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Is the world entering a new cold war? Our answer is yes and no. Yes if we mean a protracted international rivalry, for cold wars in this sense are as old as history itself. Some became hot, some didn't: no law guarantees either outcome. No if we mean the Cold War, which we capitalize because it originated and popularized the term. That struggle took place at a particular time (from 1945-47 to 1989-91), among particular adversaries (the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies), and over particular issues (post-World War II power balances, ideological clashes, arms races). None of those issues looms as large now, and where parallels do exist-growing bipolarity, intensifying polemics, sharpening distinctions between autocracies and democracies- the context is quite different.
It's no longer debatable that the United States and China, tacit allies during the last half of the last Cold War, are entering their own new cold war: Chinese President Xi Jinping has declared it, and a rare bipartisan consensus in the United States has accepted the challenge. What, then, might previous contests-the one and only Cold War and the many earlier cold wars-suggest about this one?
The future is, of course, less knowable than the past, but it's not in all respects unknowable. Time will continue to pass, the law of gravity will still apply, and none of us will outlive our physiological term limits. Are similarly reliable knowns shaping the emerging cold war? If so, what unknowns lurk within them? Thucydides had such predictabilities and surprises in mind when he cautioned, 24 centuries ago, that the future would resemble the past but not in all respects reflect it-even as he also argued that the greatest single war of his time revealed timeless truths about all wars to come.
Our purpose here, then, is to show how the greatest unfought war of our time-the Soviet-American Cold War-as well as other prior struggles, might expand experience and enhance resilience in a Sino-American rivalry whose future, hot or cold, remains unclear. That history provides a framework within which to survive uncertainty, and possibly even thrive within it, whatever the rest of the twenty-first century throws our way.
THE BENEFITS OF BOUNDARIES
Our first known is geography, which continental drift will...