Tag Archive for: Cold War

From the bookshelf: ‘Suharto’s Cold War’

The murder of six of Indonesia’s most senior army leaders on 1 October 1965 by elements of the country’s communist party became a major turning point in Indonesia’s modern history. It would bring to an end the first phase of Indonesia’s independence, under President Sukarno, the leader of Indonesia’s struggle for independence from the Netherlands.

In the ensuing turmoil, General Suharto was able to take control of the military, ultimately edging Sukarno out of the presidency and becoming the second and longest serving president of Indonesia.  Under Suharto’s leadership, the military and related organisations orchestrated a ‘politicide’ in which at least half a million leftists were killed.

In a recent book, Suharto’s Cold War: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the World, Mattias Fibiger takes us through subsequent events, as Suharto works to consolidate his regime and ensure that communism would never again take hold in the Indonesian archipelago. Fibiger, a professor at Harvard Business School, is the first scholar to offer a work of Indonesian history based on the central archival records of the Suharto regime.

A key theme of Fibiger’s narrative is the pivotal role of international capital in the global Cold War against communism. As part of his New Order policy, Suharto pursued international economic expertise and influence to rebuild the Indonesian economy and consolidate his power.

In the immediate aftermath of the murder of the generals, Suharto pushed Japan to halt economic aid to the Sukarno regime. This exacerbated Indonesia’s economic crisis, driving social unrest and helping bring to an end the Sukarno presidency.

Suharto then mobilised international aid from donors such as the United States, Japan, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. They shared a keen interest in supporting Suharto’s anti-communist regime. Thus, the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia was created, grouping donor countries to coordinate foreign aid to Indonesia and provide strong international support for economic recovery. Most importantly, although anti-communist, Suharto was no democrat. He was staunchly authoritarian.

To rebuild the economy, Suharto attracted international private investors to Indonesia’s rich natural resources, especially logging and mining. This enabled him to consolidate his anti-communist coalition by fending off internal opponents.

After the inauguration of a military aid relationship with the US, Suharto was able to buy the loyalty of the navy, a branch of the military that was loyal to Sukarno and had close links to Moscow.

While Cold War capital supported his authoritarian regime, Suharto would gain some independence with the rise in oil prices in the 1970s.

Suharto’s furthered his anti-communist campaign in Southeast Asia, working to ensure that Indonesia’s neighbours were governed by anti-communist governments and Chinese influence was contained.

For example, Indonesia joined forces with Malaysia to combat a communist insurgency on the island of Borneo where they share a border. And Suharto worked with President Marcos of the Philippines against the Moro secessionist movement.

Fibiger also argues that Suharto tried to remake Southeast Asia in Indonesia’s image by propagandising Indonesia’s national resilience doctrine. It promotes maintaining a strong, integrated system across all aspects of national life. Thus, when other Southeast Asian elites faced moments of political crisis, they would draw on this ideology.

Today, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations—a political and economic union of 10 states —that plays a major role in regional and global governance. But its creation in 1967—then counting just five members: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand—was initially motivated by Indonesia’s desire to contain communism.

Suharto’s anti-communist campaign in Indonesia and further afield in Southeast Asia was an important phase in the global Cold War. Fibiger’s book provides fascinating insights into this period of history, including the ever-present encouraging hands of the US, Britain, Japan and Australia—although it is never clear what was the motivation for Suharto’s anti-communist tilt.

Much has also happened in Indonesia since these times. In the beginning of the 1980s, Indonesia’s domestic Cold War ended as political Islam was perceived as a greater regime threat than communism, according to Fibiger. Then followed the Asian financial crisis, the end of the Suharto regime, and democratisation.

But Indonesia remains a good partner of the West, even though it carefully avoids taking sides in the current great power rivalry. We can only regret that in recent years the US has had difficulty finding much time to invest in this important friendship—something which will likely get worse with the changes in Washington.

Warning and decision: intelligence, policymaking, and rumours of wars

There has been much discussion recently in Australia of the expiration of ‘strategic warning time’. In the absence of significant shifts in policy, such discussion runs the risk of being performative rather than substantive. It is certainly being conducted euphemistically. The only credible threat to peace in Asia is an aggressive and unchecked China. This is not ever uttered or implied in official Australian discourse.

This is understandable, for the present. However, the time will come soon enough when euphemisms will no longer mask clearly evident trends, which a curious Australian public will want to better understand, especially as they are being increasingly informed by well-credentialled think tanks, commercial satellite imagery services, and geopolitical risk reporting services, amongst other open sources of intelligence and assessment.

The strategic problem of dealing with China has much in common with the historical problems of dealing with Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union after the Cold War. When political leaders and policymakers speak of the expiration of ‘strategic warning time’, they are euphemistically drawing attention to this reality.

If strategic warning time has expired, then history will judge: were the warning signs heeded, and were policies shaped and pursued accordingly? It is doubtful that history’s verdict will be that there was a ‘warning failure’. On the open record alone—and drawing no inferences as to what the classified record might one day reveal—history will find a substantial body of warning signs to suggest that we faced the credible prospect of war with China. It is likely that history’s verdict will be that there was a ‘decision failure’. That is, warning signs were not heeded, or to the extent they were, policies were not effectively shaped and pursued.

Should it come to pass, an Indo Pacific war will be one of the most forecast strategic events in history. Of course, the possibility of failures in operational warning (measured in months or even weeks) or tactical  warning (measures in days or even hours) cannot be discounted. Surprise attacks can succeed even when strategic warning is to hand. For all of its vigilance, Israel was caught by surprise in October 2023 when it was attacked by Hamas. A ‘standing start’ surprise attack by China would be difficult, but not impossible to achieve, where its preparations would be masked by good deception and the use of plausible cover (such as large-scale military exercises). In a Taiwan scenario, such a ploy would be designed to catch US and allied forces unprepared and out of position, with perhaps up to 21 to 28 days being required before sufficient US and allied forces could arrive to contest such an attack on Taiwan.

For this reason, recent calls in the pages of The Strategist to re-invigorate warning capabilities make sense. As occurred in the Cold War, indicators and warning (I&W) systems should be enhanced. Full-time analytical teams would look for signs of PLA readiness changes, national mobilisation, increased defence production and stockpiling, economic resilience measures (such as a rapid sell-off of US securities and the hoarding of gold), preparatory moves in cyberspace and space, changes in the content and intensity of Chinese discourse (aimed at laying out the case for the use of force), and so on.

As these efforts are pursued, we would do well to re-examine the question of warning, and ‘warning failures’, which is explored in the substantial literature on the intelligence aspects of surprise attacks and crises, such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 1941), the North’s invasion of South Korea (June 1950), China’s intervention in Korea (November 1950), the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962), the Tet Offensive (January 1968), the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (August 1968), the Yom Kippur War (October 1973), the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (December 1979), and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (August 1990).

