At the global level, Cold War II is a struggle between the incumbent superpower, the United States, and a rising challenger, China. And unless Washington adopts a less ambitious global strategy, the United States is doomed to lose Cold War II.

The reason is simple: America’s strategic objective — perpetual US military hegemony in East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East — is far too costly to achieve. In contrast, the goal shared by China and Russia — a multipolar world of great-power spheres of influence — is not only possible but probably inevitable. The Chinese dragon and the Russian bear can patiently wait until Uncle Sam exhausts himself from overextension and then goes home, just as he did when he abandoned Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. And the major beneficiary of America’s military overextension is likely to be its greatest rival — Beijing.

The sharpest figures in the Trump orbit appreciate this, and see the linkages between the various flashpoints. But the administration as a whole can’t resist the strategic hubris and haphazardness that have characterized many post-Cold War American governments — indeed, with the new Iran War, the Trumpians have displayed this tendency on overdrive. 

At last month’s Munich Security Conference, for example, America’s envoy to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, observed: “China could call Vladimir Putin and end this [Ukraine] war tomorrow and cut off his dual-purpose technologies that they’re selling.… You know, this war is being completely enabled by China.”

Whitaker was right. The People’s Republic has allowed both Russia and Iran to evade American and European sanctions by buying their oil, with the help of “shadow fleets” and transactions denominated in China’s currency, the yuan. In addition, Beijing has supplied the Islamic Republic with components used in its devastatingly effective (and remarkably cheap) Shahed drones. The Chinese are reportedly negotiating to provide Iran with antiship missiles and have likewise transferred dual-use technology, which can be used for both military and civilian purposes, to the Russian defense industry.

More: the Chinese regime has helped Iran to use its Beijing’s encrypted Beidou-3 global satellite navigation system and provided the Islamic Republic with stealth radar systems. For its part, the Kremlin has supplied Tehran with satellite intelligence showing the location of US naval ships and aircraft in the Persian Gulf. The backscratching is mutual. Iran has supplied Russia with thousands of drones used in Ukraine.

In one telling, America’s new war against Iran helps advance its position in Cold War II, by taking out the weakest of the three pillars that uphold the adversary’s Eurasian power. Yet this is a comforting after-the-fact narrative, typically offered by academics and magazine writers. They do it to console Western audiences dismayed by the war’s aimlessness and potentially devastating consequences for American prestige as the Iranian mullahs appear to hold on and even squeeze Washington. 

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In reality, China and its ally Russia benefit from Trump’s foolish diversion of American military resources to the Persian Gulf. To sustain the operation, the United States has stripped South Korea of missile defense systems and dispatched them to the Middle East and has diverted two guided-missile destroyers based in Japan to the Persian Gulf area. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a war with China over Taiwan, the United States would run out of missiles in less than a week.

The Iran war benefits the Sino-Russian entente in other ways. It has divided NATO, with President Trump denouncing America’s European allies as “cowards” and then calling on them for aid. Having stumbled into a trap, Trump has humiliated himself and the nation by begging Beijing to help in the Persian Gulf. On March 14, in a Truth Social post, Trump desperately called on China along with other countries to send “War Ships, along with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe.” China declined the invitation. 

What incentive does Beijing have to rein in its proxies Russia or Iran? While watching Uncle Sam struggle in the steel traps of Ukraine and the Persian Gulf, China’s leaders can focus on capturing one global industry after another and increasing the dependence on China of other nations — including America’s own allies.

Long ago, Chinese leaders viewed American over-extension abroad as a means for diminishing US power. In a 1958 speech, Mao Zedong told his fellow Chinese Communists that US military bases in Taiwan, Lebanon, and elsewhere were “nooses”: “The nooses have been fashioned by the Americans themselves and by nobody else, and it is they themselves who have put these nooses around their own necks…. The longer the US aggressors remain in those places, the tighter the nooses round their necks will become.” Then as now, China benefits when the United States wastes its resources on wars in peripheral countries. 

The military realm is not the only area in which Washington is losing Cold War II. Whether in the form of hot wars or cold wars, modern great power struggles ultimately are wars of economic attrition. As in the two World Wars and the first Cold War, the side with superior industrial resources tends to prevail. It matters, therefore, that in the words of economist Richard Baldwin, China is “the world’s sole manufacturing superpower.”

