The US - China Relations 2022

How not to learn from history
YUEN FOONG KHONG *
At a crucial National Security Council meeting in July 1965, during which Presi-
dent Lyndon Johnson and his advisers were deliberating whether the United States
should intervene militarily in South Vietnam with 100,000 troops, US Ambassador
to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr delivered the coup de grâce to those vacil-
lating about the intervention: ‘I feel there is a greater threat to start World War
III if we don’t go in [to save South Vietnam]. Can’t we see the similarity to our
own indolence at Munich?’1 Thirty years later, US Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright also felt it necessary to remind her interlocutors, when dealing with
ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, that her ‘mindset is Munich’,2 not Vietnam. Her
pro-military intervention mindset pitted her against the then chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell, whom she needled with her famous comment
‘What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about
if we can’t use it?’3 Powell was so dismayed by Albright’s willingness to send US
troops in harm’s way that ‘I thought I would have an aneurysm’.4
The point of departure of this article is that what Lodge and Albright were doing
is unexceptional: when confronted with new challenges, they looked to the past for
guidance. But as the Vietnam debacle and Powell’s reaction to Albright suggest, it
is also true that looking to the past to assess the present (and future) is strewn with
risks. The invocation of the Hippocratic ‘do no harm’ oath by the editors of this
special issue undoubtedly applies to decision-makers predisposed to ‘learning’ and
applying the lessons of history in dealing with foreign policy challenges. Scholars
who have examined how policy-makers use historical analogies in international
affairs agree that in most of those cases, their analogies—insofar as they shaped
the decision—have led to suboptimal outcomes, or what the editors call ‘failures’.
* This article is part of the International Affairs September 2022 special issue: ‘International relations: the “how
not to” guide’, guest-edited by Daniel W. Drezner and Amrita Narlikar. The author would like to thank Ian
Russell Koh Tze Ming and Michael Zhou Xizhuang for their invaluable research assistance. This research is
supported by Social Science Research Thematic Grant (Singapore) WBS R-603-000-371-119.
1
Meeting on Vietnam, July 21, 1965, Papers of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Meeting Notes File, Lyndon Baines
Johnson Library, Austin, Texas.
2
Barbara Crossette, ‘A political diplomat: Madeleine Korbel Albright’, New York Times, 6 Dec. 1996, https://
www.nytimes.com/1996/12/06/us/a-political-diplomat-madeleine-korbel-albright.html. (Unless otherwise
noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 16 June 2022.)
3
Cited in Crossette, ‘A political diplomat’, New York Times, 6 Dec. 1996,
4
Cited in Robin Wright, ‘For nominee, power lies in restraint’, Los Angeles Times, 17 Dec. 2000, https://www.
latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-17-mn-1164-story.html.
International Affairs 98: 5 (2022) 1737–1762

Yuen Foong Khong
This article attempts to do two things: first, to glean from existing studies of
‘failures’ in using the lessons of history in international affairs a set of ‘how not
tos’ that can help steer the process of using history away from the wrong paths
towards something better; and second, to examine the extent to which these ‘how
not to’ proscriptions have informed the way policy-makers and analysts are using
history in a contemporary case. I will proceed as follows. In the first part of the
article, I draw on existing analyses of how policy-makers have used the ‘lessons
of the past’ in their foreign policy decision-making to suggest a few ‘how not to’
proscriptions on using history.5 My survey of the existing literature on the pitfalls
of analogical reasoning in international affairs leads us to four related ‘how not
to’ strictures: (1) do not settle or fixate on the first or most evocative analogy that
comes to mind; (2) do not dismiss differences between your favoured analogy and
the case in question; (3) do not neglect alternative analogies; and (4) do not shirk
from ‘testing’ the observable implications of your preferred analogy. Decision-
makers who show awareness of these ‘how not tos’ in using the lessons of the past,
I argue, are less likely to commit the errors that plague the unaware.
The second part of the article explores the extent to which these four ‘how
not tos’ manifest themselves in a contemporary case of ‘learning from the past’.
The case I have chosen is how the United States and its strategic partners are using
historical analogies to interpret the nature and trajectory of US–China relations
today. Research indicates that four historical analogies figure prominently in the
contemporary worldwide debate about the nature and challenge posed by China’s
rise: Athens–Sparta (or ‘the Thucydides Trap’), the First World War, the Second
World War or Munich, and the Cold War. Of these four, the Cold War analogy is
emerging as the key interpretative schema and it will be the focus of the analysis
here. I shall pay special attention to how policy-makers (former and current),
rather than scholars, use the analogy, because it is the use of analogies by those
with policy influence, such as former US Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and
Mike Pompeo, that shapes thinking and debate in the policy sphere.
The use of the Cold War analogy is not limited to the US policy community.
China’s leaders, for example, often accuse the United States of adopting a ‘Cold
War mentality’ in its diplomatic approach to Asia in general, and China in particu-
lar, but they seldom spell out what that mentality involves other than to imply
a hegemonic US bent on retarding China’s rise.6 Other policy-makers in Asia,
Europe and Africa—as I will show below—are also latching on to the Cold War
5
The literature (in English) on ‘the lessons of history’ is overwhelmingly about US cases and/or US decision-
makers, as notes 6–12 below suggest. A notable exception is Dan Reiter, Crucible of beliefs: learning, alliances,
and world wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). The US-centric nature of the literature is in part
to do with the availability of archival sources (declassified documents 25 years after the event) and the surfeit
of momentous US actions and outcomes to explain, given the country’s superpower status and inclinations.
6
Chinese President Xi Jinping has referred to but rejected the ‘the Thucydides Trap’ analogy. If there is one
analogy that is even more relevant than ‘the Cold War mentality’ in understanding China’s strategic think-
ing, it is likely to be the perceived imperative to avoid a repeat of the ‘one hundred years of humiliation’. See
Michael Zhou, ‘For China, the history that matters is still the “century of humiliation”’, South China Morning
Post, 28 Sept. 2021, https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3150233/china-history-matters-still-
century-humiliation; Vincent K. L. Chang, ‘China’s new historical statecraft: reviving the Second World
War for national rejuvenation’, International Affairs 98: 3, 2022, pp. 1053–69.
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International Affairs 98: 5, 2022
parallel to make sense of US–China relations and the implications for their respec-
tive countries and regions.7 My focus, however, will be on the analogy’s usage by
the United States and its strategic partners (Australia in particular). This focus is
justified by the fact that the most systematic and detailed articulations of the anal-
ogy are to be found in debates within the US. This should not come as a surprise,
given that the United States (and its strategic partners in Asia) are the ones most in
need of getting the ‘diagnosis’ about the nature and stakes of the China challenge
right if they are to construct appropriate strategies to meet the challenge.
My analysis of how the Cold War analogy is being deployed suggests that its
users have avoided the worst pitfalls of analogical reasoning in foreign affairs.
The most prominent users of these historical analogies show awareness of the
first three of the above proscriptions; all, however, shy away from the fourth—
the need to test the prognostications of their favoured analogy. Although this
is far from perfect, the signs point to the Cold War analogy being used in ways
that avoid the general pattern of superficial and poor use documented in existing
analyses of analogical reasoning in foreign affairs.
A pattern of failure in analogical reasoning in foreign affairs

