Cold War With China Is Avoidable

It is a mistake, however, to think we can decouple our economy completely from China without enormous economic costs. That is why the cold war metaphor is misleading. In the Cold War, the Soviet Union was a direct military and ideological threat to the U.S., and the two countries had almost no economic or social interdependence. The U.S. does half a trillion dollars in trade annually with China, not to mention the millions of social interchanges like tourism. China has learned to harness the creativity of markets to authoritarian Communist Party control in ways the Soviets never mastered.

The U.S. and its allies aren’t threatened by the export of communism—few are taking to the streets in favor of Mr. Xi’s ideology—but by a hybrid system of economic and political interdependence that China can manipulate. More countries count China than the U.S. as their leading trade partner. Partial decoupling on security issues like Huawei is necessary, but total economic decoupling would be costly, and few allies would follow suit.

Moreover, with regard to the ecological aspects of interdependence such as climate change and pandemics, the laws of physics and biology make decoupling impossible. No country can solve transnational problems alone. The politics of global interdependence involves using power with others as well as over others. For better and worse, we are locked in a “cooperative rivalry” with China in which we need a strategy that can accomplish two contradictory things at the same time. This isn’t like Cold War containment.

Meeting the China challenge will require a more complex strategy that leverages American hard and soft power at home and abroad to defend ourselves and strengthen a rules-based system. Some pessimists look at China’s population size and economic growth rate and believe the task is impossible. On the contrary, if the U.S. treats allies as assets rather than liabilities, the combined wealth of the Western democracies will far exceed that of China well into this century.

A successful challenge to China will require clear strategy with well-defined goals. It will require establishing and defending technology standards and values that are consistent with freedom. A new cold war can’t be ruled out. But as Henry Kissinger has warned, the appropriate historical metaphor today isn’t 1945 but 1914, when all the great powers expected a short third Balkan war. Instead they got a world war that lasted four years and destroyed four empires. A successful strategy must also protect against such a sleepwalker syndrome.

If China thinks it can coerce Taiwan with a blockade or by taking an offshore island—or there is a ship or aircraft collision that leads to loss of life—all bets are off. If the U.S. reacts by freezing Chinese assets or invoking the Trading with the Enemy Act, the world could slip quickly into a real cold war, or even a hot one. The Biden administration needs to prepare a broad strategy to meet the China challenge, and it must include processes for accident avoidance, crisis management and constant high level communication. Otherwise, the result could be disastrous for China, the U.S. and the world.

Mr. Nye is a former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School and author of “Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy From FDR to Trump.”