The Cold War analogy’s misrepresentation of the essence of US–China strategic competition

The gradual deterioration of the US–China relationship during the Trump era has inspired the development of diverse theoretical approaches to grasping the essence of the two countries’ recent great power rivalry. Although the Cold War analogy is a useful heuristic for making sense of the dynamics of the US–China strategic competition, it is based on the bygone US–Soviet relationship, and thus may lead to misunderstandings about the particular logic of the current US–China relationship. The pitfalls of relying on the Cold War analogy include motivated bias, cognitive bias resulting from framing effects, and potentially missing the real causal variable driving the rivalry. Historical analogies are necessary but not sufficient for grasping the nature of the US–China case. Instead, scholars should ascend the ladder of abstraction to escape the conceptual stretching problem that contributes to misunderstandings in studies of the dynamics of the US–China strategic competition.