A U.S.-China Cold War, With Robin Niblett

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is a U.S.-China Cold War.

With me to discuss what may be a second Cold War, this time between the United States and China, is Sir Robin Niblett. Robin is a distinguished fellow with Chatham House, or as it is formerly known, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and a senior advisor with Hakluyt, the London-based strategic advisory firm. Robin was executive of Chatham House for fifteen years from 2007 to 2022. He has written widely and well in British, European, and U.S. foreign policy. In 2022, Robin was appointed night commander of the order of St. Michael and St. George in the Queen's Platinum Jubilee 2022 birthday honors in recognition of his services to international relations in British foreign policy. Robin is the author of the new book, The New Cold War: How The Contest Between the U.S. And China Will Shape Our Century. It was published in the United Kingdom in March and it'll be published here in the United States next month. Robin, thank you very much for joining me.

NIBLETT:
Jim, it's a pleasure. Fantastic to be with you.

LINDSAY:
I take it from the title of your book that you believe that the United States and China are embroiled in a new Cold War. How so?

NIBLETT:
You could argue that it's been driven principally by the classic international relations conundrum of a major rising power seeking to overthrow the primacy of the existing major power, the classic Thucydides trap as described by Professor Graham Allison. I'm going to take that, given you have a knowledgeable audience of this podcast as a given, we see plenty of manifestations of that dynamic underway from the South China Sea, right into the halls of the UN. But, the point I make in my book on the argument I'm making, is that there is an ideological dimension to this as well. Obviously, it is not communism versus capitalism. It strikes me the Chinese are pretty capitalist when it comes to how they manage their economy and they don't seem to be wanting to promote their version of socialism with Chinese characteristics across the whole world.

But, there is a fundamental divide between the Chinese Communist Party, that believes it is a very efficient and effective proponent of centralized governance, a chosen or self-selected elite, in this case of the Chinese Communist Party, who know what's best for the country, who are the guardians of its sovereignty and the protectors of its people, and it is the duty of citizens to follow the leadership of that party, in essence, to serve the vision that the party has for the country and then they will get the goodies that come with it. There is a different system of government, reflected in the United States, in Europe, in what we call liberal democracies around the world, which is essentially bottom up, where the governments ultimately are meant to serve the people and most importantly, where there is a separation of powers, a level of transparency, and accountability that comes with governments having to serve the people and be seen to do so and to be held to account for doing it.

And, these two systems of governance, it strikes me, are mutually incompatible. It wouldn't matter if America's main challenger weren't about to be—or is supposed to the first, second largest country in the world by population—one that may someday match it on GDP at nominal terms; it already equals it on PPP, purchasing power parity terms, but it is certainly becoming a contender with the United States technologically, militarily, and in influence in the Asia Pacific, if not globally. And, in that emergence as America's peer, potentially a country that could overtake it, certainly a country that would challenge it for power, it fears that the United States is going to undermine its system of government because in the end, authoritarian states that are run by a single central part of government spend all their time trying to hold onto it and making sure that they retain that power. They fear that others will undermine it, and if it's going to be undermined internally, that that internal insecurity could be driven by external powers.

So, this sort of constant fear—having watched what happened to the Communist party, how it crumbled under pressure from outside, the Colour revolutions that followed in Georgia and Ukraine, the Arab Spring—there's this sense, in a way, that America will never accept its rise as an equal with its system of government. Is America fearful of Chinese communism? You might say it shouldn't need to be, but at one fundamental level I think it is because it knows authoritarian systems are internally secure. Our experience has been that those types of governments end up externalizing their internal insecurity. They look to create buffer zones around them.

They try to be maybe excessively influential with their neighbors to try to create a sense of space, which then pushes them up against the United States, certainly in the Asia Pacific in a much more intense way. And, then just my last point on this would be, I note U.S. efforts to force ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, to divest and hand it over to U.S. shareholders because the fear is that at some level, China's approach of the technological heights is being used to try to turn democracy against itself. The kind of algorithmic, hyper intensified style of TikTok actually is trying to undermine democracy, stability in the United States and these fears are held by many of America's allies as well.