The classical model for understanding ‘warning failures’ was set out by Roberta Wohlstetter in Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962). Richard K. Betts built on her work in Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning (1982). While the former focused on a failure by analysts to connect and make sense of signals as against noise, specifically in the lead up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the latter focused on the disposition of decision makers to rely on their own experience and judgement to assess strategic situations, and to infer adversary intentions—often exhibiting a sceptical wariness of the intelligence process.

Intelligence regarding the prospect of war is necessarily an estimative activity, dealing in probabilities rather than certainties. Unlike many other areas of public policy, there is no readily applicable actuarial model, although we should not shut our minds to the possibility of improved predictive tools emerging in this field. Christopher Joye, for instance, has written on the issue of better measuring the empirical probability of war, drawing attention to possible models, and suggesting techniques such as aggregating expert opinions, and building risk indices of leading signals.

The estimation of the prospect of a war will always be a complex process of trying to forecast the interaction of numerous independent, co-dependent, and integrated variables. This endeavour will be increasingly assisted by the rapidly accumulating oceans of data, the rise of ‘superforecasting’ techniques, and the AI-assisted mapping of causative relationships, which will see improvements in predictive capabilities in this field.

For all of these improvements, there will always be the irreducibility of uncertainty and unpredictability when it comes to questions of war, but as Carveth Read cautioned more generally in Logic: Deductive and Inductive (1898), it is better to be vaguely right, than exactly wrong.

In the spirit of attempting to be ‘vaguely right’, one might proffer the following probabilities for three scenarios over the course of 2024-30:

  • A crisis in the Indo Pacific region, similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962: at least 50 per cent;
  • A military clash between US and Chinese forces involving an exchange of fire, followed by rapid de-escalation, which would be unlike anything that occurred in the Cold War: at least 30 per cent;
  • A major war, similar to the Pacific War of 1942-45: at least 10 per cent, but with different assumptions about risk thresholds (as discussed below), possibly 20 per cent.

If these estimates are ‘vaguely right’, then we should be preparing urgently, lest we find ourselves being proven to be ‘exactly wrong’ and thereby surprised, and worse.

The prospect of war challenges the intelligence process and policymaking alike. War challenges widely-held assumptions about rationality and the assumed benefits of peace. The deployment by the Soviet Union of missiles in Cuba in October 1962 was a warning failure on the part of the CIA’s estimates staff. They judged that such a deployment would not be ‘rational’, which is to say not in keeping with Soviet interests, and they therefore discounted the possibility of it occurring. They were wrong.  Some thought before the First World War that economic interdependence would reduce, or even eliminate, the risk of war. They too were wrong.

These cases are a reminder that we have to be careful to ensure that analysts are not so confined and constrained in their worldview that they miss the bold gambles that are taken by those whom Hegel termed ‘world historical individuals’—and whose motivations, biases and thought processes are outliers in terms of expected human behaviour. Analysts are trained to judge capabilities, doctrine, and intentions, with a presumption that ‘rational’ behaviour sees an alignment of means consistently with ends. However, how is risk-taking of an ostensibly ‘irrational’ kind to be judged by a midlevel analyst working in an intelligence agency in Canberra?

There are other biases in analytical work. As before the First World War, analysis today could be distorted by the idea that the economic cost of war is so great that no power would rationally start a war in the face of its probable consequences. The related notion that economic interdependence between powers typically acts as a brake on war does much to explain why peace might endure, but nothing to explain why war might yet still occur. Often the probability of war depends not only on the actual dangers and costs of war to the attacker, but also on their perceptions of the dangers of the peace. While we often speak of the ‘fog of war’, we too little speak of the ‘fog of peace’, a term that Betts coined in his aforementioned 1982 book on surprise attack.

There is yet another analytical bias—that of the idea of ‘war by accident’, where war occurs in the fit of an absence of mind, as a result of sleepwalking, blundering or stumbling. However, history teaches that powers pursue aggressive policies that risk war in a knowing fashion, because the sought-after prizes of war exceed the perceived costs of war. They might well misjudge the reactions and responses of others, but that is not the same as saying that actions, and responses, are ‘accidental’, or that they lead to ‘accidental’ outcomes which are outside of all contemplation.

It is to be hoped (and there is no way by which to judge this from outside of government) that these analytical problems have been addressed, and that any such biases in the analytical process have been surfaced and mitigated. It is to be also hoped (and, again, there is no way by which to judge this from outside of government), that the policymaking process is being guided by the analytical process, without the latter being ignored, or worse being compelled to modify its judgements, when they are inconvenient to policy.

In the Australian model, national intelligence assessments are as a matter of law the product of a dialogue between the intelligence process and policymaking, insofar as while they are issued independently by the Director-General of National Intelligence, she or he is required under law to advise the Prime Minister and others where there are differences of opinion, including with policy departments. It is to be hoped that this contestation by design is being employed regularly, and that assessments are being produced in the face of differences of opinion, with the appropriate dissemination of dissenting or alternative views being done, as required by law. This should be occurring on the greatest strategic question of the age: will there be an Indo Pacific war?

Political leaders and policymakers should of course probe intelligence assessments, especially where they might to relevant to the question of going to war. These are, after all, estimative questions, and the problems are probabilistic in nature. Such would not represent ‘interference’ in the intelligence process, or an impermissible transgression of the supposed ‘separation’ of the intelligence and policy functions. It will be of great interest to see whether the Independent Intelligence Review by Heather Smith and Richard Maude, which was due to report by 30 June 2024, has anything to say on the issue of contestability and, more generally, on the relationship between intelligence and policymaking.

If it is accepted that strategic warning is to hand, biases in the analytical process have surfaced and been mitigated, intelligence and policymaking are working together as they should, political leaders have been informed (and warned), and the problem of operational or tactical surprise is being addressed as effectively as possible, we are left still with the ‘decision problem’. That is, if political leaders and policymakers are unwilling to be persuaded, or are disinclined to act meaningfully, then no amount of process improvements will make a material difference to the outcome.

In part, this might be a problem of professional dissonance (something that Henry Kissinger explored at length in his academic research before he joined Nixon’s White House—research which still bears up today). Political leaders typically do not have a deep background in strategic and defence affairs. Their frame of reference for considering and weighing the assessments that they receive are unlikely to be grounded in long experience in dealing with intelligence, defence and military data and information.

They will also naturally have an eye to their domestic agenda and political prospects, especially in relation to what might be involved in winning acceptance, and rallying public support, for the hard task of preparing for war. Quite often, the methods which might see someone attain high political office are not suited to being applied to decisions which are related to the unfolding of world history.

Typically, decisions regarding pressing strategic and defence matters do not get made until they appear as a bureaucratic imperative (perhaps, when something has to be decided because world events are unfolding, and officials are seeking direction—or, more prosaically, when decisions have to be taken because of upcoming international meetings, for instance). However, the question of a possible Indo-Pacific war requires dedicated time to be set aside for consideration of hypothetical scenarios, where policy success cannot be measured readily—partly because it is conjectural and related to things that might never happen, and partly because the very decisions taken conjecturally might materially contribute to things never happening.

