U.S. and China now are drifting toward cold war

One by one, the United States has hit at the core tenets of Xi Jinping’s vision for a rising China ready to assume the mantle of superpower.

In a matter of weeks, the Trump administration has imposed sanctions over punitive policies in Hong Kong and China’s western region of Xinjiang.

It took new measures to suffocate Chinese innovation by cutting it off from American technology and pushing allies to look elsewhere.

On Monday, it challenged China’s claims in the South China Sea, setting the stage for sharper confrontation.

And President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he had signed into law a bill to punish Chinese officials for the new security law that curbs the rights of Hong Kong residents — along with an executive order ending preferential trade treatment for Hong Kong.

“The power gap is closing, and the ideological gap is widening,” said Rush Doshi, director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington, adding that China and the United States had entered a downward “ideological spiral” years in the making.

“Where’s the bottom?” he asked.

For years, officials and historians have dismissed the idea that a new Cold War was emerging between the United States and China.

The contours of today’s world, the argument went, imply are incomparable to the decades when the United States and the Soviet Union squared off in an existential struggle for supremacy. The world was said to be too interconnected to easily divide into ideological blocs.

Now, lines are being drawn and relations are in free fall, laying the foundation for a confrontation that will have many of the characteristics of the Cold War — and the dangers.

As the two superpowers clash over technology, territory and clout, they face the same risk of small disputes escalating into military conflict.

The relationship increasingly is imbued with deep distrust and animosity, as well as the fraught tensions that come with two powers jockeying for primacy, especially in areas where their interests collide: in cyberspace and outer space, in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea — and even in the Persian Gulf.

And the coronavirus pandemic, coupled with China’s recent aggressive actions on its borders — from the Pacific to the Himalayas — has turned existing fissures into chasms that could be difficult to overcome.

Specter of McCarthyism

the virus.

With the world distracted by the pandemic, China also has wielded its military might, as it did by testing its disputed frontier with India in April and May. That led to the first deadly clash there since 1975. The damage to the relationship could take years to repair.

Increasingly, China seems willing to accept the risks of such actions. Only weeks later, it asserted a new territorial claim in Bhutan, the mountain kingdom that’s closely allied with India.

With China menacing vessels from Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia in the South China Sea, the U.S. dispatched two aircraft carriers last month in an aggressive show of strength. Further brinkmanship appears inevitable now that the State Department has declared China’s claims there illegal.

A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, Zhao Lijian, said Tuesday that the U.S. declaration would undermine regional peace and stability.

“China is committed to resolving territorial and jurisdictional disputes with directly related sovereign states through negotiations and consultations,” he said.

That’s not how its neighbors see things. Japan warned that China was attempting to “alter the status quo in the East China Sea and the South China Sea.” It called China a more serious threat than a nuclear-armed North Korea.

Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia and professor of international studies at Stanford University, said China’s recent maneuvering appeared to be “overextended and overreaching,” likening it to one of the most fraught moments of the Cold War.

“It does remind me of (Soviet Premier Nikita) Khrushchev,” he said. “He’s lashing out, and suddenly he’s in a Cuban missile crisis with the U.S.”

“The power gap is closing, and the ideological gap is widening.” Rush Doshi, Brookings Institution China Strateg y

Initiative director

Pessimism widespread