President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, November 9, 2017. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst
Edward Alden, Business Insider/World Politics Review: The US's old Cold War playbook won't work against China
* During the Cold War, the US used its economic influence to isolate and ultimately weaken the Soviet Union.
* Now, as the US lurches toward a similar confrontation with China, a new balance of economic power, in which China has much more sway than the Soviet Union did, means the old Cold War playbook doesn't apply.
During the Cold War, the United States created and led two quite different international trading systems.
The first, and by far the better known, was the open, multilateral trading system. Its aim was to expand free trade and market principles around the world, and it culminated after the Cold War in the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995. What began with just 23 nations in the aftermath of World War II, with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, today includes 164 countries from every corner of the globe. Most significantly, the United States welcomed China into the WTO in 2001, bringing into the fold its former Cold War-era adversary.
The second system was far less known and has been far less written about in the history books. It was a web of export controls and sanctions intended to deny advanced technologies to the Soviet Union and its allies. Organized under the opaque Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls, or CoCom, the United States and its allies mustered a collaborative and ultimately successful effort to weaken the technological capabilities of the Soviet Union.
Now, it appears, the United States is trying to do the same to China.
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WNU Editor: China is not the Soviet Union. And it is definitely in a better economic situation than the Soviet Union ever was. The fact that China may now embrace a free market economic model will make it even more formidable on the world stage .... Chinese President Xi Says China Won’t Return To Planned Economy. Markets Will Now Play A 'Decisive Role' (May 24, 2020). But China is not superman. It has one huge weakness, and that weakness is its authoritarian political system. The Chinese that I know are not only striving for a better life economically speaking, but they are also yearning for the freedoms and rule of law that we in the West take for granted. Beijing will need to address those yearnings, because if they do not, resentment and bitterness like what we are seeing in Hong Kong will only grow and it will destabilize the regime in the same manner that we saw in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