None of this is to suggest that political decision making should simply derive prescriptions in a linear fashion from the analytical process, without the political leader and policymaker applying their own perspectives and convictions during the policy formation and decision process. On the contrary, and thanks to scholars such as Keren Yahri-Milo, in Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations (2014), we can better understand how political leaders and policymakers typically rely on heuristics, especially in a crisis—that is beliefs, perceptions, emotions, reputational concerns, and their personal cognitive models. Whatever we might think about their decisions, they certainly think that their theories, ideas, and choices are consistent and logical (for instance, think of Chamberlain in 1938 clinging to the idea that he could dissuade Hitler).

If political leaders and policymakers do not bring to the task deep strategic expertise, it is to be hoped that at least they bring to their decision-making conviction and some degree of historical perspective, and that they are willing to engage in contested, intelligence informed conjecture, when having to make decisions before knowing enough about the future to fully justify them. In questions of war, it is always better to be ‘vaguely right’, but that still means dealing with vagueness.

These questions are especially pertinent to today’s strategic challenge. China’s (and really this means Xi Jinping’s) decisions will depend on a series of contingent calculations regarding, amongst other things, China’s prospects of success in any move against Taiwan, as well as US and allied resolve, and Xi’s own assessment of the national mood about China’s ‘great rejuvenation’—the tally of which is not conducive to strategic forecasting that is ‘exactly right’.

Xi might, for instance, decide that the ‘dangers of peace’ outweigh the cost of war, and that risking war is preferable to living with an unacceptable status quo. He might test the responses of the US and allies with a blockade. Or he might test by initially seizing Taiwan’s offshore islands. And of course Taiwan’s own actions will affect Xi’s decision making.

War is certainly not inevitable, and indeed diplomatic initiatives have a place among the many contingencies in this strategic environment. The peacemaker should always continue to labour even as the first bombs are falling.

In the anarchic world of geostrategic politics, it is the brutal calculus of power that ultimately determines the fate of nations.  That calculus is always contingent—both on the interplay of the vast and impersonal forces, and the decisions and actions of Hegel’s ‘world historical individuals’, which can nudge, deflect, accelerate or even disrupt the playing out of those forces.

In this contingent world, crises, confrontations, and possibly war in our region will not occur as a result of ‘warning failures’.  Rather—should they occur—the question to be asked will be could they have been avoided through better and more timely decisions.

One way in which to better inform the Australian public of what might lie ahead would be for a rigorous independent and public strategic assessment of the prospects of war to be conducted outside of government. Such a strategic assessment could be based on publicly-available material, and would not have to rely on classified information. Conducted with an eye to Australian perspectives and interests, such a strategic assessment could make a real difference to public understanding, by raising awareness of the relevant issues and choices.

The strategic assessment would be tasked with answering three broad questions:

  • Using an estimative process, what are the probability ratings of crisis, confrontation and conflict (including major war) in the Indo Pacific between now and 2030?
  • Using scenario-based gaming techniques, how might such a war be triggered and unfold, how might it be conducted, and how might it end?
  • What would be Australia’s strategic interests in these contingencies, and flowing from those interests, what courses of action would be open to Australia, including in relation to both lessening the risk of war, and preparing for war, should it come?

Such a strategic assessment exercise could be conducted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (this being core business for ASPI), perhaps in partnership with the National Security College and the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, both of the Australian National University. The assessment team would consist of the best and brightest Australian minds from think tanks and academia, as well as serving Australian Public Service and Australian Defence Force members (who would be authorised to participate in a personal capacity).

Ideally, the project would be overseen by a group of eminent persons. Perhaps ASPI could enlist all living former deputy secretaries of defence strategy and former Vice Chiefs of the Defence Force (those two positions being the partnership in Defence where defence policy meets military strategy) as an ‘all-star’ group to guide and mentor the project. Such a list would include Paul Dibb, Ric Smith, Hugh White, Richard Brabin-Smith, Peter Jennings, Peter Baxter, Rebecca Skinner, Peter Tesch, Chris Barrie, Ken Gillespie, David Hurley, and Mark Binskin—a group which would bring a range of different perspectives to the project, along with a deep collective reservoir of knowledge, experience, and judgement.

This is but an idea. Better ones might be suggested. Anything would be an improvement on the tiresome and reductive commentary by categorisation (namely the trope of ‘hawks versus doves’) that dominates and blights Australian strategic discourse. By bringing different perspectives together, and engaging in a contest of estimates and ideas, we might stand a better chance of being vaguely right, rather than exactly wrong, on the question of war and peace in our region.

Remembering Vasili Mitrokhin: ‘A man of remarkable commitment and courage’

Tuesday [23 January] marked 20 years since the passing away, in exile, of an unpretentious archivist—and one of the most remarkable and consequential figures in international espionage—Vasili Mitrokhin.

A KGB officer for more than three decades, Mitrokhin’s defection to the UK in 1992, masterminded by the Secret Intelligence Service, delivered an extensive personal archive of hand-written notes made of KGB documents accessed before his retirement. The process was aided by his responsibility for transferring First Chief Directorate [foreign intelligence] records from central Moscow to a new headquarters, between 1972 and 1982.

Mitrokhin’s defection was acknowledged in 1999 upon publication of the first of two books co-authored with historian Christopher Andrew. Reaction to the audacity of Mitrokhin’s enterprise and to the archive’s contents was rhapsodic. Former KGB general Oleg Kalugin:

When I opened Mitrokhin’s book for the first time, I was stunned by the accuracy of his descriptions of many intelligence operations I had been personally involved in… Mitrokhin’s book has become for me an encyclopaedia of sorts, a true treasure trove of information about the cold war times.

The FBI called the archive: ‘the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source’. The CIA described it as ‘the biggest CI (counter-intelligence) bonanza of the post-war period’.

After an inquiry, the UK Parliament’s Intelligence & Security Committee concluded that Mitrokhin:

‘[i]s a man of remarkable commitment and courage, who risked imprisonment or death in his determination that the truth should be told about the real nature of the KGB and their activities, which he believed were betraying the interests of his own country and people. He succeeded in this, and we wish to record formally our admiration for his achievement.’

But beyond initial surprise, and sheer volume of records, why was Mitrokhin important? Why remember this humble archivist?

In one sense the answer’s obvious. Mitrokhin revealed the extraordinary extent to, and confirmed the egregious nature of, Soviet intelligence operations and interference globally during the Cold War.

Rather immediately, this led to identification of historical KGB spies in the US and UK. Melita Norwood (codename HOLA)—who betrayed British nuclear secrets and was memorialised in newspaper headline as ‘the spy who came in from the coop’—is well known. A more pressing example, sparking successful prosecution, was former National Security Agency (NSA) officer Robert Lipka.

