Opinion | Can the US win the new cold war with China? Not without risking a nuclear war

America is using flimsy means to confront the strongest adversary it has ever faced, and needs to ask itself if it is willing to fight a hot war to maintain its position in Asia

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Published: 2:30am, 6 Mar 2019Updated: 2:24pm, 6 Mar 2019

Declaring a new cold war against China is easy, but working out how to fight it and win it is much harder. While almost everyone in Washington these days seems to agree that resisting China’s seemingly insatiable ambition is now America’s highest strategic priority, the nature and scale of the task is still enveloped in uncertainty.

No one seems too worried about this, however, because they assume that a new cold war with China is going to be easy to win.

The few attempts we have seen to formulate a strategy to against China, from think-tankers’ policy papers to Congress’ recent Asia Reassurance Initiative Act (ARIA), radiate confidence that America can defeat China’s challenge by doing just a little bit more of the things it has been doing in Asia for decades.

The talk is of closer links to allies, more active partnerships with friends, more military deployments and increased economic and people-to-people links. But this is just what America has been saying and doing for years, and none of it has worked to stop China’s growing influence.

America need not go to war with China to defeat its challenge, but it must convince Beijing that it is willing and able to do so

By expecting to win this way, today’s new cold warriors massively underestimate China. That is a huge mistake, reflecting major misunderstandings of China’s power, ambitions and resolve.