In his classic study of how American leaders used history in their foreign policy
decision-making, the historian Ernest May came to three conclusions: first, that
they are ‘often influenced by beliefs about what history teaches or portends’;8
second, that they tend to use history badly mainly because they ‘seize upon the
first [analogy] that comes to mind’;9 and finally, that they can be taught to use
history more discriminatingly.10 Those who have followed May have tended to
agree with his first two propositions. Robert Jervis’s chapter on ‘How decision-
makers learn from history’ in his Perception and misperception in international politics,
provided a political science perspective on the issue. He surveyed numerous
instances of how policy-makers have used historical analogies and explored why
they found certain events—such as the last major war their nation fought and their
coming of political age—especially salient. Jervis agreed with May that policy-
makers did not just use historical analogies to ‘prop up their own prejudices’ (as
A. J. P. Taylor claimed) but that their analogies actually shaped ‘the interpreta-
tion of incoming information’. He also agreed that in general, policy-makers used
historical analogies poorly. Importantly, Jervis also touched on, but did not discuss
at length, the psychological dimensions of analogical decision-making.11 Subse-
7
Sebastian Biba, ‘Germany’s relations with the United States and China from a strategic triangle perspective’,
International Affairs 97: 6, 2021, pp. 1905–24; David McCourt, ‘Framing China’s rise in the United States,
Australia and the United Kingdom’, International Affairs 97: 3, 2021, pp. 643–65; Kei Koga, ‘Japan’s “Indo-Pacific”
question: countering China or shaping a new regional order?’, International Affairs 96: 1, 2020, pp. 49–74.
8
Ernest May, ‘Lessons’ of the past: the use and misuse of history in American foreign policy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1973), p. ix.
9
May, Lessons of the past, p. xi.
10
May, Lessons of the past, p. xii.
11
Robert Jervis, Perception and misperception in international politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976),
pp. 217–87. See also Alex Hybel, How leaders reason: US intervention in the Caribbean basin and Latin America
(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990).
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Yuen Foong Khong
quent work by Glenn Snyder and Paul Diesing also found that historical analogies
played an important information-processing role in crisis decision-making, but
they concluded that that role was overwhelmingly negative: ‘No examples in our
sample or elsewhere in the cases of historical analogies produced a correct inter-
pretation of a message. Jervis’s hypothesis that statesmen usually draw incorrect
or over-generalized inferences from historical analogies is strongly confirmed.’12
In an earlier work, Analogies at war, I elaborated on some of the themes identified
above by focusing on the role played by historical analogies in US decision-making
during the Vietnam War.13 In this work, I set my view that ‘analogies were used
for diagnostic and information processing’ purposes against the view of sceptics
who believed that analogies were used mainly for justifying policies reached on
other grounds. I proposed a framework within which analogies performed six
diagnostic functions: namely, defining the nature of the challenge confronting
policy-makers; assessing the stakes involved in the challenge; providing policy
prescriptions; estimating the probability of success of those prescriptions; evalu-
ating their moral rectitude; and warning about dangers associated with the
prescriptions. I applied this framework to the three major historical analogies
used by US decision-makers—the Korean War, Munich and the battle of Dien
Bien Phu—and argued that the Korean analogy could explain the policy options
chosen by Washington. Agreeing with May, Jervis and others, I also argued that
US decision-makers, despite being hailed as ‘the best and the brightest’, used analo-
gies poorly.14 I drew on a set of psychological explanations to explain why this
might be the case, focusing on the cognitive short-cuts involved in the selection
of analogies, the top-down information-processing that such analogies entail, and
the role of affect and perseverance in preventing policy-makers from entertaining
alternative analogies. My psychological approach to analogical decision-making
made me more pessimistic than May and others that policy-makers can easily
be trained to use history better.15 Subsequent work by David Houghton on US
decision-making during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis and by Alex Hybel on the
US intervention in the 1990–1991 Gulf War have also lent support to the (negative)
policy-shaping roles played by the Entebbe and Munich analogies respectively.16
12
Glenn Snyder and Paul Diesing, Conflict among nations: bargaining, decision making, and system structure in interna-
tional crises (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 321. See also Richard Toye’s discussion of how
British prime ministers used historical analogies during the Munich, Suez and Iraq (2003) crises, ‘How not to
run international affairs’, International Affairs 98: 5, 2022, pp. 1515–32; Yaacov Y. I. Vertzberger, ‘Foreign policy
decisionmakers as practical–intuitive historians: applied history and its shortcomings’, International Studies
Quarterly 30: 2, 1986, pp. 223–47.
13
Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at war: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam decisions of 1965 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992).
14
David Halberstam, The best and the brightest (New York: Random House, 1972). The book’s title was Halber-
stam’s sardonic characterization of the intellectual pedigree of the makers of America’s Vietnam policy in the
1960s and 1970s.
15
See Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, Thinking in time: the uses of history for decision-makers (New York: Free
Press, 1986), an optimistic approach to teaching policy-makers how to use history better. See also Khong,
Analogies at war, pp. 254–63.
16
David Houghton, US foreign policy and the Iran hostage crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp.
157–65, also provides a convincing refutation of the analogies as ‘ex-post justification’ argument. See also Alex
Hybel, Power over rationality: the Bush administration and the Gulf crisis (Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 1993). Houghton’s analysis of how the Carter administration relied on the Entebbe analogy—
1740
The above findings about the pitfalls and pathologies associated with analogical
reasoning in international relations allow us to converge on a set of proscriptions
that conform at the very least to the ‘do no harm’ policy Zeitgeist of this special
issue; we may hope that these proscriptions can also steer policy-makers in the
right direction. Some may argue that, given the poor record of how policy-makers
have used history, one should avoid trying to learn from history altogether.
However, as the historical record also shows, policy-makers will continue to draw
lessons from history as they confront new challenges. It may not be the only thing
they do, but it will be one of the main things they will do. US Secretary of State
Dean Rusk’s explanation of why he and others (such as Madeleine Albright, in the
example cited above) find themselves resorting to the lessons of history is persua-
sive: ‘One must always think about historical precedents—we are all shaped by
the experiences through which we have lived.’17
If it is hard to escape from thinking about historical precedents, especially the
experiences we have lived through, and if such a mode of thinking is strewn with
risks, it behoves us to identify a set of proscriptions capable of mitigating the
worst excesses of analogical reasoning in foreign affairs. I now turn to elaborate
on the four proscriptions introduced earlier.
Proscription 1. Studies of analogical decision-making suggest that the riskiest step in
the process is the initial selection of the relevant historical parallel. As the Albright
example suggests, it is inevitable that we will find some analogies more salient than
others, but the key ‘how not to’ point here is to resist taking the most evocative,
vivid or ‘best fit’ (on first glance) analogy as the final one. This is easier said than
done.
Proscription 2. Related to the first proscription is the second: do not neglect
differences between the two events or entities being compared. Since analogical
reasoning involves highlighting the similarities between two different events or
entities, the differences should always be acknowledged explicitly. Sophisticated
users of historical analogies will often explicitly acknowledge the differences,
although they almost always claim that in the final analysis, the parallels trump
the differences and that is why their analogy is valid. This is acceptable in so far as
the differences are specifically set out; thus ‘forewarned’, it is up to the consumer
or audience to make the judgement call about the validity of the analogy.
Proscription 3. The third proscription is not to dismiss alternative or counter-analo-
gies advanced by others in the decision-making group. In most cases of collective
decision-making, even those where a particular analogy dominates the discussion,
alternative analogies are likely to be introduced by other decision-makers. These
analogies provide an alternative take to that suggested by the dominant analogy
of the stakes involved in or the chances of success of the prescribed policy. It
where Israeli commandos successfully rescued 102 Israelis held hostage by armed militants at Entebbe airport,
Uganda, in 1976—in assessing US options on rescuing Americans held hostage in the US embassy in Tehran
in 1979 provides an insightful refutation of the analogies as ‘ex-post justification’ argument: Houghton, US
foreign policy and the Iran hostage crisis, pp. 82–7, 164–5.
17
Cited in Khong, Analogies at war, p. 182.
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Yuen Foong Khong
would be prudent to give these analogies their ‘day in court’. In fact, this is where
there is room for some cognitive creativity in the policy process. Consideration
of alternative interpretations introduces the potential for learning. Policy-makers
can reconsider their assessment of the stakes or probability of success by incorpo-
rating the perspectives provided by alternative analogies.
Proscription 4. Related to the third proscription is the fourth and final one: do not
shy away from testing the assessments and prognostications provided by different
analogies. This is akin to asking the question: ‘What are the observable implica-
tions of your analogy?’18 As President Lyndon Johnson was about to make his final
decision on whether to intervene in Vietnam, Under-Secretary of State George
Ball pleaded with him to ‘test’ the prognostications provided by two competing
‘lessons of history’: the ‘US can win’ argument, supported by the Korean and
Munich analogies, and the ‘US will lose’ expectation, supported by Ball’s analogy
with France in 1954. Ball’s suggested test was to commit 100,000 American troops
to fight the Vietnamese communists operating in the South for a ‘trial period’ of
three months (in 1965).19 If President Johnson had conducted that ‘test’, he would
have most probably established that the United States could not win, which in
turn might have reinforced his personal doubts about intervening in Vietnam.
The above ‘don’ts’ may also be expressed as prescriptions or ‘dos’: think of
analogies other than the first one that comes to mind; be attuned to differences
and how they may invalidate the analogy; entertain alternative analogies advanced
by others; and ‘test’ the predictions of your analogy against evolving realities.
Decision-makers who heed these injunctions will be better equipped to interro-
gate those bent on using analogies to prop up their own prejudices, discern good
from bad use, and in so doing protect themselves from ‘extremely wrong ways of
doing things’.20
Historical analogies and US–China relations