It also served to underscore the appalling behaviour of the KGB and its antecedents (mirrored by its successors!)—characterised by violence, cynicism and a contempt for truth. Just a few examples from Volume I (aka The Sword and the Shield) suffice:

  • Soviet navy defector Nicholas Shadrin’s disappearance in Austria in 1975 confirmed as a botched kidnapping resulting in Shadrin’s death;
  • A plot to break defector ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev’s legs (euphemistically termed ‘lessening his professional skills’);
  • Sabotage plots (and arms caches) ready in the event of war with the West;
  • Supplying of weapons to terrorist groups; and,
  • Widespread ‘active measures’ (covert influence and interference) globally—including instigating many of the conspiracy theories plaguing us today.

Volume I focussed on KGB activities in the West. Volume II (The World was going our way, published after Mitrokhin’s death) catalogued activities in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

As Andrew observed, revelations of pervasive KGB operations and influence (hitherto underexamined) served to balance what was until then a ‘curiously lop-sided history of the secret Cold War in the developing world’ given no account of US policy would be prepared without an accompanying (critical) examination of the CIA. Ironically, in 1974 the KGB documented over 250 of its own ‘active measures’ just targeting the CIA’s reputation in the developing world.

To take a handful of regional examples:

  • An extraordinary level of KGB activity in India, including active measures attempting to convince Indira Ghandi she was the imminent victim of a US-sponsored coup;
  • Coerced recruitment and blackmailing of two Japanese Foreign Ministry officials (RENGO and EMMA) in the late 1960s and 1970s; and,
  • Significant Line X (scientific and technological intelligence) operations against Japanese industry. Stolen Japanese technology benefited approximately 100 Soviet R&D projects in 1980.

Mitrokhin’s revelations also reverberated in Australia. As it happened, he visited as part of a KGB escort team during the Melbourne Olympics. This was the high point of Mitrokhin’s operational career but in the wash-up he was shunted from operations and into administration (and archival work that had been his pre-KGB training).

But Mitrokhin’s revelations published in 1999 and 2005 did not include specific material about Australia. Subsequent availability of his notebooks in 2014 did include some such information but there has long been speculation that other material remains unreleased.

Nonetheless, revelations reported included:

  • The 1963 Skripov expulsion had initially crippled operations in Australia, requiring complete rebuild of operational capability;
  • Operations directed at and through Australian universities—Leonid Stupin (GATSKY), a Soviet academic at ANU, and a Melbourne-based professor codenamed SILVER (thought to be Reginald Bray);
  • Archbishop Aghan Baliozian OAM (Armenian Church), who arrived in Australia in 1975 was a KGB spy (having been recruited in 1973 although later discontinued for under-performance); and,
  • Labor MP Albert James was a confidential contact of (now infamous) KGB officer Gerontiy Lazovik.

Australia was indeed ‘a medium-high target’ for the KGB, as it was seen (quoting ASIO’s official history) as a ‘backdoor route into the secrets of the US, the so called “main adversary”, and Britain’. Furthermore, Mitrokhin refuted the assertion of Anatoli Golitsyn, 1960s Soviet defector, that ASIO had not been penetrated. In fact, reports suggest the KGB had penetrated ASIO.

Beyond his revelations, Mitrokhin’s story highlights the West’s continuing potential advantage over authoritarian foes. For Mitrokhin was motivated in his archival collection and defection by a snowballing of outrages and crises: Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes, the Prague Spring’s crushing, and the decrepitude of late Soviet life (and moral counter example of dissidents)—and by comparison with the West’s ideals.

This still matters today. As then Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) Director-General Paul Symon argued in 2022:

‘ASIS benefits from espionage opportunities that emerge from the suppressed dissent within authoritarian states. When leaders abolish fixed political terms, for example, they become responsible and accountable for everything – including the disillusionment that emerges from within. This provides us an edge. We notice that in closed societies top officials will always reinforce leaders’ biases and assumptions. That, after all, is the safest career path for them. Speaking truth to power is an enduring strength of our system.’

Winning the 21st-century intelligence contest

The conduct of intelligence activities is inherently a strategic dynamic between rival actors simultaneously playing offence and defence. Analogies with war, sporting contests and competition abound. Action and reaction. Denial and deception. Or, in its Soviet incarnation, ‘sword and shield’—the KGB’s motto.

The prize for a nation’s leadership? Holding an advantage in decision-making and action. Knowing others better than they know you. And being able to use that advantage and that knowledge to the benefit of your interests and security.

This essence is highlighted in two important and insightful new works on intelligence.

Calder Walton’s Spies: the epic intelligence war between East and West charts the history of espionage and counterespionage through the 20th century and into the 21st, illuminating an ongoing shadow war between the UK and US (and their allies) on the one hand and the Soviet bloc (and later Russia) on the other.

Walton, a historian at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, through archival study and interviews with practitioners and defectors, finds that the struggle started in 1917 (and not after World War II). The resulting intelligence ‘warfare’ was at the bleeding edge of the next 75 years. What’s more, it didn’t end in 1991 despite the West’s ‘peace dividend’. The Soviets’ perceived humiliation is key to understanding Russian revanchism today—seen not only in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine but in Russian intelligence outrages worldwide. Disturbingly—especially in light of recent events—Walton concludes that the West has a Russia problem not a Putin problem.

Spies has a particularly contemporary resonance, illustrated by Walton’s revelatory account of attempts to assassinate Russian Foreign Intelligence Service defector Aleksandr Poteyev in Florida just three years ago. This links to earlier BBC reporting of Russian efforts to track down Poteyev, including using disinformation about his ‘death’ to flush out those with knowledge of his whereabouts.

Furthermore, Walton’s reflections extend to an emergent China–West confrontation. Espionage is once more at the front line of what he describes as a new cold war with Russia and China. Different, yes (how could it be otherwise in a globalised economy?), but a cold war nonetheless, and one that’s critical to keep cold given the continuing threat of mutual nuclear destruction.

What’s changed are the phenomena that will determine who comes out on top: not least OSINT (open-source intelligence) and the race for artificial-intelligence-driven mastery of data. For Walton, a critical historical lesson is the importance of creativity, exemplified by the CIA’s turn to technologically sophisticated satellite imagery to overcome the challenge of spying behind the Iron Curtain.

Walton’s chosen analogy is war. That’s not uncontroversial. It captures the century-long nature of the dynamic and the sense of zero-sum results, but I’m queasy about direct equation at a time when we have an actual war occurring on the plains of eastern Europe. ‘Contest’, albeit more bloodless and less evocative, is a safer harbour for more generalised accounts of intelligence. It also better accommodates multidirectional intelligence efforts in an increasingly multipolar world.

For the writers in Deter, disrupt or deceive: assessing cyber conflict as an intelligence contest, edited by Robert Chesney and Max Smeets, the question is whether the long-heralded idea of ‘cyber war’ is indeed actually better understood as ‘intelligence contest’. In doing so, the contributors also consider different national (including Chinese and Russian) perspectives on cyber issues and the role of non-state actors (including internet users, technology companies and cybersecurity firms).

US scholar Josh Rovner’s chapter dissecting what constitutes an intelligence contest is perceptive. In his words, participants endeavour to:

  • ‘collect more and better information relevant to long-term political competition’
  • ‘exploit that information for practical gain’
  • ‘undermine [their] adversary’s morale, institutions and alliances’
  • ‘disable adversary intelligence capabilities through sabotage’
  • ‘pre-position assets for future collection in the event of a conflict’.