In 2025, China manufactured more goods than the next eight largest manufacturing countries combined. In addition to being the workshop of the world, the Middle Kingdom dominates global trade. Today, only 30% of the world’s countries trade more with the United States than with China, down from 80% at the turn of the millennium.

During the first Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for global influence in part by competing to finance projects like Egypt’s Aswan Dam. In today’s Cold War II, China has far outpaced America as the world’s leading source of development finance, providing $68 billion to developing countries, compared to only $39 billion from the United States in the first two decades of the 21st century. Indeed, the United States spent a paltry $76 billion on infrastructure in other countries over the past decade or so, compared to China’s $679 billion.

With the help of unpatriotic American corporations and investors, moreover, China has made the US defense and civilian economies dependent on Chinese factories. In 2023, China was the largest supplier in critical US military supply chains — ahead of Britain, India, and Japan.

China controls 80% percent of global graphite, necessary for batteries, 62% of fluorspar used in nuclear fuel and semiconductors, and a majority of the world’s magnesium, necessary for aircraft and missiles. Raytheon, a major US defense contractor, has declared that it is so dependent on Chinese suppliers that decoupling its supply chains from China is impossible. And while the Biden and Trump administrations have sought to boost US rare earth mining and processing, the American military may be dependent on China for at least a decade.

But surely America is far ahead in tech research? Wrong. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, China leads global research in 90 critical technologies, the United States in 74. In quantum computing, a frontier technology, China is ahead of the United States, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

What, then, is America’s comparative advantage over China as a great power? China has surpassed us in manufacturing, but we Americans lead the world in militarism — in lashing out here and there without a sense of deep strategic purpose or an appreciation for the problems associated with scarcity.

Since Trump’s second term began in January 2025, the United States has bombed governments or nonstate actors in seven countries — Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. The Trump administration has illegally engaged in the extrajudicial murder of around 100 alleged drug smugglers on the high seas in the Caribbean and Pacific, even though drug smuggling doesn’t carry the death penalty in the United States. Likewise, the United States has kidnapped the president of Venezuela and allowed Israel to assassinate most of Iran’s leadership in a Pearl Harbor-style sneak attack, before unleashing an American military campaign of massive bombing of Iran with no evident plan to counter Iran’s violent response — or even a cogent definition of victory.

In the same period, China, while quietly enabling its Russian and Iranian proxies, hasn’t bombed any countries or killed any foreign nationals. Indeed, while the United States for decades has been almost constantly killing suspected terrorists, bombing and invading multiple countries, and piling up foreign civilian corpses all over the world, China has grown rich and influential without firing a shot.

Since 1979, when it fought a brief war with Vietnam, China hasn’t fought any wars, although it has engaged in border skirmishes with India and has bullied other countries with shows of force in the South China Sea. By avoiding military quagmires and concentrating on internal development and strategic trade, China in the last three decades has become the dominant manufacturing power on earth. 

And here is the absurd result. Even though the United States gets less than 10% of its oil from the Persian Gulf, American soldiers must die or be maimed for life and American taxpayers must spend hundreds of billions of dollars to prevent Iran, whose largest customer is China, from blocking oil shipments to China by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq — all of whose largest trading partner is also China.

Meanwhile, American taxpayers must also spend money on European bases and fund the war in Ukraine to protect the European Union, which imports one and a half times as much from China as it does from the United States, from a hypothetical invasion by Russia, whose largest trading partner is… also China. In East Asia, Washington spends a fortune to defend Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — all of which trade more with China than with America — from a hypothetical attack by China. Why China would want to attack its trading partners is never made clear.

In short, America’s global grand strategy consists of using the US military, reliant for weapons on Chinese supply chains, to protect China’s trading partners from China or other Chinese trading partners, at the expense of American soldiers and American taxpayers.

Cold War II is also fought in the arena of legitimacy or “soft power.” Does the claim that America fights other people’s wars for them so they don’t have to defend themselves result in gratitude to the United States? According to a poll this month, citizens of Canada, Britain, Germany, and France now regard China as a more reliable partner than America. In the United States itself, according to the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, public opinion has shifted under Trump, away from confrontation with China to “friendly cooperation and engagement with China,” rising to 53% of respondents last year, up from 40% percent in 2024.

