HISTORIANS and political scientists are growing more comfortable using the term Cold War Two when describing the international tension between China and the United States. The first Cold War was between the United States and the Soviet Union from about 1945 through 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed into pieces, the largest being Russia. The similarities between that Cold War and the current situation are striking.
Throughout the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union used third-party client states to clash with each other. If the two giants had ever gone toe to toe, the resulting war would have been catastrophic. With thousands of nuclear weapons on each side, a full-blown war between American and its NATO allies against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact friends could have resulted in billions of casualties, making the two world wars look like child’s play. Instead, the superpowers armed countries such as North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, Cuba, and El Salvador and waged smaller wars that resulted in the deaths of millions rather than billions.
Today, the tensions between China and the United States are inspiring realignments around the region. The Philippines, after a brief flirtation with China during the Duterte administration, has recommitted to the alliance with America. Vietnam, which fought a long, bloody war with the United States in the Sixties and Seventies, sees the Yanks as the lesser of two evils today. China pushes against Vietnamese rights and territory on a daily basis and now exercises control over the Mekong river through its hydroelectric dams. Hanoi feels the vulnerability and looks increasingly to America to address it.
Taiwan stands at the center of the Chinese-American relationship, as it has for decades. Twice in the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower threatened to use nuclear weapons if the communists of mainland China tried to invade Taiwan. Would a current president do it?
During the first Cold War, the United States was a democracy and the Soviet Union was communist. The two political systems were ideologically opposed and offered competing visions to Third World, so-called because they were aligned with neither the First World (democracies) nor the Second World (communists). So, a war of words accompanied the shooting as both sides attempted to advertise the strengths of their system and expose the deficiencies of the other side. In 1959, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech to the United Nations in which he said “Socialism is replacing capitalism, so colonial slavery is giving place to freedom. Such are the rules of human development.”
Likewise today, both sides are intensely engaged in the war of words. Each presents itself as the future of humanity, the path to progress, while the other is already finished but does not accept it yet. Third parties must decide which is credible.
In the years leading up to the French-Indian War, the early to mid 1700s, North America witnessed a power relationship between the French, the English, and the Iroquois. France and England fought to control the continent, but the land was not empty. The Iroquois Confederacy was a group of six indigenous tribes who joined forces to resist both groups of outsiders, and they proved to be quite skilled at playing the English and French against each other for their own enrichment. The three-way relationship benefitted the Iroquois until the French were finally pushed out of North America. Pacific island nations find themselves in the same situation now.
BC Cook, PhD lived on Saipan and has taught history for over 30 years. He is a director and historian at Sealark Exploration
BC Cook