The result is typically long-term information duels among adversary states, during which participants use secrecy for defensive but also offensive purposes. They’re challenged too, as all regimes (democratic and undemocratic alike) ‘struggle to make the most of intelligence, but for different reasons’. Amid that struggle are overriding incentives to innovate but also to end up mimicking one’s adversaries’ tactics and capabilities.

I would observe that, as in a duel, those rivals search for points of advantage and positive asymmetry amid what can otherwise tend towards an evenly matched stalemate.

What are the lessons for Australia? After all, our national intelligence community is necessarily engaged in defence and offence to advance our national interests in concert with our allies and unilaterally. We’re also drawing on experiences back to at least the onset of the Cold War.

One distinction from the past is a new sense of maturity and realism in Australian approaches to intelligence matters. Recent ABC allegations about Soviet penetration of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in the 1970s and 1980s suggest just how naive we have been historically, including in our political discourse. That’s reinforced by the 40th anniversary of the Combe–Ivanov affair and the second Hope royal commission. Much of the supposedly hard-bitten cynicism of that moment, especially from the press gallery and commentariat, now comes across as impossibly provincial and innocent.

For Valeriy Ivanov was an undeclared KGB officer. He was actively cultivating a senior political figure in pursuit of Soviet interests. ASIO was on the ball. Prime Minister Bob Hawke acted appropriately. Justice Robert Hope got it right (again).

Australia has moved on thankfully, as can be seen from the forthright approach of ASIO, the rest of the intelligence community and the government to the realities of espionage and foreign interference today—and the fact that Australia finds itself in the strategic cockpit of the 21st century, rather than the sidelines of the 20th.

Australia can also take note from Spies and from Deter, disrupt or deceive that we are in a contest, like it or not. That contest involves defence and offence. But an intelligence contest only makes sense within a broader strategy incorporating defence, deterrence, diplomacy and national resilience (including social cohesion).

The intelligence contest in the 21st century requires mastery of both old techniques and new ways of working. For an intelligence middle-power like Australia, a key to success will be creativity and innovation. As will be making the most of our national talent.

There’s also a need for self-reflection: what features of Australian government structures will challenge our making the best use of intelligence? One would be the relatively immature integration of intelligence within broader statecraft. Another might be the still limited engagement between our intelligence community and the nation and people it serves.

But Australia is blessed with an established, comprehensive national intelligence capability. And the power of our enduring intelligence relationships.

All of these are important issues for the next independent intelligence review to examine.

Southeast Asia’s new-old cold war

Few parts of the world paid as high a cost during the Cold War as Southeast Asia. The superpower conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union divided the region into pro- and anti-communist camps, spawning five wars in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam over four decades. Today, US–China competition is fuelling a so-called new cold war with familiar structural characteristics.

In fact, the Sino-American great-power confrontation is a continuation of an unfinished ideological struggle, this time pitting the US-led and Western-based alliance system against a China-centric global network of client states, many of them with various shades of authoritarian governance. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War, but China is now giving the West a run for its money in the sequel. And Southeast Asia will once again be a major theatre.

For about two decades following the end of the Cold War, America seemed to enjoy a ‘unipolar’ moment enabling it to reshape the global order, and free markets and democratisation spread around the world. But liberal democracy and market capitalism were subsequently weakened from within, particularly following the 2008 global financial crisis, enabling a growing challenge by alternative models of authoritarianism and state-directed economic development.

The vaunted Western promise of liberty and prosperity was increasingly discredited by an accelerating concentration of wealth and power, deepening social divisions and seemingly intractable political polarisation. Electorates became more sceptical and disillusioned about what democracy and capitalism could deliver—an alienation compounded by runaway globalisation and rapid technological change.

Southeast Asia was not immune to these trends. Many people in Thailand, the Philippines and elsewhere, resentful that their incomes and living standards had fallen behind, were attracted to populist or authoritarian alternatives.

Populist leaders around the democratic world bypassed established centres of power such as the media and the traditional political class, connecting directly with voters. Significantly, many of Asia’s populists, once elected, had little effective rule of law to constrain them.

Enter China, whose appeal thrives on the shortcomings of Western democracy and free-market capitalism. China’s model is still Leninist, but while the Chinese Communist Party exercises centralised political control along totalitarian lines, the country’s economic development and management are market-consistent (though not market-driven). China thus challenges and frustrates the Western model of liberal democracy and market capitalism in unprecedented ways.

The ideological battle that the Soviet Union once waged with the West has taken on a new form with the rise of China, which feels entitled, even destined, to reclaim its glorious past. But the inherent contradictions between political totalitarianism and market-consistent capitalism make China strong and weak at the same time. No other modern state has been able to have its cake and eat it by imposing centralised control and repressing individual rights and freedoms while running a successful market economy that improves its people’s living standards.

One might argue that the Chinese state drives a capitalist economy in the same way that Japan, South Korea and Taiwan pioneered state-led capitalism from the 1960s to the 1980s. The major difference is that those countries were strong US allies and partners that developed well-consolidated Western-style democracies. China is neither a US ally nor democratic, and very possibly never will be.

The Soviet Union confronted the US in proxy conflicts, such as the Indochina wars, but eventually lost the Cold War because it couldn’t keep up with the West’s more dynamic capitalist economic development. China has yet to confront the US directly in military terms, despite its unprecedented arms build-up, preferring to keep its powder dry for clashes over trade and technological innovation.

But, like the US three decades ago, China is trying to reshape the global system in line with its preferences. The resulting face-off between the new East and the old West would be best settled through a process of compromise and accommodation that accords China a greater international role and prestige befitting its global weight. If denied, China will likely become resentful, self-righteous and belligerent. But, because the parameters of such accommodation are fluid, the new cold war will continue to play out.

Nowhere will the impact of this new superpower tussle be more evident and consequential than in Southeast Asia, which is increasingly divided over what China stands for and how to respond. China appears to have the upper hand in the region for now. But the Covid-19 pandemic may soon expose fundamental flaws in China’s system, because, having committed to elimination of the virus, it cannot fully reopen its economy.

Meanwhile, the current high infection numbers in the US and other democracies could eventually enable them to cope with Covid-19 more effectively. If they can capitalise on that possibility, it would rebalance the new cold-war struggle in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

Is the US sleepwalking towards war with China?

As US President Joe Biden’s administration implements its strategy of great-power competition with China, analysts seek historical metaphors to explain the deepening rivalry. But while many invoke the onset of the Cold War, a more worrisome historical metaphor is the start of World War I. In 1914, all the great powers expected a short third Balkan war. Instead, as the British historian Christopher Clark has shown, they sleepwalked into a conflagration that lasted four years, destroyed four empires and killed millions.