Why wouldn’t people in nations all over the world have a more favorable view of a repressive but unwarlike state like China, which makes first-rate consumer products and offers trade and investment opportunities, than they would of the United States, which, under any president of any party at any given time tends to be killing people in multiple foreign countries while boasting that it is the greatest country ever?

While the People’s Republic has risen to global industrial and commercial supremacy by following former Chinese leader Hu Jintao’s slogan “peaceful rise,” the arc of the United States since the 1990s can be described as “violent decline.” Post-Cold War America has repeated the strategic mistake of leaders in London in the three decades after 1945, when Britain imagined that it was still a major power because its troops were still machine-gunning natives in places like Kenya and Oman, even as it lost its manufacturing leadership to Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan; Uncle Sam is the new Colonel Blimp. 

America’s bungling militarists in both parties can’t even tell us what they imagine a US “victory” in Cold War II would look like. In the world wars, the strategic goal was stripping Germany and Japan of their foreign empires, without which they would be nothing more than medium powers. In the Cold War, the similar goal of the United States and its allies was achieved when the Soviet Union gave up its essential Eastern European empire, even before the USSR disintegrated along lines of nationality, leaving the Russian core smaller than it has been in centuries.

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But China’s power, like that of the United States, is based on its own internal population, workforce, and markets, augmented by peaceful, civilian trade and investment. Outside of Tibet and Xinjiang, China is an empire of commerce, not conquest. Absent total collapse, China is likely to be a superpower, and Russia a regional great power, for centuries or millennia, under regimes of any kind. If it survives the current American-Israeli onslaught, which is likely, Iran will likewise endure as a civilizational state, albeit as a client of Moscow and Beijing rather than a fully coequal partner in their Eurasian bloc.

China, especially, is well-poised to inherit the outcome of Cold War II. If East Asia is defined as China, Taiwan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan, then China accounts for around 90% of the East Asian population. If Germany had made up 90% of the population of Europe in 1914 or 1939, it would have been the European hegemon without any need to augment its strength by conquering its neighbors. 

Even if China and Russia were to adopt multiparty liberal democracy tomorrow, national pride, expressed through free and fair elections, would prevent their new democratic leaders from accepting humiliating, permanent subordination to US military power in their own neighborhoods. The same would be true of a proud and patriotic Iranian democracy freed of the mullahs. Somehow, the Trump administration, which promotes nationalism and sovereigntism for the United States, hasn’t figured out that other nations may feel strongly about their sovereignty, too, and be willing to die for it.

Sadly, we know how today’s Cold War II will end: in the eventual abandonment by the United States of its attempt at permanent US global hegemony, and the adoption by default of the Chinese and Russian alternative, a multipolar world characterized by spheres of military influence and trade blocs based on a handful of regional great powers. One need not have any sympathy for Putin’s gangster regime or China’s Communist dictatorship to recognize that their vision of world order is likely to be achieved, while the delusory post-1989 goal of American global hegemony can never be realized.

A multipolar world order is inevitable, because American voters since the fall of the Berlin Wall have never been willing to pay the costs, in American taxes and American blood, that would be required for the United States to be “the sole superpower” in every region on Earth for generations or centuries to come. American voters thought they were getting less unnecessary foreign military intervention in 2008 with Obama, who then launched new wars of regime change in Libya and Syria, and in 2016 with Trump, who has now begun an unnecessary and disastrous third Persian Gulf War. But sooner or later, the war-weariness of the American people will bring an end to the fantasy of a global Pax Americana built on drones and bombs. Perhaps we Americans in the 2030s or 2040s will finally get the kind of patriotic statesman we did not get after the Cold War — an American de Gaulle, who will liquidate too-costly overseas commitments and focus, at long last, on nation-building at home.

Chris Miller, author of Chip War, spoke to Freddie Sayers about how semiconductors became such a vexed issue, the purpose of America’s protectionist CHIPS Act, and the chances of military confrontation over Taiwan, the world capital of microchip manufacturing, which he places at 20%. Below is an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Why have microchips become a geopolitical issue?

