Despite U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent remarks that "We are not looking for conflict or a new Cold War. To the contrary, we're determined to avoid both", the official Chinese English-language mouthpiece for the People's Republic of China has released an editorial explaining why the next Cold War is all but inevitable and would be unwinnable for the United States.
“The growing U.S.' geopolitical competition with Russia and China marks the end of the post-Cold War world order, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, speaking at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies on Wednesday. ‘What we are experiencing now is more than a test of the post-Cold War order. It's the end of it’, he noted. ‘Decades of relative geopolitical stability have given way to an intensifying competition with authoritarian powers, revisionist powers’. This statement appears to be a rallying cry for a ‘new cold war’.
Regarding Blinken's remarks, there are two main points to consider. Firstly, Blinken was creating a sense of crisis in the world. The underlying message to U.S. allies and other countries is that there are challengers, particularly China and Russia, who want to change the existing order.
The U.S. is attempting to slow down China's rise through strategic competition while hoping to sustain its hegemony without jeopardizing its own interests. However, it seems that the U.S. has no clear solution to this dilemma.
China is one of the beneficiaries of the existing system and does not seek to challenge or subvert this order. However, the U.S. has viewed any legitimate demand made by China, even those that reflect the reasonable demands of the majority of developing countries, as a challenge and ill-intentioned sabotage.
The U.S. believes that by containing China, it will gain an advantage. However, whatever damage they're doing to China, it also backfires on the U.S. and even the world.
Today, the U.S. is embroiled in simultaneous confrontations with China and Russia. The U.S. needs to think carefully, as it will be more difficult to engage in a ‘new cold war’ compared to the previous one. In the 1970s, the U.S. GDP accounted for nearly one-third of the global total, but now it is only one-fourth. Its two major opponents are the nuclear power Russia and the economic powerhouse China. In order to defeat Russia, the U.S. must ultimately dismantle its nuclear deterrence, which would be a thrilling adventure.
As for China, the U.S. is attempting to stifle its development by imposing unlimited technological restrictions, but it is unable to completely decouple from China economically. For the U.S. and its main allies, China is either their largest single trading partner or one of the largest. Today, the U.S. is a reckless strategic aggressor, attempting to unite its relatively weaker strength with its allies to wage a new cold war. It should be noted that the power of U.S. allies has declined significantly, and the unity of the ‘West’ is crippled due to the U.S. transitioning from a ‘blood donor’ to a ‘vampire’.
The current generation of American elites arrogantly seeks to replicate the victory of the Cold War, but they will never succeed”. -Global Times
The geostrategic position of the United States and its NATO allies is much weaker than it once was.
Imposing unilateral economic sanctions on its perceived enemies without agreement from a substantial number of other multi-aligned nations has seemingly unified the adversaries of the United States in shared resistance against the unipolar neoliberal regime.
This change in the international order on the back of the failures of centralization on the part of the neocolonial West and the continuing rise of nationalism worldwide has cast serious doubt upon the strategy to isolate the U.S. and its NATO satellites from what has become the better part of the world economy.