Back then, leaders paid insufficient attention to the changes in the international order that had once been called the ‘concert of Europe’. An important change was the growing strength of nationalism. In Eastern Europe, pan-Slavism threatened both the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, which had large Slavic populations. German authors wrote about the inevitability of Teutonic–Slavic battles, and schoolbooks inflamed nationalist passions. Nationalism proved to be a stronger bond than socialism for Europe’s working classes, and a stronger bond than capitalism for Europe’s bankers.

Moreover, there  was a rising complacency about peace. The great powers had not been involved in a war in Europe for 40 years. Of course, there had been crises—in Morocco in 1905–06, in Bosnia in 1908, in Morocco again in 1911 and the Balkan wars in 1912–13—but they had all been manageable. The diplomatic compromises that resolved those conflicts, however, stoked frustration and growing support for revisionism. Many leaders came to believe that a short, decisive war won by the strong would be a welcome change.

A third cause of the loss of flexibility in the early 20th-century international order was German policy, which was ambitious but vague and confusing. There was a terrible clumsiness about Kaiser Wilhelm II’s pursuit of greater power. Something similar can be seen with President Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream’, his abandonment of Deng Xiaoping’s patient approach, and the excesses of China’s nationalistic ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy.

Policymakers today must be alert to the rise of nationalism in China as well as populist chauvinism in the United States. Combined with China’s aggressive foreign policy, a history of standoffs and unsatisfactory compromises over Taiwan, the prospects of inadvertent escalation between the two powers exist. As Clark puts it, once catastrophes like World War I occur, ‘they impose on us (or seem to do so) a sense of their necessity’. But in 1914, Clark concludes, ‘The future was still open—just. For all the hardening of the fronts in both of Europe’s armed camps, there were signs that the moment for a major confrontation might be passing.’

A successful strategy must prevent a sleepwalker syndrome. In 1914, Austria was fed up with upstart Serbia’s nationalism. The assassination of an Austrian archduke by a Serbian terrorist was a perfect pretext for an ultimatum. Before leaving for vacation, the German Kaiser decided to deter a rising Russia and back his Austrian ally by issuing Austria a diplomatic blank cheque. When he returned and learned how Austria had filled it out, he tried to retract it, but it was too late.

The US hopes to deter the use of force by China and preserve the legal limbo of Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province. For years, US policy has been designed to deter Taiwan’s declaration of de jure independence as well as China’s use of force against the island. Today, some analysts warn that this double deterrence policy is outdated, because China’s growing military power may tempt its leaders to act.

Others believe that an outright guarantee to Taiwan or hints that the US is moving in that direction would provoke China to act. But even if China eschewed a full-scale invasion and merely tried to coerce Taiwan with a blockade or by taking one of its offshore islands, all bets would be off if an incident involving ships or aircraft led to loss of life. If the US reacted by freezing assets or invoking the Trading with the Enemy Act, the two countries’ metaphorical war could quickly become real. The lessons of 1914 are to be wary of sleepwalking, but they don’t provide a solution to managing the Taiwan problem.

A successful US strategy towards China starts at home. It requires preserving democratic institutions that attract rather than coerce allies, investing in research and development that maintains America’s technological advantage, and maintaining America’s openness to the world. Externally, the US should restructure its legacy military forces to adapt to technological change; strengthen alliance structures, including NATO and arrangements with Japan, Australia and South Korea; enhance relations with India; strengthen and supplement the international institutions the US helped create after World War II to set standards and manage interdependence; and cooperate with China where possible on transnational issues. So far, the Biden administration is following such a strategy, but 1914 is a constant reminder about prudence.

In the near term, given Xi’s assertive policies, the US will probably have to spend more time on the rivalry side of the equation. But such a strategy can succeed if the US avoids ideological demonisation and misleading Cold War analogies and maintains its alliances. In 1946, George Kennan correctly predicted a decades-long confrontation with the Soviet Union. The US can’t contain China, but it can constrain China’s choices by shaping the environment in which it rises.

If the Sino-American relationship were a hand of poker, Americans would recognise that they have been dealt a good hand and avoid succumbing to fear or belief in the decline of the US. But even a good hand can lose if it’s played badly.

Big-power decathlon in a hot peace

The emerging era of great-power competition shapes as a hot peace.

‘Hot peace’ is a better label for what the world faces than ‘new cold war’, not least because we’re well short of an icy bipolar faceoff between China and the US.

Beyond the current superpower and the coming superpower, a lot of other big powers are going to matter in this new era. All those powers will be running in many different races. See the G20 as competitors in a big-power decathlon, with lots of other nations also contending in the foreign policy version of track and field.

The model is multipolar. Diverse powers and diverse competitions. In the hot peace, the US and China will be central but not always decisive. That’s because managing differences and divisions will be the main job of the G2, not agreeing on decisions.

If and when they can get together to agree on G2 deals, Beijing and Washington will have the capacity to direct and dominate on specific issues. Good deals are still possible in a hot peace. But this new era is going to make deals difficult, because competition and confrontation build as the elements of engagement fade. It’ll be a hotly contested peace.

In How to avoid an avoidable war, Kevin Rudd offers a thoughtful discussion of the strategic competition between China and the US:

When future generations look back on 2018, it could well be as the year in which the relationship between the two great powers of the twenty-first century—the United States and China—shifted from peaceful coexistence to a new form of confrontation, although its final trajectory remains far from certain.

Part of thinking about that trajectory is naming what we see. To argue that this isn’t a new cold war throws up the obvious task: offer a better label.

One flippant suggestion from inside the Canberra system was ‘big-cat spat’. It’s certainly an update of the proverb that one mountain can’t contain two tigers. The need, though, is to broaden the scope to suggest many mountains and many tigers.

In the quest for a label, I played with ‘races’. The ‘new geo race’? Nah! A slightly better version is a ‘big-power Olympics.’ Plenty of medals to go around in lots of different disciplines. Dropping the Olympics as misleading or too off topic, I refined this to ‘big-power decathlon’.

Decathlon works because it’s easy to draw up a crowded list of contests/races that’ll figure in the hot peace: military–strategic, geopolitics, geoeconomics, trade, cyber realms, communications, multilateral institutions, climate change, resources and space.

Then open the ‘values’ box to add in democracy, human rights and liberalism in a time of nationalism and authoritarian resurgence. The challenge, really, is to cram it all into just 10 headings. To win the name game, the label has to be able to trump new cold war. Up against war, ‘big-power decathlon’ is too sporty, although it captures the range of players and races.

Hot peace answers new cold war, using its own frame of reference. The argument is that we have arrived at a troubled form of peace, not a muted form of indirect war. This is a strategic contest with many peaceful dimensions. Hot peace rebuts the cold war claim by saying, ‘We’re not there yet!’

Without getting too metaphysical, the hot idea works better in describing close partners who are simultaneously opponents. Rather than frigid nuclear and ideological standoff, China and the US are locked together—interdependent even if intemperate. Joseph Nye gets it right in describing the relationship of the two giants as ‘cooperative rivalry’.

In a new book, a former US ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, uses the title From cold war to hot peace—an American ambassador in Putin’s Russia. What McFaul sees with Russia has now arrived with China.