The reason I call it a Cold War is I think these differences in ideology, in the sense of how you run a government effectively are unbridgeable. It wouldn't matter, but because we have two powers that are now bumping up against each other as the two most powerful countries in the world, those differences do matter and they make it impossible, in a way, to trust each other in such a way that you would not have a Cold War and just some sort of low level competition.

LINDSAY:
There's a lot there, so bear with me as I try to focus on some pieces of it, Robin. As I listen to you speak, I'm struck by the emphasis you put on the ideological aspect of the competition. It's not simply the Thucydides trap redo about a rising power challenging the hegemonic power, but also the dimension that comes through ideology, democracy versus autocracy, if I can put it in those bare bones terms. That immediately takes me back to what we know as the first Cold War, between the United States and the Soviet Union, which also featured a democracy, the United States, surrounded by democratic friends, partners, and allies, and an authoritarian power, the communist Soviet Union. I think in that era, at least early on, there was much greater fear in the West and in the United States about the ideological threat that communism might pose to the western Democratic way of life, more so I think than is the case today.

But, I'm wondering, as you sort of look at the Cold Wars, what you might see is the differences between them, and I ask that particularly because I go to a lot of conferences, as you do, and I've heard plenty of esteemed experts get up and say, "We shouldn't think about the current U.S.-China geopolitical competition as a Cold War because, at least on the economic dimension, it's so fundamentally different." The original Cold War, United States, Soviet Union, two countries whose economies essentially were entirely distinct. The United States and China, their economies are deeply interconnected, interwoven. How do you respond to that?

NIBLETT:
I mean, the reason I wanted to underscore the ideological difference alongside the sheer power competition is because I'm very conscious that the notion of boldly describing the contest in the rivalry between the U.S. and China as a new Cold War is in itself provocative. There are some people who agree with me and people who don't. There are some people who've been saying it for a while now, Ferguson, for example, and there's others who have contested that particular view. At its essence, I would say just because there are profound differences between this Cold War and the last doesn't mean it's not a Cold War. A lot of those who say it's not a Cold War almost want us to protect, in aspect, their Cold War, and that tends to be one reason why people deny it. There's another reason which I bump into more often, but sometimes in southeast Asia or other parts of the world, which is if you call it a Cold War, in a way you are going to deny some other countries the opportunity, you're trying to box them back and having to pick one side or another.

It paints a very negative picture about the future. But, my line to that, and I've heard this viewpoint made to me by people we'll probably know in common in Singapore amongst other places, is that just because you don't like it and don't want it to be so, doesn't mean it isn't so and I believe it is so. So, I talk quite extensively in the book about the differences between this Cold War and the last. I think you were touching on one of the most important ones, that China is deeply integrated into the global economy. It was midwifed into that global economy by the United States, which encouraged it and championed its membership of the World Trade Organization in 2001, and America actually did quite well out of it. Of course, China's done even better out of integrating itself into the global economy, but for China, being part of a global economy, having access to external markets, having the capacity to import the resources it needs to be able to survive economically, these are requirements that the Soviet Union in a way didn't have.

It had the resources, with fairly autarchic in its economic positioning. And, so there is a profound difference here between the two, and as I said, the U.S. played a role, which it did not play in the case of the USSR in the first Cold War, where it really focused on helping its European allies, Japan, and others recover after the second World War. And, the way I like to think about it, or the way I think about it, is that the two sides are reversing into a new Cold War. They're not driving towards it. They've spotted the flaws in ever closer integration between them; I think the Chinese spotted it well before America. China's "Made in 2025" program, which was rolled out in 2015, was about making sure that China was going to acquire its own access to the commanding heights-

LINDSAY:
What we call today, decoupling or de-risking.