Having identified and elaborated on the four pertinent proscriptions, we can
now proceed to examine the extent to which they inform the way in which the
‘lessons of the past’ have been used to make sense of contemporary US–China
relations. We focus on the lessons drawn by US and other western policy-makers
for two reasons. First, available studies of the impact of historical analogies on
policy-making focus overwhelmingly on US foreign policy cases. This can be
explained by the country’s superpower status: it has global interests to protect,
and that necessitates its intervention in numerous foreign crises (not always for
the better). Second, the availability of declassified documents (25 years after the
event) about such decisions allows the analyst to investigate more rigorously the
role of analogies relative to that of other causal factors. In so far as my ‘how
18
Gary King, Robert O. Keohane and Sidney Verba, Designing social inquiry: scientific inference in qualitative research
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 19, 28–9.
19
Khong, Analogies at war, pp. 248–9.
20
The phrase in quotation marks is taken from the editors’ introduction to this issue.
1742
not tos’ are drawn from the pathologies identified by these US-centric studies, it
makes sense for us to focus on contemporary US usage of the Cold War analogy.
However, in the analysis that follows, I will devote substantial attention to one
non-American perspective (Alan Dupont’s) that happens to be among the most
detailed and incisive articulations of the analogy.21
Four historical analogies feature in the contemporary debate about the meaning,
stakes and policy implications of China’s rise for the United States, its allies and
the rest of the world.22 They are Athens–Sparta, the First World War, Munich and
the Second World War, and the Cold War. Of the four analogies, the Cold War
analogy is the one invoked most often. This does not come as a surprise for those
who have relied on cognitive psychological insights to understand how policy-
makers choose their analogies. The Cold War analogy happens to be the most
‘available’ and ‘representative’ analogy of the four.23 By ‘available’ I refer to the
ease with which the episode or historical event can be recalled—events closer in
time or that are especially vivid will be more readily available. This is akin to how
the ‘last war’ exercises a special hold on generals planning for the next one. In terms
of vividness, evocativeness and temporal closeness, what I will term ‘Cold War I’
would be especially ‘available’—it pitted two superpowers against each another
and was not so long ago—for those in search of a historical parallel to make sense
of the US–China competition today. ‘Representativeness’ refers to the assessment
of ‘fit’ between the incoming stimuli (say, deteriorating relations between the US
and China) and the repertoire of historical analogues in our memory. Cold War I
would be strongly representative for those who see today’s US–China competition
as an instance of the US ‘balancing’ against or preventing communist expansionism.
That in the name of the latter the United States fought two land wars in Asia—in
Korea and Vietnam—further reinforces the geographic representativeness of Cold
War I in relation to the challenge posed by China to America today. Going by the
‘availability’ and ‘representativeness’ heuristics, then, the Cold War analogy is hard
to beat. This analogy has its detractors, but of the four analogies in play, it is the
one most likely to emerge as the dominant analogy through which the United
States and its allies will view US–China relations in the years to come.24
While the availability and representativeness heuristics can shed light on why
the Cold War analogy is likely to be used more frequently by more policy-makers
21
Alan Dupont, New Cold War: de-risking US–China conflict, Hinrich Foundation, 2020, https://www.hinrich-
foundation.com/research/wp/us-china/new-cold-war/.
22
For a possible fifth analogy, see Kurt M. Campbell and Rush Doshi, ‘How America can shore up Asian order’,
Foreign Affairs, 12 Jan. 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-01-12/how-america-
can-shore-asian-order. On the basis of their reading of Henry Kissinger’s A world restored, Campbell and Doshi
argue in favour of a Concert of Europe-like response to deal with China’s rise, with the US leading coalitions
to balance China’s power in the context of a regional order with rules on trade, technology and transna-
tional issues accepted, by the region’s major powers, including China. Historians have questioned whether the
Concert ushered in a century of peace as claimed. More crucially, the analogy has yet to be widely discussed
or accepted and is therefore left out of our count.
23
See Khong, Analogies at war, pp. 35–7, and Houghton, US foreign policy, pp. 29–31, for discussions of the
psychological dimensions of the availability and representativeness heuristics.
24
See Joseph S. Nye, Jr, ‘How not to deal with a rising China: a US perspective’, International Affairs 98: 5, 2022,
pp. 1635–52; Joseph S. Nye, ‘With China, a “Cold War” analogy is lazy and dangerous’, New York Times, 2
Nov. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/opinion/biden-china-cold-war.html.
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Yuen Foong Khong
than the other three, we can also use the Factiva database to count, and establish
more rigorously, the relative frequency of use for all four analogies. Factiva, a
data analytics platform containing an international news database of over 30,000
sources in 26 languages, enables us to measure how frequently a select set of words
appear together in the sources covered by its database. Performing such a Factiva
analysis, covering the years 1990–2022, indicates that the historical parallel that
appears most frequently in conjunction with the term ‘US–China relations’ is the
Cold War, followed by the Second World War, Athens–Sparta/Thucydides Trap
and the First World War (see table 1).25 In terms of frequency of association with
the term ‘US–China relations’, the Cold War beats the Second World War, the
Thucydides Trap and the First World War by multiples of 3.6, 16 and 29 respec-
tively. Comparing US–China relations today to the US–Soviet Cold War appears
to have captured the imaginations of those who have resorted to history to make
sense of the former. The top-ranking position of the Cold War analogy is robust:
substituting ‘US–China relations’ with terms such as ‘US–China rivalry’ (table 1,
right-hand side) or ‘US–China competition’ and replacing ‘Second World War’
with ‘the 1930s’ do not change the relative rankings. The Cold War analogy is
emerging as the dominant analogy for viewing contemporary US–China relations.
Table 1: Factiva frequency analysis of analogies used to interpret US–

China relations
Search terms US–China relations Rank US–China
rivalry
Athens and Sparta/ 157 3 44
Thucydides Trap
First World War 85 4 18
Second World War / Munich 684 2 129

Cold War 2,453 1 689
Notes: Factiva search and analysis performed on 2 July 2022. Date range: 1 Jan. 1990 to 26 March 2022. Legend:
Left-hand column: Factiva’s database indicates that there are 2,453 occasions in which the terms ‘Cold War’ and
‘US–China relations’ can be found in the same article/report, and 684 occasions where the terms ‘Second World
War and Munich’ (counted separately, summed = 684) and ‘US–China relations’ appear in the same source. Refer-
ences to the Cold War therefore exceed those to Second World War/Munich by a factor of 3.6 (2,453/684). Right-
hand column: Narrowing the search term to ‘US–China rivalry’ shows that the ranking remains unchanged; the
Cold War is associated with ‘US–China rivalry’ 5.3 times (689/129) more than ‘Second World War II/Munich’.
Note that the co-appearance of the search terms in a Factiva source does not always equate to the explicit use of
the analogy to describe US–China interactions; this may decrease the count for each of the analogies, but should
not change the ranking order of the analogies. See fn 25 for details on accessing the Factiva data base and analysis.
25
The author accessed the Factiva data base through his University’s subscription; the URL for the search terms
‘Cold War’ and ‘US–China relations’, for example, is https://global-factiva-com.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/ha/
default.aspx#./!?&_suid=165673492174805802218819798217, but will only be accessible to National University
of Singapore staff. Readers with access to Factiva can replicate the analysis using the specified search terms
and date range and obtain roughly similar results. See also notes in table 1. Because the database is a dynamic
one, small but immaterial differences may show up when the analysis is performed on a different date. Readers
without access to Factiva and who are interested in viewing screenshots of the author’s analysis are welcome
to contact him.
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The Factiva ranking of the Cold War analogy as the most frequently invoked
analogy is suggestive rather than conclusive. But for the purposes of this article,
it should suffice, because our initial task is to identify which historical analogies
are being invoked most frequently by those with policy influence. No claim need
be or is being made about how the Cold War analogy is actually shaping contem-
porary US or Chinese foreign policy. To make such a claim is neither necessary
nor possible. It is not necessary because our task is to select the most frequently
used—not the most impactful—analogies for interpreting contemporary US–
China relations, and to probe whether those using them show awareness of the
‘how not tos’ discussed above. We assume that the most frequently invoked analo-
gies will be among the top contenders in terms of policy impact. This assumption
is justified by previous studies showing that the analogies used most frequently in
public by officials have also tended to be invoked by the same or other officials in
decision-making contexts (such as US National Security Council meetings).26 It is
not possible because, in the absence of declassified documents minuting those delib-
erations (along the lines of the Lodge’s ‘Munich’ outburst cited at the beginning of
this article), we need to be cautious about claiming that the Cold War analogy is a
major factor shaping America’s or China’s policies, even though users of the Cold
War analogy tend to highlight the parallels—such as containment—between US
strategy towards the Soviet Union then and towards China today.
The Cold War analogy may be the most prominent and popular of the four,
but the existence of the other three analogies is interesting and significant for our
analysis because they offer different interpretations of what US–China rivalry is
about and what responses would be appropriate. Combined, these two factors—
the absence of a hegemonic analogy (so far) and the different takes provided by the
other plausible analogies—open up cognitive space for policy-makers and analysts
to heed our four proscriptions. Such cognitive space would be severely restricted
in a situation where there was one hegemonic analogy (for example, Munich) or
where even different analogies (for example, ‘the lessons of Korea’) suggested the
same policy direction (show resolve by going to war).
My discussion below will touch on the other three analogies as appropriate, but
the focus will be on the Cold War analogy. There are two reasons for this: first,
space limitations and the need for (some) depth of analysis preclude a thorough
examination of the other three analogies; second, the Cold War analogy seems to
be the analogy of choice for those with policy experience. This means that it will
have a higher chance of being invoked in decision-making contexts.
From Athens–Sparta to Cold War I and II

The Athens–Sparta analogy (or power transition theory)
Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War focused on the challenge posed by
the rising power to the position of the established power and how that struggle led
to war. In Thucydides’ famous words: ‘It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that
26
See Khong, Analogies at war, pp. 58–61.
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Yuen Foong Khong
this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.’27 Applied to contemporary US–
China relations, the analogy suggests that the issue is about a rising power (China)
threatening to displace a ruling one (the US), and how that makes war likely.28
Within this rising/established power context is also the issue of how entangling
alliances can lead the major antagonists to war. Sparta’s ally, Corinth, had serious
disputes with Corcyra (allied to Athens), and it was this conflict between two
minor players that forced Athens and Sparta to come to the defence of their allies,
lest they be seen as failing to protect them.
The Athens–Sparta case is seen by many political scientists as an illustrative case
of power transition theory.29 The most recent systemization of the theory is Graham
Allison’s Destined for war, in which he adduces and analyses 15 other power transition
cases and concludes that in 12 out of the 16 cases, the struggle ended in a hegemonic
war. Applied to the US–China situation today, the Athens–Sparta analogy and the
theory it illustrates posit that the strategic distrust between China and the US is a
result of power transition politics and that those structural tensions are likely to
drive the US and China towards a head-on collision. The latter is not inevitable
(contra Thucydides) but, given that 75 per cent of such contests end up in war, the
burden of proof is on those who argue that a peaceful transition is possible.30
First World War

