry to global affairs, the liberal school of thought—with its emphasis on economic interdependence, ideology, and domestic institutions—has lost some of its explanatory value. Indeed, in order to make sense of contemporary world politics, one is tempted to invoke Clinton: “It’s the geopolitics, stupid!”

Building his argument on liberalism, however, Doyle views the domestic roots of conflict as the most important driver of a new cold war. Is that really true? China’s domestic polity, for example, is not all that different today than from 10 or 20 years ago, when the United States engaged China on many levels. Washington, too, has not undergone a dramatic ideological shift in the way it views the world. Doyle argues that economic competition with China is challenging the U.S. middle class and encouraging the United States to implement restrictions on trade and international investment. But this is not new: The United States responded in a similar fashion to Japan’s economic rise in the 1980s. The difference, of course, is that Japan never seriously invested in military power, whereas contemporary China does.

The main factor changing Washington’s China policy from engagement toward containment is not ideology, but the shifting balance of power. Today, the international system is no longer unipolar, and it is also not yet multipolar or tripolar, as Doyle suggests. The current power structure is bipolar, just as it was during the original Cold War. It is the bipolar U.S.-China rivalry—with its inherent logic of balancing and alignment—that is shaping a new cold war, just as the bipolar U.S.-Soviet rivalry shaped the original Cold War. Doyle, like many others, often refers to Russia’s assertiveness and invasion of Ukraine as a driver of Cold War II. However, Russia is no longer a great power. The war in Ukraine might enhance a new geopolitical divide between a U.S.-led bloc of allies on one side and a strengthened Chinese-Russian partnership on the other, but the main story in international affairs today is the U.S.-China rivalry.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden meet at the G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, on Nov. 14, 2022.Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

In fact, in terms of economic power, the current system is actually more perfectly bipolar than during the Cold War, with China’s aggregated economic wealth almost equaling that of the United States, whereas the Soviet economy never accounted for much more than 50 percent of the U.S. economy. With regard to military power, the current international system is less perfectly bipolar than it was during the Cold War, with a larger gap in military might between Washington and Beijing now than between Washington and Moscow then. But the reason for this gap in military might is simply because China still spends a smaller share of its GDP on defense than the Soviet Union did during the Cold War.

Doyle debates at length about the international power structure, but he concludes that it is tripolar, consisting of the United States, China, and Russia in military terms, and the United States, China, and the European Union in economic terms. It seems that nobody likes to admit the arrival of a bipolar power structure. The United States doesn’t like it, because it reduces its power position. Beijing is not fully committed to it either, because it elevates China to an international position it is not yet ready to fill. And European leaders certainly don’t like it, because they would prefer a multipolar system—as would Russia and India. Moreover, after three decades of globalization, there is a great deal of reluctance among policymakers and academics alike to accept the realities of an intense, all-encompassing, and polarizing bipolar rivalry. Then there are those who find the idea of a multipolar world more comforting or fairer—say, to the rising powers of the global south—but in doing so, they are espousing a normative view of what the world should look like in their eyes, not the way it actually is today.

Still, even though the U.S.-China power structure resembles that of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, the geographic context of these two bipolar systems differs, creating two very unique geopolitical logics. As the U.S. international relations scholar Nicholas J. Spykman wrote in America’s Strategy in World Politics in 1942, geopolitics is the interplay between power and geography. It means that a new territorial order always emerges with the rise and fall of great powers and is determined by where the great powers are geographically located vis-à-vis each other. During the original Cold War, the United States faced the land power Soviet Union, situated in the Eurasian heartland, whereas today it faces the sea power China, located in the Asian rimlands. This variance in geography has major implications for the great-power rivalry and international order.

People’s Liberation Army sailors stand on their warship during an international fleet review off Qingdao, China, on April 23, 2009.Guang Niu/AFP via Getty Images

Even so, Doyle’s Cold Peace does not discuss China’s geographic position at all, nor its nature as a fast-growing sea power. Let me here briefly highlight three ways in which China’s rimland position matters—and will inform the emerging global order much more than politics and the other domestic factors Doyle addresses.

First, China’s rimland position enables it to build sea power. It is China’s fast-growing naval capabilities, and not differences in political systems, that drives the U.S.-China rivalry. Chinese sea power challenges the long-standing U.S. supremacy in Asia, and Republicans and Democrats alike support the United States pivoting more of its resources into the Indo-Pacific theater to balance China’s military rise. Moreover, the U.S.-China naval rivalry may be less stable than the predominantly land-based U.S.-Soviet rivalry. The Cold War’s main focus on the European land theater allowed the strategy of massive retaliation to emerge, which strongly deterred any attempts to cross the fixed line dividing Europe and contributed to strategic stability. Today, the absence of fixed lines in Asian waters may reduce the risk of nuclear escalation between China and the United States, but it increases the risk of a limited war with uncertain escalation mechanisms.

Second, I share Doyle’s view that Cold War II will be less polarized than the first Cold War. But rather than seeing this as the result of domestic issues and ideology, I would emphasize geopolitics and the importance of China’s rimland position. Whereas the Soviet Union’s nature as a land- and resource-based economy contributed to a distinct two-bloc economic divide during the Cold War, China’s rimland position enables it to stay more interconnected with the global economy. China’s comprehensive sea power, from its shipbuilding capabilities to its large merchant fleet to its naval prowess, adds to this picture.

Third, I share Doyle’s concern about the future of trans-Atlantic ties. Nonetheless, where Doyle sees the rise of populism in the United States as a threat to the U.S. commitment to European security, I would yet again stress the importance of China’s geography. Political leaders may change, but China’s geographic constraints will remain the same. From its position in the East Asian rimland, China has more limited geographic reach than the Cold War-era Soviet Union did, and this creates diverging threat perceptions in the United States and Europe. While the Soviet Union was a two-flank challenge to the United States across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, China is a one-flank challenge only, in Asia. Geography thus forces the United States to give priority to its Pacific flank, whereas Europe views Russia as the larger challenge to its security.

Cold Peace is a useful guide to make sense of the emerging Cold War II, but Doyle overplays the domestic roots of international affairs. In order to fully grasp contemporary world politics and the U.S.-China rivalry, there remains no better guide than classic geopolitics.