NIBLETT:
And, we have then done the same in the opposite direction, a little late. And, this brings me to another key difference, which is the role of Russia. I'm not sure we would be in something we could describe today as a new Cold War if it weren't for Vladimir Putin's full scale invasion, to use that terminology, of Ukraine in February 2022, because it forced China then to have to pick a side. And, although it's been very careful to try not to cross the red lines the U.S. put down that would then make it subject to secondary sanctions: not formally selling it weapons, not formally breaking swift financial sanctions, it is the nonetheless supporting it rhetorically. In thinking of this as a defensive war, of course it has doubled its trade with Russia in the last three years-

LINDSAY:
I would say over time the Chinese have been edging closer and closer to what looks like almost overt support for the Russian war effort in Ukraine.

NIBLETT:
I think the interesting part of this is the Europeans I think have come to that conclusion. I was in Beijing a couple of weeks ago at a conference there and it was striking, and this was on the record this part, that the panel of diplomats most harshly critical of China on a whole range of things were the Europeans, even stronger than those there to represent the views of the Biden administration.

LINDSAY:
I think we saw it also in the recent G7 summit meeting, we saw it in the recent NATO summit-

NIBLETT:
NATO Summit, exactly.

LINDSAY:
Celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of NATO.

NIBLETT:
Calling out China now in NATO summits, something Europeans constantly wanted to separate out, "No NATO, it's an Atlantic alliance, we'll deal with China through our Indo-Pacific strategies." But, now those two things are coming together and their reason they're coming together, and this is sort of a difference and a parallel with the last Cold War, certainly its early decades, is that China and Russia have ended up creating this deep partnership. Obviously, they're not going to have an alliance. China doesn't like having allies, but the fact that China is backing Russia, that it is trying to make sure Russia doesn't lose, even if it isn't probably indifferent about whether it wins, means that Europeans are now seeing China in this much more negative light, see it as a supporter of Russia and are then reteaming up with America. So, they rely on America much more. We Europeans rely on America yet again for our security in a way we thought we wouldn't have to given the end of the last Cold War.

We're now going back to having to rely on them in this one partly because of Russia's invasion, but then we find ourselves pulled into wanting to take a tougher line on China because China is supporting Russia.

LINDSAY:
Let me ask you about that, Robin, because one of the interesting developments, certainly since the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the formation of what I'll call the "axis of the aggrieved." We have China, we have Russia, but also Iran, North Korea, actively colluding: Iranians sending Moscow drone technology and drones, North Korea sending artillery shells, the Chinese sending the Russians all kinds of primary and intermediate goods. Do you see this as an alliance that has length and duration, that it's going to stick around for a while, or do you see this as just something that's forming temporarily given the current context and give it three or four years—there are natural divisions and this sort of alignment will fall apart?

NIBLETT:
I think the alignment between China and Russia is going to persist for a long time. And again, it's part of the reason why I think we've entered a Cold War, and it'll last for a long time because of those fundamental differences, insecurities, and fears that America and China have of each other, which gives Russia then the capacity to play to that. It means that in the sort of the way I think of it, the hierarchy of priorities, for China, having Russia not lose a war and not be weakened, and then China being left alone, facing against a United States that is then reinforced in its strength and its capacity to confront China; this is an absolute priority for Beijing. So, although there are deep differences between Beijing and Moscow continuing today, and too, Russians not wanting to sell some of their best military technology to the Chinese, the Chinese rejecting, for example, the signature to the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline that the Russians are now desperate to get going because they can't sell their gas to Europe.

There's plenty of competition over Central Asia. There's North Korea itself. Who's the best buddy of North Korea? Is it China or is it in Russia? There's plenty of areas for...