During the Soviet–US cold war, hot peace was the improved state many yearned to reach. Back in 1973, Pierre Hassner mused in the New York Times—under the headline ‘Cold war to hot peace’—about that shift:

A new stage of ‘hot peace’ has indeed replaced the cold war, but it would be wrong to assume that the farther one gets from war and propaganda the closer one is to peace and reconciliation. In this new state of ambiguity, situations may thaw without being solved, isolation may be broken but in favor of asymmetrical penetration or imbalance rather than of reconciliation.

We are going from Rudd’s ‘peaceful coexistence’ to a more ambiguous hot peace.

To embrace that hot peace description of where we are and where we’re going is to take a lesson from the cold war—the importance of words and visions in defining and directing the conflict. That’s a thought from one of the great American historians of the cold war, John Lewis Gaddis.

He notes that the cold war was fought at different levels in dissimilar ways in multiple places over a very long time. Any attempt to reduce its history exclusively to the role of great forces, great powers or great leaders would fail to do it justice. Yet for Gaddis, the first step to understanding is clear:

‘It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail.’

If the many competitors stuff up this new era, they could freeze the hot peace and drive history to deliver us all to a cold war.

The cooperative rivalry of US–China relations

On a visit to Beijing in October, I was often asked whether US Vice President Mike Pence’s recent harsh criticism of China marked the declaration of a new cold war. I replied that the United States and China have entered a new phase in their relationship, but that the cold war metaphor is misleading.

During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union targeted tens of thousands of nuclear weapons at each other and had virtually no trade or cultural ties. Now, however, China has a more limited nuclear force, annual Sino-American trade totals half a trillion dollars, and more than 350,000 Chinese students and three million tourists are in the US each year. A better description of today’s bilateral relationship is ‘cooperative rivalry’.

Since the end of World War II, US–China relations have gone through three phases that lasted roughly two decades each. Hostility marked the 20 years after the Korean War, followed by limited cooperation against the Soviet Union during the phase that began after President Richard Nixon’s famous 1972 visit.

The Cold War’s end ushered in a third phase of economic engagement, during which the US helped China’s global economic integration, including its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. Yet in the first post–Cold War decade, President Bill Clinton’s administration hedged its bets by simultaneously strengthening the US–Japan alliance and improving relations with India. Now, since 2017, the US national security strategy focuses on great-power rivalry, with China and Russia designated as America’s main adversaries.

While many Chinese analysts blame this fourth phase on US President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping is also to blame. By rejecting Deng Xiaoping’s prudent policy of maintaining a low international profile, by ending presidential term limits, and by proclaiming his nationalistic ‘China Dream’, Xi might as well have been wearing a red hat reading, ‘Make China Great Again’. The conventional wisdom on China within the US had already begun to sour before the 2016 presidential election. Trump’s rhetoric and tariffs were merely fuel poured on a smoldering fire.

The liberal international order helped China sustain rapid economic growth and reduce poverty dramatically. But China also tilted the trade field to its advantage by subsidising state-owned enterprises, engaging in commercial espionage, and requiring foreign firms to transfer their intellectual property to domestic ‘partners’. While most economists argue that Trump is mistaken to focus on the bilateral trade deficit, many support his complaints about China’s efforts to challenge America’s technological advantage.

Moreover, China’s growing military strength adds a security dimension to the bilateral relationship. While this fourth phase of the relationship is not a cold war, owing to the high degree of interdependence, it is much more than a typical trade dispute like, say, America’s recent clash with Canada over access to that country’s dairy market.

Some analysts believe this fourth phase marks the beginning of a conflict in which an established hegemon goes to war with a rising challenger. In his explanation of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides famously argued that it was caused by Sparta’s fear of a rising Athens.

These analysts believe that China’s rise will create a similar fear in the US, and use the analogy of World War I, when a rising Germany set hegemonic Britain on edge. The causes of World War I, however, were far more complex, and included growing Russian power, which created fear in Germany; rising nationalism in the Balkans and other countries; and the risks deliberately taken by the Habsburg Empire to stave off its decline.

Even more important, Germany had already surpassed Britain in industrial production by 1900, while China’s GDP (measured in dollars) currently is only three-fifths the size of America’s. The US has more time and assets to manage the rise of Chinese power than Britain had with Germany. China is constrained by a natural balance of power in Asia in which Japan (the world’s third-largest economy) and India (about to surpass China in population) have no desire to be dominated by it.

Succumbing to the fear that Thucydides described would be an unnecessary self-fulfilling prophecy for the US. Fortunately, polls show that the American public has not yet succumbed to a hysterical portrayal of China as an enemy as strong as the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.

Neither China nor the US poses an existential threat to the other the way that Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union did. China is not about to invade the US, and it is unable to expel America from the Western Pacific, where most countries welcome its presence. Japan, a major part of the so-called first island chain, pays nearly three-quarters of the host nation costs to keep 50,000 US troops based there.

My recent visit to Tokyo confirmed for me that the US–Japan alliance is strong. If the Trump administration maintains it, the prospects are slight that China can drive the US from the Western Pacific, much less dominate the world. The US holds better strategic cards and need not succumb to Thucydidean fear.

There is another dimension, however, that makes this fourth phase a ‘cooperative rivalry’ rather than a cold war. China and the US face transnational challenges that are impossible to resolve without the other. Climate change and rising sea levels obey the laws of physics, not politics. As borders become more porous to everything from illicit drugs to infectious diseases to terrorism, the largest economies will have to cooperate to cope with the threats.

Some aspects of the relationship will involve a positive-sum game. US national security will require power with China, not just over China. The key question is whether the US is capable of thinking in terms of a ‘cooperative rivalry’. Can we walk and chew gum at the same time? In an age of populist nationalism, it is much easier for politicians to create fear about a new cold war.

Hitler’s cold war, Stalin’s cold war, today’s … ?

The two cold wars of the 20th century caution against the idea that today’s confrontation between the US and China is a ‘new cold war’.

The long cold war launched by Stalin and the shorter version waged by Hitler tell much about why this isn’t a cold war. Yet.

In naming the confrontation with the Soviet Union, in his 1947 book The cold war: a study in US foreign policy, American journalist Walter Lippmann said he’d merely repurposed a phrase used in Europe during the 1930s to describe Hitler’s war of nerves against France.

The long cold war of the 20th century ended quietly when the Soviet Union collapsed, while Hitler’s short cold war turned hot when his brinkmanship pushed everyone over the brink. The long and short give different understandings of whether states can remain cool in playing at the edge of war.

The 20th century cold wars offer lots of nasty history and a potent vocabulary. Language directs understanding and the new cold war is a dangerous bit of shaping; a big category error obscures more than it reveals. Names matter and ‘cold war’ is a punchy one.

As both the French and Chinese say in different ways, the naming of things is vital because it determines where you start and has much to do with where you head.

The trouble with the new cold war is that it’s a binary label for a networked world. The question last time was simple: which side of the Berlin Wall are you on?