The First World War analogy shares several elements with the Athens–Sparta
analogy. First, it also involves a power transition narrative, where a rising power,
Germany, striving for its place in the sun, is perceived by the established power,
Great Britain, as seeking to displace it. Second, this struggle for supremacy also
resulted in war. Third, quarrelling allies played a role in dragging the major antag-
onists into war. The role of prestige and credibility also looms large in driving the
latter to fight.31 In recent years, Kissinger has been perhaps the most prominent
practitioner who has invoked the First World War analogy. His use of the analogy
is interesting: he touches on all the above four elements, but also adds a techno-
logical edge to the contest, which in his view, makes ‘unrestrained competition’
between the United States and China even more dangerous. As Edward Luce put
it in the Financial Times, Kissinger ‘likened today to the period before the first
world war in which Britain and Germany were so ill-informed about each other’s
27
Cited in Graham T. Allison, Destined for war: can America and China escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), p. vii.
28
Allison, Destined for war, pp. xi–xx.
29
A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The war ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Robert
Gilpin, War and change in world politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
30
Although Allison provides justifications for his selection criteria, critics have questioned whether some of his
cases are about a rising power challenging an established one. See e.g. Arthur Waldron, ‘There is no Thucy-
dides trap’, SupChina, 12 June 2017, https://supchina.com/2017/06/12/no-thucydides-trap/.
31
Richard Rosecrance and Steven Miller, eds, The next great war: the roots of World War I and risk of US–China
conflict (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), brings together some of the best scholarly analyses of the parallels
and non-parallels of the First World War with the current trajectory of the US and China. See also Margaret
MacMillan’s perceptive take in ‘Which past is prologue? Heeding the right warnings from history’, Foreign
Affairs, 11 Aug. 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-08-11/history-which-past-
prologue. This article, however, emphasizes the way policy-makers, not scholars, are using the four analogies.
1746
aims that a seemingly unrelated incident—the assassination of an archduke ...
—triggered what at the time was the bloodiest war in history’. Kissinger weaves
into this First World War scenario the role of US and Chinese artificial intelli-
gence (AI) competition and capabilities, which to Kissinger introduces a ‘level of
uncertainty in the world within which permanent peace is very difficult to sustain’
unless the two superpowers are able to work out common understandings of ‘AI’s
strategic impact’ along the lines of ‘work done on nuclear weapons during the
first cold war’.32 Kissinger is thus warning against the apparent complacency and/
or ill-preparedness of the powers-that-were, and how that contributed to their
stumbling into war.33 This ‘stumbling into war’ notion has been recast by Chris-
topher Clark as the ‘sleepwalking’ syndrome, where the major European powers,
‘watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to reality’ sleepwalked into
the First World War. In contrast to Kissinger’s worry about the AI factor as the
potential powder keg, Clark points to the many flashpoints in contemporary Asia
that resemble those of pre-1914 Europe.34
Munich and the Second World War

The Munich analogy references the events of the 1930s in Europe. It casts the
spotlight on a dictatorial revisionist challenger—Hitler—with unappeasable
strategic wants; and the imperative of not giving in to the (territorial) demands of
such a revisionist power. John Bolton’s use of the analogy to criticize Washington’s
indifference to Chinese actions in the South China Sea provides a good example
of this line of argument: ‘In Washington today, these [South China Sea] disputes
appear distant, almost trivial, akin to Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 description of
Czechoslovakia as ‘a faraway country of which we know little’. Such lassitude
must give way, he asserts, to a strategic approach based on three key elements,
the most important of which ‘must be that the international waters around China
will not become Lake Beijing’.35 To achieve the latter, the United States will need
to confront China. The Philippine analyst Renato de Castro, writing about his
country’s search for President Rodrigo Duterte’s successor, has also argued that
‘We can’t afford another six years of appeasement [as per Duterte’s policies] ...
By appeasing, the Philippines accepts and faces greater vulnerability and a false
hope that Chinese appetite for further expansion in the South China Sea is sated
or diverted.’36 Bolton’s and de Castro’s uses of Munich and appeasement echo that
of Lodge cited at the beginning of this article.
32
Edward Luce, ‘US and China must heed Kissinger’s stark warnings’, Financial Times, 4 Nov. 2021, https://
www.ft.com/content/8dc78be5-aa5a-4ea0-9692-0641acf27042.
33
Luce, ‘US and China must heed Kissinger’s stark warnings’.
34
Christopher Clark, The sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914 (New York: HarperCollins, 2013); see also
Joseph S. Nye, Jr, ‘The China sleepwalking syndrome’, Project Syndicate, 4 Oct. 2021, https://www.project-
syndicate.org/commentary/sleepwalking-to-war-with-china-by-joseph-s-nye-2021-10.
35
John Bolton, ‘As China muscles into the Pacific, the US lacks a strategy’, Wall Street Journal, 11 Sept. 2012,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444273704577637560538194478.
36
Cited in Raul Dancel, ‘Is Bongbong Marcos another Manchurian candidate?’, Straits Times (Singapore), 29
Nov. 2021.
1747
Yuen Foong Khong
The lesson of Munich is to show the challenger the mailed fist now instead of
later; moreover, fighting now and putting the revisionist power in its place will
avoid a larger conflagration later (no Second World War). Users of the Munich
analogy focus on this connection between appeasement and the Second World
War. If only Neville Chamberlain had not appeased Hitler, the argument goes,
and had confronted him instead, the Second World War might have been avoided.
The main counterfactual assumption here is that if Chamberlain had been more
resolute at Munich, Hitler would have backed down. Gideon Rachman of the
Financial Times summarizes the issue well when he compares the policy thrusts of
Munich with that of First World War: when political leaders speak of ‘Munich’,
they are almost always advocating a tough response to aggression, which usually
justifies military action.37 By contrast, when they apply the lesson of ‘Sarajevo’
(First World War), they are warning against slithering into an undesirable conflict.38
The Cold War analogy

The Cold War analogy looks to the geopolitical competition between the United
States and the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1989 for parallels to the US–China contest
today. Because the Cold War—unlike, say, Munich—was such a protracted affair,
there are numerous parallels from which its users can draw, from structural neces-
sities occasioned by a bipolar international system to an ideological contest pitting
democracy against autocracy, to a conflict that remained ‘cold’ because of nuclear
weapons. Instead of providing a summary of these parallels and how they apply to
US–China relations, I will investigate concrete instances of how the analogy has
been used or attacked by decision-makers and analysts in recent years.
‘Did Cold War II break out ... while no one was watching?’ asked Walter
Russell Mead in response to Vice-President Mike Pence’s 2018 speech at the
Hudson Institute, which declared ‘an end to a 40-year period of US strategic
engagement with China’.39 Described by the New York Times as a ‘portent of [the]
New Cold War’, Pence’s speech castigated China for a litany of sins, ranging from
intellectual property theft to aggressive actions in the South China Sea to inter-
fering in US domestic politics. On the political–military front, Pence took the
view that ‘China wants nothing less than to push the United States of America
from the Western Pacific and attempt to prevent us from coming to the aid of our
allies’.40 As Dupont (on whom more below), one of Australia’s foremost strategic
thinkers, put it, the ‘twin themes of confrontation and containment are strikingly
evident throughout Pence’s speech’.41
37
Gideon Rachman, ‘Time to think more about Sarajevo, less about Munich’, Financial Times, 7 Jan. 2014,
https://www.ft.com/content/37adb544-749a-11e3-9125-00144feabdc0.
38
Rachman, ‘Time to think more about Sarajevo, less about Munich’.
39
Cited in James Curran, ‘Cool heads on a cold war’, The Australian, 23 Nov. 2018.
40
‘Vice president Mike Pence’s remarks on the administration’s policy toward China’, Hudson Institute, 4 Oct.
2018, https://www.hudson.org/events/1610-vice-president-mike-pence-s-remarks-on-the-administration-s-
policy-towards-china102018.
41
Dupont, New Cold War, p. 48.
1748
The same themes can also be found in Secretary of State Pompeo’s speech at
the Nixon Library in 2020:
The kind of engagement we have been pursuing has not brought the kind of change in
China that President Nixon hoped to induce ... The truth is that our policies—and those
of other free nations—resurrected China’s failing economy, only to see Beijing bite the
international hands that fed it.42
For Pompeo, it was time to create ‘a new grouping of like-minded nations—a

