Description
Discourse, deliberation, and rhetoric on China from US politics is dominated by frameworks of “New Cold War” (NCW) - discussions are concerned with whether NCW is true, impending, pessimistic, or unrealistic for thinking about China. Irrespective of the conclusions of scholarly and policy debates, the relevance of Cold War (CW) thinking is undeniable for articulating the nature of China and its future: predicting China’s behavior, strategy, and desires are grounded in likeness, denial, or an otherwise comparative backdrop of the historic Cold War. Although the historic US-USSR Cold War dynamic (1945 - 1989) is economically, geopolitically, and militarily distinct from recent relations between the US & China, NCW and other predictive futures referencing the CW appear to be undetachable for framing China-threat discourse. What explains the attachment and reliance on CW discourse for articulating the China threat, despite its imperfect fit? This paper argues that, although comparative CW framing on US-China relations is a flawed analogy, its ahistoricity signifies its utility as a tool of legibility for securing national identity and ontological security in world-order making. Existing attachment to the fealty of US-China relations against the historic Cold War obscures the emergence of a world-ordering Cold War ideology that is utterly abstracted and distinct from its referent event.
