Biden has a chance to turn China’s strengths into weaknesses.
“In the First Cold War, the United States and our allies had a secret weapon against the Soviet Union and its satellites.
It didn’t come from the C.I.A. Nor was it a product of DARPA or the weapons labs at Los Alamos. It was Communism.
Communism aided the West because it saddled an imperialist Russian state with an unworkable and unpopular economic system that could not keep up with its free-market competitors. “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” — the quintessential Russian joke about working life in the workers’ paradise — goes far to explain why a regime with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads simply petered out.
Now we are entering the Second Cold War, this time with China. That’s the takeaway from this month’s U.S.-China summit in Anchorage, in which both sides made clear that they had not only clashing interests but also incompatible values. Secretary of State Antony Blinken bluntly accused China of threatening “the rules-based order that maintains global stability.” Yang Jiechi, his Chinese counterpart, replied that the U.S. had to “stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world.” “
How Will We Win the Second Cold War?
Biden has a chance to turn China’s strengths into weaknesses.
David Lindsay Jr. | Hamden, CT
Thank you Bret Stephens for a thoughtful piece. You make excellent points at the end. I would quibble with some sloppy or unclear writing. Your wrote, “Say what you will about either the Trump or the Obama administrations, but they did not provoke China to crush democracy in Hong Kong, . . . . ” You had just cast aspersions at Biden, so did you mean to suggest by this sentence that Biden was provoking these horrible things? Don’t you hot shots get the review of an editor? – To your credit, I followed the first hyperlink in the sentence above, to an excellent news piece in the Wall Street Journal, about the ferocity of the crackdown in Hong Kong, right after the imposed the new law of control for national security. Your three suggestions were good, but there are others, as pointed out in the comments. Our gutting out of our middle class and manufacturing haven’t helped, or our coddling of the wealthy with tax cuts, while spending way to much on military hard ware for the last world war, instead of building the infrastructure and sustainable energy systems for the future. Quibbles aside, an excellent and thoughtful piece loaded with good points. You were right to point out we won the first cold war against the Soviet Union. They went bust trying to keep up with Reagan’s military increases, which I opposed at the time, but came to give some credit.