new alliance of democracies’ to confront China, for ‘if the free world doesn’t
change Communist China, Communist China will surely change us’.43 For those
familiar with the US debate about China in the 1990s, the issue was whether to
engage with or contain a rising China, and until the late 2000s, the ‘engagers’ had
the upper hand. Pence’s and Pompeo’s speeches, with their call for ending engage-
ment, imply that the time for confrontation and containment has arrived.
Although Pompeo was quick to say that ‘this isn’t about containment’, the
chorus of voices emanating from Trump officials about the imperative of jetti-
soning engagement, corralling allies to protect ‘our way of life’ and preventing
the further expansion of Chinese influence and power, do not seem that dissimilar
from George Kennan’s recommendations in his ‘X’ article for dealing with the
Soviet Union in the years after the Second World War.44 John Lewis Gaddis has
described the latter as ‘strategies of containment’. ‘Containment’, according to
Gaddis, was
the term generally used to characterize American policy toward the Soviet Union during
the postwar era ... the idea has been to prevent the Soviet Union from using the power
and position it won as a result of that conflict [the Second World War] to reshape the
postwar international order.45
As I will seek to show below, US worries about China’s intention and ability to
reshape the international order did not begin with the Trump administration. A
case can be made that US concerns about China grew serious with the George
W. Bush administration and that, had it not been for the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
it would have focused on confronting China as a strategic competitor, especially
after the EP-3 incident of March 2001. The incident, which seriously strained US–
China relations, involved the collision of a US Navy spy plane, the EP-3, with a
China J-8 interceptor jet in the South China Sea, resulting in death of the Chinese
pilot and the emergency landing of the damaged EP-3 on Chinese territory. The
EP-3 crew of 24 was detained for eleven days and were released only after the US
issued an apology of sorts; the dismantled EP-3 plane was returned to the US in
42
US Department of State, ‘Communist China and the free world’s future’, speech by Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo at Richard Nixon Presidential Library, 23 July 2020, https://2017-2021.state.gov/communist-china-
and-the-free-worlds-future-2/index.html.
43
US Department of State, ‘Communist China and the free world’s future’.
44
X [George F. Kennan], ‘The sources of Soviet conduct’, Foreign Affairs, July 1947.
45
John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of containment: a critical appraisal of postwar American national security policy (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 4. Gaddis’s identification of two variants of America’s postwar containment
strategy, one Kennan-inspired (asymmetrical containment), the other based on NSC-68 (symmetrical contain-
ment) is one of the lasting contributions of the work.
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Yuen Foong Khong
July. It is probably safer, however, to claim that a more coherent response to China
started with the Obama administration’s ‘pivot’ or ‘rebalancing’ to Asia.
The historian Niall Ferguson was among the first to call what he deems a spade
a spade: the kind of ideological, geopolitical and economic competition vis-à-vis
China that Trump officials are talking about resembles Cold War I: why not call
it Cold War II?46 A more cautious Henry Kissinger likened the tense state of US–
China relations in 2019 to the two powers finding themselves ‘at the foothills of a
Cold War’. Two years later, with a new (Biden) administration in place but with
US–China relations in no better shape, Kissinger was not averse to returning to
the Cold War spectre:
It’s [the serious strain in US–China relations] the biggest problem for America; it’s the
biggest problem for the world. Because if we can’t solve that, then the risk is that all over
the world a kind of cold war will develop between China and the United States.47
The most systematic elaboration of why the Cold War analogy is an apt
description of US–China competition today is probably Dupont’s report, New
Cold War: de-risking US–China conflict, which he wrote for the Hinrich Founda-
tion in 2020.48 Considered one of Australia’s leading strategic analysts, Dupont
has been an adviser to Australian ministers of defence and foreign affairs. He led
the team that wrote Australia’s 2013–2014 defence white paper and is the founder
and CEO of the Cognoscenti Group, a political and strategic risk consultancy.
His 86-page analysis of the relevance of the Cold War analogy and how one
can avoid a US–China military clash warrants analysis because it is probably the
most in-depth and intelligent discussion of the analogy available. Coming from
a respected Australian strategic thinker and practitioner, it is also imbued with a
salience and urgency that presage developments such as the revitalization of the
QUAD security dialogue and, even more interestingly, the advent of AUKUS
(see below).49
The underlying thesis of Dupont’s report is that
the linked US–China trade, technology and geopolitical conflicts have precipitated a new
Cold War. In an epoch-defining clash for global leadership, the world’s two major powers
are wrestling for strategic advantage in an increasingly bitter contest to determine which
of them will be the pre-eminent state of the 21st century.50
46
Niall Ferguson, ‘Cold War II’, Boston Globe, 11 March 2019, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2019/03/11/
cold-war/4EbxsJrCdgBbATFwoQkwOK/story.html. See also Niall Ferguson, ‘The new Cold War? It’s with
China and it has already begun’, New York Times, 2 Dec. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/opinion/
china-cold-war.html.
47
Vincent Ni, ‘Failure to improve US–China relations “risks cold war”, warns Kissinger’, Guardian, 1 May
2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/01/US-China-doomsday-threat-ramped-up-by-hi-
tech-advances-says-kissinger.
48
Dupont, New Cold War.
49
Whether it is measuring the region’s balance of power—as in the Lowy Institute’s Asia Power Index—or
using historical analogies to make sense of the nature of the ongoing US–China contest, Australia has a special
interest in getting it right so that it can position itself securely between the two superpowers. See Brendan
Taylor, ‘Is Australia’s Indo-Pacific strategy an illusion?’, International Affairs 96: 1, 2020, pp. 95–109.
50
Dupont, New Cold War, p. 4; see also John M. Owen, ‘Two emerging international orders? China and the
United States’, International Affairs 97: 5, 2021, pp. 1415–31.
1750
But what is Dupont’s understanding of the old Cold War? The US–Soviet
Cold War was, for Dupont,
essentially a confrontation between the two leading powers of the time ... to shape the
emerging international order and determine its rules. To defend the liberal international
system and its underlying values the Truman administration sought to contain the Soviet
Union, portraying its competition as an existential clash between ‘totalitarian regimes’ and
‘free people’.51
The above statement contains two of the three most salient parallels (for
Dupont) between Cold War I and the emerging Cold War between the US and
China today. First, it is a values-based struggle between ‘free peoples’ (led by the
US) and ‘autocratic regimes’ (led by China) for global leadership; and second,
confrontation and/or containment is the strategy for winning. Dupont’s belief
that confrontation/containment is key to the US Cold War strategy can be seen
from his sympathetic description of Mike Pence’s speech—which he considers
the Trump administration’s declaration of a Cold War with China—as one
where the ‘twin themes of confrontation and containment are strikingly evident
throughout’.52 The third crucial parallel for Dupont is that a Cold War entails a
‘whole-of-government’ approach to confronting and containing the adversary—
the Soviet Union then, China now—where the United States uses its economic,
military, technological, political and cultural strengths in a coherent and purposeful
way to retard the growth and extension of the adversary’s influence and power.53
His emphasis on these parallels between Cold War I and II notwithstanding,
Dupont acknowledges that ‘some historians maintain that invoking the spectre of
a Cold War is dangerously misleading because the circumstances confronting the
US in its confrontation with China are entirely different from those of the late
1940s’. But Dupont insists that ‘the deniers are wrong’. They are wrong because
‘this is no ordinary dispute ... Trade, tech and geopolitical disputes are metas-
tasizing into a wider, more serious confrontation between the US and China’.54
Toward the end of the report, Dupont comes up with recommendations to
‘de-risk’ a US–China Cold War confrontation. Among these recommendations
are the imperative of protecting democratic values, the need for the United States
to maintain its military edge, and managing the decoupling of their economies to
minimize disruption.55 The first two of these recommendations are reminiscent of
a containment strategy, although Dupont does not quite use the term. However,
he becomes more explicit later in commenting on the utility of the QUAD, as
part of a system of ‘more diverse and flexible strategic relationships ... needed to
help constrain China’s hegemonic ambitions’.56
Thomas Christensen probably qualifies as one of the ‘deniers’ whom Dupont
thinks is mistaken. In contrast to Dupont’s broad-brush notion of what Cold War
51
Dupont, New Cold War, p. 48 (emphasis added).
52
53
54
Dupont, New Cold War, pp. 41–2.
55
56
Dupont, New Cold War, pp. 6, 57.
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Yuen Foong Khong
I was about, Christensen takes a more granular view of the Cold War that leads
him to reject the analogy. He acknowledges that ‘[Mike] Pompeo’s ... [2020]
speech basically declared a Cold War with China, but that does not mean one will
happen’.57 The new Cold War has not happened, and will not happen because, for
Christensen, the ‘essential’ elements of the US–Soviet Cold War—involving ‘a
global ideological struggle for the hearts and minds of third countries’, the division
of the world into separate economic blocs and the existence of ‘opposing alliance
systems’ that fuelled the proxy wars of the era—are absent in the US–China case.58
Situated somewhere between Dupont and Christensen is Kurt Campbell and
Jake Sullivan’s take on the relevance of the Cold War analogy.59 Their views,
articulated in a 2019 Foreign Affairs article—before they became the Biden admin-
istration’s head of Asian affairs and National Security Advisor respectively—have
special resonance not only because they are now in positions where they can act
on their beliefs, but also because they seem to show deep awareness of the perils
of analogical reasoning. The basic argument of their piece is encapsulated in the
title, that the US can ‘both challenge and coexist with China’. What we are inter-
ested in here is how Cold War I helps their thinking about the latter. They begin
by explaining why Cold War I has intuitive plausibility in making sense of the
US–China rivalry:
Given the current hazy discourse on [the US–China] competition, there is an understand-
able temptation to reach back to the only great-power competition Americans remember
to make sense of the present one: the Cold War. The analogy has intuitive appeal. Like
the Soviet Union, China is a continent-sized competitor with a repressive political system
and big ambitions. The challenge it poses is global and lasting, and meeting that challenge
will require the kind of domestic mobilization that the United States pursued in the 1950s
and 1960s.
But the analogy is ill fitting. China today is a peer competitor that is more formidable
economically, more sophisticated diplomatically, and more flexible ideologically than the
Soviet Union ever was. And unlike the Soviet Union, China is deeply integrated into
the world and intertwined with the US economy. The Cold War truly was an existen-
tial struggle. The US strategy of containment was built on the prediction that the Soviet
Union would one day crumble under its own weight—that it contained ‘the seeds of its
own decay,’ as George Kennan, the diplomat who first laid out the strategy, declared with
conviction.60
Campbell and Sullivan argue that ‘it would be misguided to build a neo-contain-
ment policy on the premise that the current Chinese state will eventually collapse’.61
57
Thomas J. Christensen, ‘There will not be a new Cold War: the limits of US–Chinese competition’, Foreign
Affairs, 24 March 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-03-24/there-will-not-be-
new-cold-war. Christensen is a leading scholar of China, and a former deputy assistant Secretary of State for
East Asian and Pacific Affairs (2006–8).
58
Christensen, ‘There will not be a new Cold War’.
59
Kurt M. Campbell and Jake Sullivan, ‘Competition without catastrophe: how America can both challenge
and coexist with China’, Foreign Affairs, Sept.–Oct. 2019, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/
competition-with-china-without-catastrophe.
60
Campbell and Sullivan, ‘Competition without catastrophe’.
61
1752
Despite viewing the analogy as ‘ill fitting’, Campbell and Sullivan did not shy
away from drawing lessons from Cold War I to deal with the contemporary US–
