Washington’s fixation on the Cold War is obscuring a far more dangerous historical parallel in the escalating rivalry between the United States and China.
In a recent interview with Foreign Affairs, historian Odd Arne Westad argued that the current geopolitical landscape resembles the brittle, interconnected world of the early 20th century more than the bipolar standoff of the late 20th. While policymakers frequently cite the Soviet Union as a model for understanding Beijing, the analogy fails to capture the defining feature of the current competition: economic entanglement.
Context
The Soviet Union self-isolated, building an autarkic system designed to exist apart from Western capitalism. China has done the opposite — it competes from within the same international economic order as the United States, creating a volatility that containment strategies cannot easily address.
Westad compared Beijing’s current trajectory to that of imperial Germany before World War I. Like Berlin a century ago, Beijing feels constrained by a global order established by a dominant maritime power. It seeks to dominate its region not merely for local security, but because East Asia has become the center of gravity for the global economy. Control there translates to global preeminence.
“For great powers, appetite sometimes increases with eating.”
— Odd Arne Westad, historian
This ambition creates structural friction that places the two powers on a collision course. While China may not have a unified grand plan for world domination, its incremental push for regional hegemony destabilizes the system just as effectively.
Taiwan: The Sharpest Flashpoint
Westad described the island’s status as a unique historical burden, calling it “Alsace, Bosnia, and Belgium rolled into one.”
For the Chinese Communist Party, Taiwan is not merely a strategic asset but a symbol of the “century of humiliation” and the unfinished business of the Chinese Civil War. Xi Jinping views reunification as a prerequisite for his regime’s ultimate legitimacy. This internal narrative makes compromise nearly impossible. The younger generation in Taiwan identifies less with the mainland every year. Time is not on Beijing’s side.
The Russia Factor
Adding to the instability is China’s rapid strategic embrace of Russia. Westad characterized this alignment as a profound long-term error for Beijing. By tethering itself to a declining, revanchist empire that quarrels with almost all its neighbors, China risks being dragged into conflicts that offer it no benefit. Yet the partnership accelerates, driven by a shared desire to erode American influence.
War is not inevitable. But averting it requires leaders to look past the comforting binary of the Cold War and recognize the chaotic dynamics of a multipolar order. Westad emphasized the necessity of high-level communication and the maintenance of mutual respect, however performative, to manage the structural pressures pushing the world toward a repetition of 1914.