Nevermind the historical and the sort of territorial anxieties that Russia has about a large China, but in a way all of this comes at second level to the fundamental sense that they both see in the United States and its allies, their number one contender, and together they're stronger in contesting it. And, we may get to a position in twenty years time— I'm picking that number out of a hat— but in twenty years time, where son of Lavrov does a mission to Washington to try to rehook up a relationship with America or with Germany, in order to confront China, much as Nixon and Kissinger hooked up with China to be able to confront the Soviet Union-

LINDSAY:
Well, that raises the question-

NIBLETT:
So, we're a long way away from that, I think is my point.

LINDSAY:
I was going to say Robin, that raises the question of whether we're going to get to that point twenty years in the future, where we can see a reversal in global alignments. And, you pointed out the ways in which the U.S.-Soviet Cold War differ from what you see as the Cold War between China and the United States, but I take it that there are some commonalities as well. And, one of them is that there are significant points of friction that could lead to open conflict. We obviously saw that in the classic Cold War, just think of East Germany, West Germany, Berlin, where we had a number of confrontations between Moscow and Washington. And, I'll note that you argue that an obvious tinderbox for the U.S.-China Cold War is Taiwan. So I have to ask you, what are the odds that we can keep this Cold War cold?

NIBLETT:
What are the odds? Let me just put it this way. I'm not quite sure if I want to give it betting odds, but the whole definition of a Cold War is one that runs the risk of going hot. Now in the last Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had their Cuban Missile Crisis moment, and they stared into the abyss of being both nuclear powers and realizing what outright conflict would mean to the two of them. They pulled back, and in a way, from that moment emerged then a gradual period of arms control leading to the Helsinki process leading to a sort of form of coexistence that would avoid outright conflict, but that allow plenty of scope for competition and proxy wars around the world. Obviously one of the worrying things to me is we're at the beginning of this new Cold War— we're in it— but we're in its first few years, in my opinion, and we've not yet had a learning moment. We've not had a Cuban Missile Crisis equivalent. Now I'd rather we didn't have one because who knows how it would be played out?

LINDSAY:
Well, especially if you go back and you really study the original Cuban Missile Crisis, it was a near thing.

NIBLETT:
Absolutely.

LINDSAY:
A couple of small things had gone a different way, we would've had a very different and far more catastrophic outcome.

NIBLETT:
A hundred percent, and I totally agree, Jim, I think I talk about it having been a close run thing. The one thing we know about China to date, the Chinese Communist Party's leadership to date, is they have been good students of history. They've watched what went wrong, not just in the last Cold War but in how, for example, the Soviet Union collapsed and said, "We're not going to repeat those mistakes." But, I think similarly, they want to avoid a situation where they would find themselves head to head with America. Barry Buzan, who's a well-known international relations theorist who actually came out with an article about a new Cold War in January just before my book came out, and so we've been comparing notes. He has a very good definition actually to why I think this is a Cold War: it's persistent, its long duration, it's geopolitical rivalry with unresolvable differences, but he talks about it existing within the context of the defense dilemma.

He puts alongside the security dilemma where the steps each side takes to make his own self more secure, makes the other feel more insecure, and then they take steps and blah, blah, blah. But, the defense dilemma is where two rivals cannot afford to go to war with each other because ultimately they're nuclear armed powers and do not want to countenance the outcome. I think that is an important underlying discipline given the relative control that the Communist Party of China seems to have over China and hopefully the checks and balances that exist on the U.S. side, such that a particular leader wouldn't be able to go off the deep end. However, you noted some flashpoints, South China Sea, and one of the problems we have with China is that, whereas the Soviet Union not only had a sense of what its borders were pretty much when the new Cold War emerged, it had a buffer zone around it. It had the Warsaw Pact, it had, in essence, an empire, including parts of Central Asia around its core-

LINDSAY:
And, those countries were not voluntary subjects of that empire.

NIBLETT:
Which made them more controllable in that sense as well, and they've made plenty of effort into it. China is still trying to write and cement its boundaries. South China Sea and the nine dash line, is it trying to say, "No, that is our boundary," and it's still contesting that boundary and it's contesting it-

LINDSAY:
It also invented that boundary, it didn't really exist before 1949.