China geopolitical competition. They claim that it is possible to ‘heed the lessons
of the Cold War’ and at the same time reject ‘that idea that its logic still applies’.
They then proceed to argue in favour of Cold War I modalities of coexistence
such as an ‘incidents at sea’ agreement, arms control agreements, and codes of
conduct extending beyond land and sea to include space and cyberspace.62 To
be sure, the bulk of Campbell and Sullivan’s analysis focuses on how China is a
different and more formidable competitor than the Soviet Union across a variety
of domains, including the military, economics, ideology and technology.
What seems to get less attention in Campbell and Sullivan’s and Christensen’s
analyses (of why the Cold War analogy is not appropriate) is whether the US
approach to China in the past decade amounts to a policy of containment. The
modalities of coexistence and deterrence favoured by Campbell and Sullivan are
drawn from Cold War I, a period when the United States was pursuing a policy
of containment.63 The three conditions that Christensen claims are absent from
today’s US–China competition—a global ideological struggle for the hearts and
minds of third countries, the division of the world into separate economic blocs,
and the existence of ‘opposing alliance systems’ that fuelled the proxy wars of the
era—have become more apparent in the past decade, even before the invasion of
Ukraine by Russia in February 2022.
The increasingly shrill voices of the global South—from Singapore to Indonesia
to Africa—about not wanting to choose between the United States and China
suggest an ongoing ideological struggle for the hearts and minds (and perhaps
more importantly, pockets) of third countries. Which model—the Washington or
Beijing consensus—is more likely to meet the economic and security needs of the
global South? The economic decoupling of the two superpowers is also gathering
pace. Despite their deep economic interdependence and supply chain connected-
ness, economic and digital bifurcation is becoming a distinct possibility.
Christensen is right in his observation that there is no sign of two ‘opposing
alliance systems’ like NATO and the Warsaw Pact, but it is not clear why this
should be a defining characteristic of a Cold War. The US is repairing and reinvig-
orating alliance relationships damaged during the Trump years, and the Biden
administration is very adept at marshalling allies to counter China. The revitaliza-
tion of the QUAD and the advent of AUKUS provide strong indications of the
invigoration and deployment of such democratic alliances.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has also brought together
Europe’s democracies in ways unimaginable before that event. Russia’s actions
have heightened NATO’s strategic fears so greatly that it has impelled member
states and even non-members in the neighbourhood to unite and confront Russia.
Finland and Sweden felt sufficiently threatened by Russia that they applied to join,
and have been accepted by NATO. China has refused to condemn the invasion
62
63
Gaddis, Strategies of containment, p. 4.
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Yuen Foong Khong
and is perceived by the western democratic bloc as a ‘strategic challenge’ aligned
with Russia, thus joining an autocratic bloc that also includes Iran and North
Korea. The ‘West’s’ response to the Russian invasion—providing military and
economic assistance to Ukraine and imposing economic and financial sanctions
of unprecedented severity against the Russian state and its political–economic
elites, shows how formidable a united West can be. Regardless of the outcome
of the Ukraine conflict, China and Russia, perhaps together with members of
the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), will be thinking hard about
constructing an ‘opposing system’ that will insulate them from the economic,
political and military vulnerabilities that Russia is experiencing as a consequence
of its military aggression in Ukraine. A two-bloc system, in other words, may be
in the offing.
China’s leaders have, of course, been criticizing the US for its ‘Cold War’
mentality and its policy manifestation of ‘preventing China’s rise’.64 Chinese
scholars portray it as a similar strategy to that of containing the Soviet Union
during the Cold War.65 But those looking for signs of containment should look
back further, to the Obama administration’s ‘rebalancing’ to Asia. President Barack
Obama refrained from using Cold War terminology, but US actions during his
tenure do suggest the beginnings of a containment posture, or, to use Campbell
and Sullivan’s term, one of neo-containment.
The Obama administration’s pivot to Asia, on first glance, does not equate
to a ‘contain China’ policy. It was a sensible recalibration of US strategy after
a decade of extreme focus on the Middle East and fighting in Afghanistan and
Iraq. In so far as the world’s centre of economic gravity is shifting east, it is only
natural that the United States would want to reapportion some of its military
and economic might in that direction. It is the US response to the advent of the
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that reveals US concerns about the
expansion of Chinese power and influence. It is significant that it was the Obama
administration that sought to prevent Britain from joining the AIIB. When
British Prime Minister David Cameron and his Chancellor of the Exchequer
George Osborne rebuffed the United States and joined the AIIB (thus opening
the floodgates for the other EU members to join), Obama’s officials did not hold
back from describing the British choice as being too accommodating to China—
just one step short of ‘appeasement’. President Obama also did not mince his
words when it came to why the TPP was important: it was to prevent China from
making the rules of the international economic game. That prerogative should be
the monopoly of the United States, not to be shared with rising powers such as
China. Similarly, the US saw the BRI as an economic–strategic threat, criticizing
it as ‘debt trap diplomacy’ and countering it by working with allies such as Japan
and India to come up with alternative ‘high-quality’ infrastructure schemes for
developing countries.
64
See Dupont, New Cold War, pp. 47–8.
65
See Dupont, New Cold War, pp. 4, 10, 14, 48.
1754
If it was the Obama administration that began the overt resistance to the
expansion of Chinese power and influence, the Trump administration ramped
things up several notches through the trade war, the Huawei 5-G ban and the
expansion of the remit of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United
States (CFIUS). A key moment was the administration’s coming to closure on
the issue of China’s political liberalization. China’s 30-year integration into the
US-led world capitalist economy has failed to make it more liberal politically;
instead, it has reinforced autocratic rule in the person of President Xi Jinping.
A richer, militarily stronger and persistently autocratic China poses a threat to
America’s predominant position in Asia. A series of US strategy documents—
beginning with the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States of America,
continuing with the 2018 National Defense Strategy and extending to the 2020 US
Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China—flesh out the nature of this threat
and the appropriate US response.66
A key similarity between Cold War I and Cold War II, in other words, is that
the United States is adopting a policy of containment against its adversaries. Those
who argue that the US is not pursuing, and cannot pursue, a containment policy
because there are few takers may have been right in the past, but in recent years, the
emergence of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategies, the QUAD and AUKUS,
in combination with America’s traditional bilateral alliances in Asia and elsewhere,
indicate that there are more takers than one might have imagined. This is in part a
result of China’s assertive policies in Asia, which have not endeared it to many of its
neighbours. In recent essays surveying US policy towards China from Obama to Joe
Biden in late 2021, both John Lewis Gaddis and John Mearsheimer see containment
as the operative policy and, in that sense, reminiscent of Cold War I.67
The popularity of the Cold War analogy is not limited to US thinkers and
policy-makers. The analogy is also the dominant schema used by those outside
America to characterize the nature of the US–China rivalry and to assess its impli-
cations for their countries or regions. The examples below of how Singaporean,
Korean, Kenyan, French, Indonesian and Australian policy-makers have used
the analogy are instructive in two senses: first, they show how widespread the
usage is; second, unlike the way in which Kissinger, Dupont, and Campbell and
Sullivan have used analogies, they show an almost exclusive focus on the Cold War
analogy, paying scant attention to any of the other plausible analogies discussed
in this article. Tommy Koh, Singapore’s Ambassador-at-Large and former Ambas-
sador to the United States, predicted in the aftermath of the 2020 US presidential
election that ‘Mr Biden ... [would] . . .stop the so-called new Cold War which
66
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf;
https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf; and
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/articles/united-states-strategic-approach-to-the-peoples-republic-of-
china/.
67
Hal Brands and John Lewis Gaddis, ‘The new cold war: America, China, and the echoes of history’, Foreign
Affairs, Nov.–Dec. 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-10-19/new-cold-war;
John Mearsheimer, ‘The inevitable rivalry: America, China, and the tragedy of great-power politics’, Foreign
Affairs, Nov.–Dec. 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-10-19/inevitable-rivalry-cold-
war.
1755
Yuen Foong Khong
Mr Trump has launched against China’.68 Koh’s belief that Trump had already
started a new Cold War against China was based on his understanding of the ‘new
consensus in the US’ about China being ‘a strategic competitor’. His personal
friendship with Biden, dating back to the 1980s, however, led him to suggest that
in the Biden administration, ‘Mr Trump’s Cold War [will] ... be replaced by a
Cold Peace’. For Koh,
A cold war is a contest between two adversaries. The competition is waged on many fronts,
including trade, technology, military, ideology, culture and diplomacy. In contrast, a cold
peace is a situation in which the two countries do not regard each other as adversaries.
They are at peace with each other but there is no warmth in the relationship.69
The first high-level meeting between the new Biden administration and China
might be a good test of Koh’s Cold Peace prediction. The description by the
BBC’s Barbara Plett-Usher of the US–China meeting at Anchorage, Alaska, in
March 2021, as ‘unusually undiplomatic’, suggests the mood was more antago-
nistic than peaceful.70 FranÇois Godement, perhaps France’s most distinguished
China specialist and consultant to the policy planning staff of the French foreign
ministry, likened it to the ‘first round of a boxing match’.71 Godement pointed
to the emerging constellation of blocs at the ringside of this match and expressed
concern that they might jump into the ring. His analysis of how the United States,
Asia and Europe were coming into alignment to counter China in the Indo-Pacific
was reminiscent of Cold War coalitions, but he made no mention of the Cold War
until the final sentence of his blog post: ‘The lines of a new Cold War, the term
which we loath [sic] and Chinese leaders fear, are now forming under our eyes.’72
South Korea’s former Ambassador to the Philippines and Vietnam, Lee Hyuk,
was less restrained in invoking Cold War imagery in his analysis of the same
meeting. He saw the ‘bitter war of words’ at the Alaska meeting as portending
‘the rough waves of the new Cold War between the US and China with profound
implications for this region and the world’.73 Comparing how the ASEAN
countries and South Korea might navigate the waters, Lee pointed to ASEAN’s
possession of ‘convening power’ (through its many regional confidence-building
mechanisms, such as the ASEAN Regional Forum), which facilitates its strategy
of maintaining ‘a careful balancing act between the two powers’. South Korea, he
worried, did not possess such advantages; consequently,
the US–China confrontation is an even more difficult challenge for Korea. The new Cold
War between the US and China is unfolding on every front, and the dynamics of their
68
Tommy Koh, ‘Biden’s foreign policy: a prognosis’, Straits Times (Singapore), 17 Nov. 2020, https://www.
straitstimes.com/opinion/bidens-foreign-policy-a-prognosis.
69
Koh, ‘Biden’s foreign policy’, Straits Times (Singapore),
70
‘US and China trade angry words at high-level Alaska talks’, BBC News, 19 March 2021, https://www.bbc.
com/news/world-us-canada-56452471.
71
Francois Godement, From the Indo-Pacific to Alaska: the US–China Great Game, Institut Montaigne, 19 March
2021, https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/blog/indo-pacific-alaska-us-china-great-game.
72
Godemont, From the Indo-Pacific to Alaska.
73
Lee Hyuk, ‘ASEAN and Korea amid mounting US–China rivalry’, Korea Herald, 14 April 2021, http://www.
koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20210409000655.
1756
competition over security, economy, political systems and values all carry deep implica-
tions for Korea.74
The responses of Indonesian and Australian policy-makers to AUKUS, the