The understanding today is about the functions and connections of the network’s nodes and the protocols in use. Myriad networks, many uses. Analogue wall then, digital web now.

How will nations, acting as nodes, view the competition and the connections as well as the confrontation? No single, simple choice is possible because so many different choices crowd and call.

Conceptualising a new cold war involves putting on the binary, two-bloc bifocals.

Strategically, the US has enjoyed unipolar privileges since the collapse of the Soviet Union. That period passes, so now, apparently, we’re to revert to bipolar business as usual, with China as the new foe.

The settings are all wrong for such a simple reversion. The ground today looks so different, ideologically, economically and in alliance structures.

Along with all the other disparities, today’s America is not the America of the cold war. Today’s occupant of the White House doesn’t have the intellect or world view of a Franklin Roosevelt or a Harry Truman or … just name your president, really. The Donald doesn’t do systems and structure, he does disruption and deals.

If we’re picking historical analogies, it might be better to look more at the long 19th century (from the French revolution to World War I) than at the frigid face-off that followed World War II.

Great-power competition is back. The questions and partial answers are those of a series of contests with many competing powers:

Q: Who you gonna trust?
A: It depends on the issue and the interests.

Q: Who you gonna line up with?
A: It depends. Everybody, or nobody, or a shifting mix.

Q: Who you gonna compete with?
A: Everybody!

Ngaire Woods gives a European-flavoured view of how this strategic free-for-all might pan out:

Rather than a cold war, the world may be heading toward an international system led by four powers, with the US, China, Russia, and Germany dominating their respective regions and seeking the upper hand in international negotiations. Such a scenario is reminiscent of the World War II vision of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who proposed that the four victorious allies—the US, the UK, China, and the Soviet Union—act as ‘Four Policemen,’ each patrolling its own sphere of influence and negotiating with the others on world peace.

Today, approximations of the same four powers are once again in the lead, only now we have stronger international institutions to help keep the peace. Whether that peace lasts will depend on the willingness of the four powers to use and adapt those institutions to the emerging international system.

The formula looks right, but it’s too simple. And in its Asia dimension, it too easily grants China leadership/dominance.

From where Australia sits, a couple of other players must be added: India and Japan. And ASEAN, with Indonesia foremost in our calculations.

As a ‘system’, this shapes as more a cacophony than a concert of power.

And that brings us back to the label issue. Names matter, so offer a name.

If this is not a cold war, what’s it to be called? My answer to the name choice in next week’s column.

Not the new cold war

Competition and confrontation build between China and the US.

The era of engagement fades. Superpower rivalry returns. Great power challenges great power. The world’s biggest economy faces off against the second biggest.

The descriptor of the moment is the new cold war. As a label, ‘the new cold war’ or ‘cold war 2.0’ is a sharp, vivid headline. And it’s wrong.

This is not the new cold war. The ‘new’ bit is right, but the newness of much of the contest cautions against the old label.

Today’s struggle is equally significant. And it’ll run for decades.

Yet ‘cold war’? Standing only steps from hot war and nuclear conflagration? No.

Badly bungled and dumbly driven, this struggle could eventually create two opposing blocs that’d resemble a cold war line-up. But it’s going to need a lot more poor strategic policy and economic stupidity to reach cold war 2.0.

What we face is big yet different. This is not a binary confrontation between two superpowers peering across the Berlin Wall, separated by a geographic and economic iron curtain, their leaders isolated from each other by fear and different understandings.

Today’s fight is not a confrontation based on a massive clash of ideologies and two completely separate economic systems.

The Soviet–US struggle was defined by separations—the standing armies facing each other across central Europe. The symbol of the Cold War was the wall. Today’s motif is the web.

What China and the US are fighting about is what they share and what they both want to dominate.

The competition will be defined by its connections and closeness. Two superpowers seeking to be number one. Both want to sit atop the system, not overthrow the system.

Washington’s new fear of China was announced in the 4 October speech by US Vice President Mike Pence. Canberra’s view is that Pence ‘sets out the most dramatic shift in relations with Beijing since Nixon and Kissinger’s “opening” of relations in the early 1970s’.

Pence rails against China for its interference in everything from media to movies to markets.

The vice president’s description of the struggle offers some implicit rebuttal of the cold war 2.0 idea. In version 1.0, America never accused the Soviet Union of causing the US trade deficit by gaming the World Trade Organization.

Consider some then-and-now differences.

Ideology: The Cold War was a contest of ideas and values: communism fighting capitalism, Marxism versus democracy.

The ideological content today is almost non-existent.

China isn’t offering any big new political idea. Beijing wants to expand its international power, not export its political system.

The US has a binary president, visceral in rejecting the friends, values and international institutions central to US conduct in the Cold War.

The ‘America First’ leader confronts the ‘China Dream’ leader. The images put forward by both men play to their domestic audiences. Neither side has much in its ideological armoury to enlist others in a new, frigid division.

Economics and trade: The Soviet Union wanted to overthrow the economic system championed by the US. Communism versus capitalism. Bloc against bloc. Economic sphere facing economic sphere.

China merely wants to beat America at its own game. China loves what America has created; now Beijing wants to own it. From the WTO to the World Bank, China embraces the system.

Pence harangued the Chinese Communist Party (18 mentions in his speech), but take it from the World Bank: ‘China has had a remarkable period of rapid growth shifting from a centrally planned to a market based economy.’

Savour the irony that China, the new superpower, follows the same protectionist/mercantilist policies the US used in the 19th century to become the new superpower able to match Europe (the US Civil War between the industrial north and slave-owning south was a fight between protectionists and free-traders, and the protectionists won).

Today’s struggle between the US and China has free-traders and protectionists on both sides. Many other nations looking on are conflicted about this choice; Australia, more than most, knows that it wants the free-traders to win.

So, another irony: China’s leader chants the free trade and globalisation mantra in confronting a protectionist US president.

Alliances and proxy wars: Militarily, the Cold War was waged by opposing alliance systems, a hair-trigger nuclear standoff and proxy wars.

The nukes remain, but the rest of the equation is gone.

The proxy wars—Korea, Vietnam and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—were disastrous conflicts whose wounds bled across the second half of the 20th century. We’re still dealing with the consequences in Korea and Afghanistan.

The US has allies. China doesn’t. Another irony: China understands the value of the US alliance system better than Trump does.

The US is clearly the world’s greatest military power, and US alliance dominance is a formidable bulwark against a new cold war. Yet China is coming and the equation is shifting. Robert Kaplan ponders what this means for America and its Asian allies:

The United States must face up to an important fact: the western Pacific is no longer a unipolar American naval lake, as it was for decades after World War II. The return of China to the status of great power ensures a more complicated multipolar situation. The United States must make at least some room for Chinese air and naval power in the Indo-Pacific region. How much room is the key question.

Australia and Asia need the US as a balancer, not as a belligerent in a new cold war.

The rivalry is real and the competition will be intense. The times, though, call for brains, not blocs. Take lessons from the Cold War, don’t remake it.