NIBLETT:
I went to visit the Institute of Maritime Law in Beijing about seven years ago. They gave me copious books of how fishing vessels were there. Of course, they then throw at us the Falkland Islands or Gibraltar and so on, but there was an era where you could do these things. But, if a rules-based order means only one thing, and it probably in my mind pretty much means only one thing, it means you do not change borders by-

LINDSAY:
And, it's not just the South China Sea. We see it in Himalayas where there's-

NIBLETT:
Absolutely.

LINDSAY:
...been fighting between India and China and also the issue of Taiwan.

NIBLETT:
What worries me about this thing is that China and the United States are confronting each other in areas where China does perceive its sovereignty, its core interests as it calls them, challenged. So, we're going to have to manage these very, very carefully, but because we're early on, there's very little trust because China feels it is not yet America's equal militarily. It's not wanting to get involved in these conversations. When I was in Beijing a year ago, my first trip back since COVID, I heard a former Chinese ambassador to the U.S. give a great line. He said, "America keeps saying we need guardrails. Guardrails to make sure the South China Sea doesn't go wrong." He said, "We're not interested in guardrails on the wrong path." It's a good line, clever line.

LINDSAY:
I think that sums up-

NIBLETT:
But, one more point I wanted to make on this though however is I think Taiwan is interesting, because Taiwan, whereas Cuba ran the risk of being a physical location where missiles were targeted at the United States, Taiwan is an island that is almost like aiming the missile of democracy at the Communist party, not at China. And so again, if you take the ideological dimension of this into place, they cannot allow Taiwan to succeed indefinitely.

LINDSAY:
And, they didn't allow it to happen in Hong Kong.

NIBLETT:
Now in Hong Kong, you could argue we voluntarily, and we the Brits, voluntarily handed Hong Kong back, but the idea that it would be one country, two systems failed. Taiwan of course-

LINDSAY:
It failed because of decisions made in Beijing, which decided that allowing two systems was a threat to the mainland in its control over the population.

NIBLETT:
Absolutely. Now Taiwan is in a very different position. It has its own military. That military believes it represents the true China and it's much harder to see your way out of this, unless Taiwan were to relinquish being a democracy or mainland China was somehow to become more democratic. And, I have to say, I don't see either of those things coming. So, though I'm not somebody who expects conflict over Taiwan anytime in the near future, unlike some Americans, I don't quite see how we get out of it either.

LINDSAY:
Well, there's one other wild card, Robin, that I'm curious to know how you deal with as you think about these issues, and that wild card is the debate in the United States about what role it should play in the world. We see with the rise of Donald Trump—who has named J.D. Vance as his vice presidential nominee—two individuals who've been very critical of the approach the United States has taken since the end of World War II, in terms of its leadership globally, and I could sort of condense their argument. It essentially comes to U.S. global leadership actually was something that didn't serve America's interests, that it created an opportunity for our friends, partners, and allies, not just our adversaries, to pick our pockets. So, as you think about this new Cold War and how it might evolve, and we're going to get a second, how to navigate those swift currents, how does that thinking factor in? And I'll note you wrote a piece recently for Foreign Policy titled: The G7 Must Prepare Now For Trump.

NIBLETT:
Yep. I mean there's two dimensions to this. One, the U.S. of the last Cold War is not the U.S. of this Cold War. You, yourself have very eloquently described the reasons why, and certainly there is a part of the American body politic and there is that debate reemerging in America now that we saw in the 1930s around the time of the Neutrality Acts and so on, with two visions of the kind of America should be. Now, the difference from that period of course is we have had eighty years of America as the world's leading power. And, with that the superpower element of America's power being that it has allies, and that it is able then to have other countries be with it in moments of crisis and that it can extend its influence economically as well as politically around the world through that trade-off of being a sort of benign hegemon.

