Are we witnessing a new cold war, this time between the United States and China? Are we going, like sleepwalkers, to go to war without wanting to, like our elders in 1914? I’“boundless friendship” Does Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping claim refer us to the disastrous German-Soviet pact of 1939? Can Hong Kong or Taiwan be compared to West Berlin? Are the “New Silk Roads” a Chinese version of the Marshall Plan? These are all questions – and many more – that historian Pierre Grosser addresses in his new book, The Other Cold War? The United States-China Confrontation (CNRS Editions, 392 pages, €25). If he answers some of them, he above all offers us reading grids, while warning us against “lessons of history”.
In doing so, Pierre Grosser reconsiders several received ideas. As he had already shown in his previous book, The history of the world is made in Asia (Odile Jacob, 2019), he recalls that “The Cold War was hot until 1979, especially between Americans and Chinese”. Some 90% of American war dead between 1945 and 1979 fell in Asia, and as many as 20 million people are believed to have died during this period, which some have nevertheless called “long peace”.
Another welcome reminder: at a time when Westerners tend to consider that Xi Jinping is the source of all evil, Pierre Grosser shows that Japan is worried about the rise of China since 2000 and that the turning point in the Sino-American relations actually dates from the years 2007-2013. “Beijing then believes that its low-profile policy has not paid off enough and that nationalist opinion criticizes the government for its timidity. »
If, a few years ago, some Westerners could still believe in a “social democratization of China”the « neototalitarianism » of Xi Jinping is no longer in doubt. And, as there will be no more“year zero” in Beijing than in Moscow and that any hope of a change of regime seems very illusory, “The United States should now accept the tragedy of international relations, namely managing problems and relations between great powers, accepting that security and power are always relative and that no strategy can be (…) a magic solution ».
Pierre Grosser does not believe in the trap of Thucydides, this “law of history” revived by the American political scientist Graham Allison that a rising power and a declining power cannot avoid war for world supremacy. “History is full of examples where these changes in power relations do not cause war”writes the historian.
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