US–UK plan to share nuclear submarine technology with Australia (after the
latter jettisoned its earlier deal with France) have also been laden with Cold War
imagery. For Marsetio, a former chief of staff of the Indonesian navy, AUKUS
has ‘sparked concern over an arms race and the return of the Cold War era in the
Indo-Pacific’.75 Emphasizing Indonesia’s concerns about Australia’s power projec-
tion in the region, and citing Chinese criticisms of how AUKUS might ‘ignite
an arms race in the region’ and bring back the Cold War, Marsetio concluded his
opinion piece by predicting that AUKUS will exacerbate tensions in the South
China Sea, where the ‘world’s major powers face one another and the world is
bracing for a new Cold War’. Indonesia and ASEAN, according to him, should
adopt a stronger stance to avert the regional arms race and tensions that are rising
towards a dangerous level.76
The Australian view is, unsurprisingly, more positive. Peter Varghese, Austra-
lia’s former foreign secretary, argued that ‘it [AUKUS] makes sense as part of
Australia’s plan B for China. That is, the plan we need if we find ourselves in a
full-blown Cold War 2 ... Some would say that is precisely where we are.’ To
the latter, especially those not averse to engaging in such a full-blown Cold War,
Varghese warned:
I hope they understand what a new cold war means. It means a radical reordering of the
global economy to decouple it from China, which is the largest trading partner of most
countries in the world. It means a strategic fault line down the middle of the Indo-Pacific,
with south-east Asia—our strategic hinterland—uncomfortably trying to straddle the
strategic fence.
Varghese’s transcendent worry for Australia was that ‘the risk today is that rather
than fix our policy around how best to stop short of a new cold war, we become
its cheerleader’.77
Almost a year later, Peter Kagwanja provided an African perspective on US–
China relations. Kagwanja, a thought leader in the African Union and a prominent
Kenyan foreign policy adviser, described the tensions and hostility between the
United States and China as characteristic of ‘the New Cold War’.78 He believed
that ‘like the Soviet Union before it, China is facing a new policy of containment,
giving rise to a new Cold War’. Africa should avoid getting ‘sucked into the new
74
Lee, ‘ASEAN and Korea’.
75
Marsetio, ‘AUKUS and the potential for an Indo-Pacific Cold War’, Jakarta Post, 23 Sept. 2021, https://www.
thejakartapost.com/academia/2021/09/22/aukus-and-the-potential-for-an-indo-pacific-cold-war.html.
76
Marsetio, ‘AUKUS and the potential for an Indo-Pacific Cold War’.
77
Peter Varghese, ‘AUKUS is a good plan B for China. But let’s not bring on Cold War 2.0’, Australian Financial
Review, 22 Sept. 2021, https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/aukus-is-a-good-plan-b-for-china-but-
let-s-not-bring-on-cold-war-2-0-20210920-p58ta8.
78
Peter Kagwanja, ‘What next for Africa as US–China enter New Cold War era?’, The Citizen, 21 Feb. 2022,
https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/oped/what-next-for-africa-as-US–China-enter-new-cold-war-
era--3724490.
1757
Yuen Foong Khong
Cold War’ by opposing ‘new cold war alliances and aggressive power politics’.
Rejecting attempts by the United States to reassert its hegemony, or Europe’s inter-
est in resurrecting a post-Napoleonic ‘Concert of Europe’ arrangement to secure
global order, Kagwanja argued that Africa should align firmly ‘with peace and
development’ by forging ‘a new policy to lift the mass of its poor from poverty’.
His emphasis on economic development led him to argue, tacitly if not explicitly,
that Africa should align itself with China, given what China has done in Africa and
its new programmes such as the Global Development Initiative (to provide public
goods) and ‘Initiative of Peaceful Development in the Horn of Africa’.79
Common to all the above non-American views of US–China relations is a
recognition, to use Francois Godement’s words, that ‘the lines of a new Cold war
... are now forming under our eyes’.80 With the exceptions of Koh, who contrasts
a less adversarial Biden era ‘Cold Peace’ with (Trump’s) Cold War, and Kagwanja,
who touches on ‘a post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe’ only to reject it as a way
forward, users of the Cold War analogy do not allude to alternative historical
parallels. This differentiates them from some of the US/Australian users.
The four proscriptions and the Cold War II analogy

