COLD WAR 2.0: US AND INDIA WORK ON A WINNING STRATEGY
The CCP has since 1949 regarded itself as being in a war with the US over primacy. The difference is that in the Chinese mind, ‘war’ need not be kinetic. War to the Chinese means the subordination to their interests of the other, and using this definition, China has been ‘at war’ with the US for a long while.
The drive by Jospeh Stalin for the expansion of territory and influence of the Soviet Union that was visible after the 1939-45 war convinced US policymakers that (what was subsequently called) the USSR-US Cold War was a reality. This swift acceptance of reality came about because both Russian as well as western tradition defines war in kinetic terms: guns, bombs, troops. The Chinese do not. They believe in achieving their objectives through chipping away and reducing the physical, psychological, economic and technological advantages of the adversary. Such “victory through stealth” suppresses the ability of the rival power to respond effectively, especially if that country is a democracy. This is what had been taking place with India since the PRC pace of establishing superiority accelerated in the 1990s. Territory has been lost, meta data got vacuumed up in copious quantities to feed the Artificial Intelligence capabilities of the PRC, and domestic enterprises were serially destroyed by crony businessmen importing substitutes flowing from China. Much of Beijing’s expansion of territory on land and water and industrial and technological capability has taken place outside the public radar. The first President of the US to seriously call out China for its primacy-seeking policies was Donald Trump in 2017. This had never been attempted in the past, and indeed several US Presidents (including Nixon, Carter and Clinton) showered benefits on Beijing while occasionally scolding the CCP in public.
Although the Covid-19 pandemic has in the US somewhat changed the public perception of China as less of a threat than Russia or even Iran, even in the foreign policy team of the Biden campaign there is widespread denial about the fact that a new Cold War has