Now, that clearly is not the vision of a J.D. Vance and probably of a Donald Trump, where you are tied in a way to allies. I think that's something future President Trump, if there were to be one, would not like any more than he liked it when he was president. You have to be nice to people for no good reason other than you already committed. That's the antithesis I think of the Trumpian worldview. But, from a J.D. Vance standpoint, if we can use him as the cipher for this bigger thing, it's that somehow globalization, the commitment to allies, big business taking advantage of a peaceful world at the expense of the American worker, that much more almost left-leaning, it's almost a La France Insoumise, if I can point to a left-leaning party that's just captured a very large share of the vote in French parliamentary elections. This is not the America that we had coming out victorious of the last Cold War. This is an America in which a large part of the population and the body politic feel that they've been losers from what was meant to be America's heyday.

LINDSAY:
And, they've been losers because of foreign policy choices. You can tell a different story of the past 30 years where the failing isn't in foreign policy, it's in our domestic policy.

NIBLETT:
I would say where does foreign policy and foreign economic policy come? Because, you could argue you could have strong alliances and yet be relatively protectionist around your work. In fact, that's where we're going now with a European Union that's looking to imitate the United States with an Inflation Reduction Act of heavy industrial policy, not getting involved in trade agreements. The Biden administration was offering a model where you could sustain alliances but without having to sustain globalization. Those are the National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan's speeches have been about the end of his Washington consensus, is you can still lead alliances, still protect democracies, still even promote democracy, though I don't think that's what we're doing as much now, but certainly protect them, and yet take a much more self-centered economic line-

LINDSAY:
I'll just note that if you read Jake's Foreign Affairs article carefully, a big part of the blame for the struggles of many Americans, he lays at the door actually of domestic policy, not of foreign economic policies. It begins with foreign economic policy, but that's not where the weight is.

NIBLETT:
It's a fair point, Jim, and something I've written about with my colleague, Leslie Vinjamuri, in also in the pages of Foreign Affairs was three or four years ago now or three years ago, was that we have to fix ourselves. Some of the biggest weaknesses we have are self inflicted.

LINDSAY:
Well, let me ask you on that and specifically about the issue of allies because you are a citizen of the United Kingdom, and the argument that is often made in American political circles by those skeptical of America's activist or leadership role in global affairs is that our friends, partners, and allies freeload on us. If the United States decides that it is going to try to lead and get its allies to do something, are countries like the United Kingdom going to step up to the bar? You have a new prime minister, but as I look at the United Kingdom and Prime Minister Starmer, he has a very big set of challenges on the domestic front.

NIBLETT:
He has a big set of challenges on the domestic front, as does the United States as we know if you look at its debt levels and interest rate payments on those debt levels and all the things that are being debated in this presidential election. But, what he's as committed to as the succession of conservative leaders we have before him, and I think part of the reason that he's successfully been attractive and attracted a fairly large section of the vote—that we can debate whether it was as large as he expected or not—is because he's taking a very mainstream line on security, that he has pledged to get 2.5 percent of GDP defense spending; the UK is on about 2.2 percent right now. It's not a huge number, but it is above the NATO minimum that's out there. He has pledged to renew the nuclear trident missile capability at the same time, and one of his first meetings, obviously on the margins of the NATO summit, was with President Zelenskyy, but he is committed to uphold and sustain the high levels of military spending and support that the UK has been giving to Ukraine.

So, I don't think you're going to see in the UK with a Starmer government any pulling back from security commitments. In fact, it's almost a calling card, he reckons, I think, to try to help strike a better deal with the EU on the economic side that's been lost. In other words, to be a purveyor of security to its European partners and knowing that that makes it valuable in Washington is something that's very natural to Keir Starmer's quite pragmatic way of thinking. This is not an ideologue on foreign policy in any shape, and I think if you look across the rest of Europe, well average spending on defense is now 2 percent or above. You've got some are still back at 1.2 percent. You've got some like Poland or over 3 percent. We're heading in the right direction, even for a Trump presidency, especially when you note that the bulk of that additional spending is also being spent on American weapons, because we don't make enough of our own in Europe and-

LINDSAY:
Which is a whole nother issue and problem.

