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The US, China, and the Cold War analogy

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Abstract

Of all the historical precedents that have been invoked in recent years to make sense of US–China relations, which is the most suggestive? This article argues that the Cold War analogy, which frames the US–Soviet strategic rivalry between 1947 and 1989 as a power-cum-ideological struggle, fits the bill best. Yet because analogical reasoning tends to be a hazardous intellectual enterprise, it is necessary to “test” the inferences derived from the Cold War 1.0 analogy against the current trajectory of US–China relations. This article offers some suggestions on how to go about performing such tests.

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Notes

  1. Interview with the author, 1986. Cited in Khong (1992).

  2. See this paper’s “Appendix” and Khong (2019) for a fuller discussion of the Lowy Institute’s Asia Power Index.

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Funding

This research was supported by National University of Singapore (Grant Start Up Grant, WBS R603-000-191-133).

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Correspondence to Yuen Foong Khong.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 1.

Table 1 Overall power ranking 2019.

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Khong, Y.F. The US, China, and the Cold War analogy. China Int Strategy Rev. 1, 223–237 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42533-020-00034-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42533-020-00034-y

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