Strongly disagree; the first cold war was much more complex, changing, and varied than we paint it as, and looking at and studying from it is extremely important. But the core problem remains.
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
Everything is more complex than the story about it. The cold war was an improvised reaction to a transformative technological leap (nuclear weapons) and had a genuine, transnational ideological core that is simply missing from the plain vanilla great power conflict with China
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Replying to @Pinboard
Getting that ideological core back is one reason to call it a second Cold War - the recognition that this isn't just country-vs-country, but a party that *will always feel threatened* unless it can crush its enemies globally.
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer @Pinboard
John Garnaut has a good summary of the ideological side of this, which is repeated again and again in Xi-era texts - https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cta …
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
The difference in my perception is that there is no content for a non-Chinese audience here. Lenin, Stalin, Mao believed in world revolution. Xi's ideology as far as I can tell is not internationalist at all, but profoundly rooted in Chinese exceptionalism.
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Replying to @Pinboard
And what we're fighting against is the attempts to use that Chinese power - mostly through local elites - to enforce that ideology globally in the ways that matter to the CCP: mostly silence. That's not *identical* to global revolution. But it's close enough for government work.
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer @Pinboard
This, by
@bentleyballan and others provides one way to think about it - their argument is that China can’t readily provide an alternative global order because it doesn’t have an ideology that resonates with other states -https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-organization/article/distribution-of-identity-and-the-future-of-international-order-chinas-hegemonic-prospects/6B178D9A058C016F6C7A50A089AA7290 …2 replies 1 retweet 4 likes -
'keep your people quiet, do as you're told, and we'll help you stay in power' *is* an ideology
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It's a one-tweet summary of human history. And old school tweet at that, the shorter kind!
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I mean, I hope that if we were to be implausibly confronted by a rising Sassanid Empire or Imperial Rome, we would also find them to be a morally abhorrent opponent that we worked to fight globally.
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For sure. But there's a big difference between saying the Saracens are really getting dangerous, we better contain them, vs. the Saracens have a poisonous ideology that our youth will be seduced by and converted to if we don't root it out. I think World vs. China lacks the latter
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