American Primacy and US–China Relations: The Cold War Analogy Reversed

Abstract

Abstract Does today’s US–China relationship resemble the bygone rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union? In this article, we suggest that there are some instructive similarities between US–China and US–Soviet relations, but the Cold War analogy works best when the contemporary United States is cast in the role of the historical Soviet Union. Specifically, the United States (1991–present) has in common with the Soviet Union (1945–91) the fact that it occupies a position of near dominance on the Eurasian continent during a prolonged era of relative peace. It was Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe that gave the bipolar international system of the Cold War era its defining characteristic—that is, a geographic distribution of power assets in Eurasia that the United States and its allies mobilized to resist and overturn. Now, it is US primacy in Eurasia that serves to define the basic contours of the present (if ailing) unipolar international system: a geopolitical configuration that denies any power other than the United States the opportunity to carve out an effective sphere of influence. In short, the legacy forward deployment of US forces shapes the context within which Sino-American relations are unfolding just as the legacy occupation of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union structured superpower relations during the Cold War.