New Cold War with China inadvisable for US: Researcher

LOS ANGELES - The United Sates has paid heavily for the Cold War routines it has been keeping and should not launch a new Cold War against China, which foreseeably creates barriers to coexistence, a think tank researcher has said.

In an opinion piece published Sunday in Los Angeles Times, Andrew Bacevich, president of Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said that a new Cold War will inevitably center Sino-American relations on military competition and confrontation, possibly for decades to come.

"Only those ignorant of the dangers and actual havoc stemming from the first Cold War could welcome such a prospect," he wrote.

Bacevich holds that the United States has been keeping and repurposing the costly routines it used to wage the Cold War even after the late 1980s, when the Cold War subsided, pointing to the country's lavish defense budget and active military presence and intervention abroad.

The recurring reference to the Cold War, the researcher said, hinders imaginations, and managing the US-China relationship will be a delicate proposition that warrants "greater wisdom and insight than the Washington establishment has shown in recent years."

The reality is that the two nations are mutually dependent, not least economically, he said, adding that this will remain inarguably the case, and there will be no acceptable alternative to mutual coexistence.