NIBLETT:
That's a whole nother issue. But we've also replaced, which Trump wanted, our dependence on Russia for gas imports, 40 percent of our imports and now down to 10 percent. Our largest source of LNG imports is now America. So, everything that Trump asked Europe to do back in 2017-18, spend more, buy our gas, buy our weapons, guess what we've done? We've done all of that and we can continue doing it.

LINDSAY:
I think Europe and Britain should not be surprised if we do get a second Trump administration if President Trump doesn't up his asks to the Europeans.

NIBLETT:
Because that's his nature. I mean the deal is if somebody gives you something already, you must have asked for too little. What I haven't mentioned here, although the UK's a different box on this, the EU ran roughly $160 billion trade surplus with the United States last year, and that is a big number. The UK was the only country to run a deficit with America, so maybe we won't be on the naughty step like others. The relationships can be difficult and fraught either way. But, just to come back to this question then, what do we do? Is it possible? Can you have a new Cold War, if America turns inwards? It's an interesting question. On the one hand, I think the contest with China could even sharpen, because there are many around the Trump camp who see in China part of an axis of evil. It becomes almost moral, not simply geopolitical and maybe even not simply ideological.

They are godless and evil and not simply top down government like I'm describing it versus bottom up, which is a very anodyne way of describing the challenge. So, I think it could become intense in a different way. The question then becomes: Does it remain blocky as it was at the moment? The Biden administration has brought onto its side, not just the Atlantic allies, but also Australia, South Korea, and Japan; they've fused America's Pacific alliances with its transatlantic alliance into a sort of "G7 Plus," in which NATO and Indo-Pacific strategies are each complimenting eachother. Now, can that survive? My optimistic note would be that if you have a Trump presidency, and he decided to pull back from the G7, or decided that's just not the vehicle he wants to major on getting a better trade deal, even than he's had so far, then can those other allies still band together, at least for four years, around a G7 or G7 Plus in which the U.S. is really an absent member.

I think the drive and the need to do that is going to be there because Europeans and America's Asian allies also fear China now in a way that they didn't five, six years ago. I go through it in the book, the way the journey that South Korea, Japan, Australia have all been on vis-a-vis China, has run from pragmatism to fear. In fact, one of my big fears of the new Cold War is we may have a whole bunch of new nuclear armed states, and that's something to maybe discuss at another time. The one thing I didn't want to miss saying is that probably the most important difference between this Cold War and the last is that we're not the dominant game in town.

It really is a new Cold War of the global North, and because the global South, this time, have the demographic weight, the emerging economic weight, the scale and the size, the population, the emerging middle classes, the resources to be able to manage the new green transition are spread all over the countries of the global south, the lithium, the cobalt, the copper, they've got a chance this time not to be spectators, but in a way to have agency.

And, I believe that the competition for their attention means that in a way it'll be a disciplining force on how far we can take our contest. I mean, already at the last G20 in New Delhi, G7 governments basically pulled back on demanding tough statements on Ukraine because we knew the Indians weren't interested, but we wanted India to be with us on other aspects of the agenda on climate change or whatever. I think that while we're at the front end of a Cold War between the global North, countries across the global South, and our competition for their attention will be a disciplining force on us in the global North. That's one of my little filaments of optimism for the future.

LINDSAY:
Robin, there is so much more there I would like to get into, but I think we've come to the point where I need to close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Sir Robin Niblett, distinguished fellow with Chatham House and the author of the forthcoming book, The New Cold War: How The Contest Between The U.S. And China Will Shape Our Century. It goes on sale in the United States in August. Robin, as always, it has been a delight to chat with you.

NIBLETT:
Thank you, Jim. Wonderful to be with you too.

LINDSAY:
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Today's episode was produced by Markus Zakaria and Kenadee Mangus with Director of Podcasting, Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay saying, thank you for listening.