Having shown how widespread the Cold War analogy is, we can now return to
our examination of how US (and Australian) policy-makers have used or reacted
to the Cold War analogy. What does it tell us about our four ‘how not tos’?
It suggests that the majority of our ‘how not tos’ seem to have permeated the
consciousness of the users. That is reassuring. The Cold War analogy is being used
in a more cautious and sophisticated manner than scholars of analogical reasoning
would have expected. To be sure, the more exacting prescriptions—testing its
observable implications—remain unfulfilled, but our observations about the way
the analogy is being deployed leave some room for optimism.
Proscription 1: The first proscription, of not being beholden to one dominant
analogy, seems to be heeded in two ways. First, those who find the Cold War
analogy applicable have not restricted themselves to this one analogy; they have
brought in other analogies to complicate the picture. Thus, while Kissinger found
the Cold War analogy evocative, he also saw the necessity of bringing in the First
World War analogy to emphasize the possibility of a different outcome. The Cold
War may have been described as a ‘long peace’ by some historians, but intro-
ducing the First World War analogy alongside it warns against sleepwalking into
a conflict or assuming that the conflict will be short.
Dupont articulates a similar warning when he brings in the Athens–Sparta
analogy or Thucydides Trap theory to qualify his Cold War I interpretation
of the US–China contest. He agrees with Graham Allison’s interpretation of
Thucydides, that the Athens–Sparta conflict was a power transition war, with a
challenger and established power fighting it out to determine who would become
79
Kagwanja, ‘What next for Africa?’.
80
Godement, From the Indo-Pacific to Alaska.
1758
or remain number one.81 For Dupont, Cold War I and Cold War II (US–China)
are power transition contests, and the implication here is that while Cold War I
ended peacefully, Cold War II may not: it may follow the path of the historical
norm (75 per cent of the time) in such contests, that is, end in a war for hegemony.
The second way in which the proscription seems to be heeded has to do with
the ideational context: it is one in which there are not just one or two dominant
analogies in play. We have been able to identify at least four analogies occupying
the debating and deliberative space. This situation makes it more difficult for
those wedded to one analogy to bulldoze their way through with their ‘received’
analogy—as Lodge did with Munich in 1965—in decision-making contexts.
Proscription 2: Do the users of the Cold War analogy acknowledge differences
between the US–Soviet and US–Chinese rivalry? The answer is yes, although
their bottom line tends to be that those differences do not invalidate the analogy.
Niall Ferguson is probably one of the few who sees such strong parallels between
Cold War I and Cold War II that he does not feel a need to deal with the differ-
ences. Dupont, and Campbell and Sullivan, are much more upfront about the
differences. For Dupont, the heart of the US–China contest is economic, with
China being a formidable competitor, and this distinguishes it from the US–Soviet
case.82 Both Dupont and Campbell–Sullivan also emphasize the economic inter-
dependence between the United States and China as another key differentiator.
What the economic difference implies is that first, if Cold War II emerges, it might
remain ‘cold’, that is, with no direct military clash between the United States and
China. That is what the economic interdependence logic implies. The desire to
continue reaping the gains from trade and investment should prevent China and
the US from going over the brink; in this sense, economic interdependence serves
as an additional restraint (supplementing nuclear deterrence) on the two sides.
Second, the differences also suggest that in Cold War II, China, unlike the
Soviet Union, has what it takes to give the United States the ‘stiff competition’
about which Biden has spoken.83 The US cannot and should not assume that it
will ‘win’ Cold War II as it did Cold War I. For Campbell and Sullivan, the differ-
ences make the analogy ill-fitting, but not ill-fitting enough to discourage them
from drawing lessons from the US–Soviet experience. Only Christensen takes the
position that the differences invalidate the analogy.
Proscription 3: As the preceding discussion indicates, both Kissinger and Dupont
bring other analogies into their analysis. Interestingly, this effectively makes
things more open-ended. Combining the Cold War and First World War analo-
gies suggests that while the US–China competition may remain cold, it may also
turn hot, especially if policy-makers are oblivious to how a small spark can cause
a general conflagration. This use of two analogies is better than just using one (say,
81
Allison, Destined for war. Allison’s account of the Athens–Sparta conflict and his ‘data set’ of 16 cases have been
contested and critiqued by other scholars.
82
83
Vivian Salama and Gordon Lubold, ‘Biden says he sees China as “stiff competition”’, Wall Street Journal, 25
March 2021, https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/biden-press-conference-live-updates-analysis/card/ifirn5y-
jOObkp0pm2Lzv.
1759
Yuen Foong Khong
that of the Cold War) because it questions the assumption of those fixated on the
Cold War analogy that things will remain cold.
Dupont’s introduction of power transition theory has the same effect: as an
adherent of the Cold War analogy, he expects the US–China contest to remain
cold. To the extent that the US–China contest is also about a rising challenger
seeking to displace the established power, however, it becomes something more
ominous—it becomes susceptible to Thucydides’ Trap—and gives rise to a high
probability of a major war.
In addition to the four analogies we have discussed, it is worth noting that
a fifth analogy—reaching back to the Concert of Europe and focusing on how
Lord Castlereagh of Great Britain and Klemens von Metternich of Austria built
a lasting regional order between 1812 and 1822—was introduced recently by Kurt
Campbell and Josh Doshi. The lesson to be drawn from the analogy is the crucial
role of far-sighted diplomats working to achieve a balance of power and ‘an order
that the region’s states recognize as legitimate’.84 Space limitations prevent us from
discussing the merits of the analogy here, but it is as intriguing as it is novel, in
part because it emphasizes the role of human agency in international affairs, and in
part because Campbell and Doshi are two of the most senior Biden administration
officials charged with formulating America’s China/Asia policy.
Proscription 4: Do not shirk from ‘testing’ the implications of your favourite
analogy. There is no evidence of the users being aware of, or having any interest
in, testing the validity of their analogy. What would such testing have involved?
In the conclusion, I offer some pointers on this issue.
Conclusions
Existing policy trends—the extreme competition spoken of by Biden, and the
Chinese take that the US is not qualified to ‘speak to China from a position
of strength’85 (implying that China is equal in strength to the US) suggest that
Cold War I is likely to emerge as the dominant lens or analogy for interpreting
the nature and trajectory of the US–China geopolitical competition. Cold War
I—especially the US ‘grand strategy’ of confronting ‘strategic competitors’ and
containing the expansion of their power and influence—seems to capture many of
the contemporary twists and turns of the US–China relationship. Policy commu-
nities outside the US and China are also viewing the US–China competition
through a Cold War lens as they assess the implications for their countries.
Of the four main historical analogies on which policy-makers, analysts and
pundits are relying to make sense of the contemporary US–China rivalry, only the
Cold War analogy seems ‘reassuring’ in terms of the eventual outcome. Despite
intense competition featuring numerous crises, proxy wars and even a couple of
nuclear brinksmanship episodes, the United States and the Soviet Union did not
84
Campbell and Doshi, ‘How America can shore up Asian order’.
85
‘China says US cannot speak from “a position of strength”’, BBC News, 19 March 2021, https://www.bbc.
com/news/av/world-56456021.
1760
come to blows. The other three analogies—Athens–Sparta, the First World War
and Munich—are all associated with a logic that culminates in war. This does
not mean the Cold War analogy is a better analogy—in fact, excessive focus on
the ‘pulling back from the brink’ or peaceful change (with the implosion of the
‘evil empire’)—might lull policy-makers into the dangerous assumption that these
favourable outcomes will be replicated in US–China interactions. To be sure,
the fear of (nuclear) mutual assured destruction will continue to exert a strong
restraining role on both superpowers as it did on the United States and the Soviet
Union during the Cold War. But accidents, misperceptions and the perceived
importance of protecting one’s ‘way of life’ or prestige/credibility may result in
a direct military clash.
What dangers arise when and if the Cold War analogy emerges as the dominant
analogy for viewing US–China relations? The usual ones identified at the begin-
ning of this article: fixation on its relevance and an unquestioning acceptance of
its prognostications; ignoring differences between Cold War I and the present
situation; dismissal of alternative analogies; and unwillingness to ‘test’ the observ-
able implications or expectations of the analogy. Yet our ‘how not to’ exercise—
in which we have examined how a few influential analysts/practitioners have used
the Cold War analogy—suggest that they have managed to avoid some of the
worst excesses of using the Cold War analogy to interpret current events.
Advocates of the Cold War analogy such as Kissinger and Dupont are not
completely captivated by it. They acknowledge differences between Cold Wars
I and II, and they bring in other analogies—First World War (Kissinger) and
Athens–Sparta (Dupont)— to nuance or complicate their analyses. These other
analogies are helpful in that they create cognitive tension vis-à-vis the main (Cold
War I) analogy: the naive user of the latter might have assumed that Cold War
II will remain cold, but the First World War and Athens–Sparta analogies warn
against this assumption because in both cases, the outcome was a systemic war.
Similarly, proponents of the Cold War II scenario who assume that the outcome
of the US–China contest will resemble that of Cold War I—a victory for the
United States and the demise of the Chinese Communist Party—will also have
to contend with the arguments of analysts such as Christensen and Campbell–
Sullivan who emphasize the point that China is not the Soviet Union: the impli-
cation being that China is a much more formidable rival across the economic,
military and technological fronts. The users of the Cold War analogy, in other
words, seem to have heeded our first three ‘how not tos’ or proscriptions.
It remains true, however, that none of the users of the Cold War analogy have
considered ‘testing’ the analogy against future developments. If indeed the US–
China contest has marched beyond the foothills of a Cold War, what should the
world be seeing or not seeing? Can the spate of events in late 2021—the release of
Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou, the six-hour meeting between US National Security
Advisor Jake Sullivan and China politburo member Yang Jiechi in Zurich, Biden’s
reassurances to Xi Jinping about his ‘one China’ policy, Xi’s remarks about peaceful
reunification with Taiwan, and US–China cooperation to rein in climate change
1761
Yuen Foong Khong
at COP26— be seen as initial steps in dialling down the US–China rivalry? If
these developments were followed by other cooling measures, such as the lifting
of some US tariffs on Chinese exports and China’s heeding US requests not to
help Russia evade the economic and financial sanctions imposed by the West for
invading Ukraine, they might suggest to advocates of the Cold War analogy that
the two superpowers have managed to pull back from the brink of a Cold War.
Thinking about and answering these questions would constitute a good test of
the validity of the Cold War analogy. To be sure, this ‘do not shirk from testing
your favoured analogy’ stricture is probably the most demanding and exacting
of the four proscriptions, and it is not surprising that it tends to be ignored. This
makes the ‘how not to’ record on the use of the Cold War analogy rather mixed;
on balance, though, it would be fair to conclude that most of the proscriptions
seem to have been heeded. This may come as a pleasant surprise to the scholars
who have mainly documented poor and unsophisticated use of historical analogies
by policy-makers.
1762

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How not to learn from history

YUEN FOONG KHONG *

International Affairs 98: 5 (2022) 1737–1762

A pattern of failure in analogical reasoning in foreign affairs

Historical analogies and US–China relations

Table 1: Factiva frequency analysis of analogies used to interpret US–

Second World War / Munich 684 2 129

From Athens–Sparta to Cold War I and II

First World War

Munich and the Second World War

The Cold War analogy

For Pompeo, it was time to create ‘a new grouping of like-minded nations—a

The responses of Indonesian and Australian policy-makers to AUKUS, the

The four proscriptions and the Cold War II analogy

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