Chris Miller: If you look at the production of advanced processor chips — the types of chips that process data that you find in a smartphone and PC, or a data centre — around 90% of them are made in Taiwan, which also produces over a third of the new computing power in the world each year. Taiwan’s importance is really extraordinary when it comes to all of the world’s technology. And it’s managed to acquire this position largely thanks to the efforts of a single company called Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), founded in 1987. Since that time it has grown inexorably: today, it’s both the world’s most advanced chip-maker and also the world’s largest manufacturer of silicon chips.

FS: And this pre-eminence can be traced back to TSMC’s founder, Morris Chang. Is he still involved?

CM: He’s officially retired, although he still plays a big role in the company’s decision making and in the company’s culture. He played a critical role in building the entire chip industry. He was in Texas when the first chip was invented in 1958. He played a major role in Silicon Valley’s decision to globalise the industry and build assembly facilities in East Asia, places like Hong Kong and Singapore, and especially Taiwan. More than anyone else, he can claim to have made possible the semiconductors on which the modern economy is critically dependent.

FS: Do we know anything about his politics — his contemporary relationships with China and the US?

CM: He’s done such a good job in business, in part by managing relations with multiple different governments. He was born in mainland China; his father was an official in the nationalist government. When the Communists took power in 1949, he and his family fled. He moved to the US and enrolled at at Harvard, then he spent 30 years working in the US chip industry — he held the US security clearance for working on specialised chips that went into defence systems. And then he got a job offer to start this company in Taiwan, backed by the Taiwanese government, which put up three quarters of the money needed to found TSMC. And since then, he’s lived in Taiwan. He’s still a US citizen. But he’s one of the most influential people in Taiwan because he founded and for a long time ran a business that contributes around 10% of Taiwan’s GDP. But he has generally stayed out of politics. Most of TSMC’s facilities are in Taiwan, a couple of small facilities in China, and a couple of small facilities in the United States. But it’s predominantly focused on production in Taiwan.

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FS: How did this history lead to the conflict we see today?

CM: The problem is that TSMC has grown its capacity in Taiwan over the last two decades, just as America’s military advantages around Taiwan have been deteriorating, and China’s have been growing. And so it’s in some ways really the fault of the United States for failing to keep deterrence in the Taiwan Straits effective. Two decades ago, it was obvious, in the event of world war, who would win. Today, it is not at all obvious who would win. That uncertainty created by our decision to let our military advantages over China deteriorate — that’s why we’re concerned about production in Taiwan.

FS: Do you think chips specifically are making the possibility of conflict between China and the West more likely?

CM: I think when Chinese leaders assess the situation in Taiwan and think about their goals vis-á-vis Taiwan, they’re not primarily thinking about semiconductors. The reality is, the Chinese Communist Party has wanted to control Taiwan since before the first semiconductor was invented. When they talk about Taiwan, they talk about the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, these broad ideological slogans rather than anything specific, technological or economic in nature. If we’re trying to understand policymaking in Beijing, leaders in China realise that Taiwan produces a lot of chips, but that’s not at the centre of their thinking. Now, some people say that Taiwan’s role in chip-making deters conflict, because China knows that if it were to attack Taiwan, it would destroy the chip-making facilities and the entire world, including China, would pay a massive economic cost. And it’s true, the cost would be tremendous. But there’s lots of examples of wars in history that have been waged by leaders who have decided the economic costs were worth it, or underestimated the economic costs — look at Putin, for example. I think anyone who is betting on “mutual-assured economic destruction” to maintain the peace doesn’t have much grounding in history on which to base that faith. And if we were to lose access to Taiwan’s chips through a war or a blockade, the impact on global manufacturing would be as dramatic as anything we’ve seen since the Great Depression.

FS: Biden’s CHIPS Act is a response to this threat — what does it do and is it making the situation more or less dangerous?

CM: The CHIPS Act is trying to make it less costly to build chip-making facilities in the US. The goal is to reduce reliance on Taiwan by building new capacity in the US and providing subsidies for companies to do that. So both US firms and also foreign firms that build in the US will be able to apply for subsidies to help defray the cost of production. And it’s already clear that there’s new investment coming in to the US that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, thanks to the subsidies. The challenge is that we’ve allocated $39 billion to subsidies, when one new chip-making facility can cost $20 billion. So $39 billion sounds like a lot of money, but it’s not that much. And our reliance on Taiwan is so substantial, that we’re going to need vast new construction not only in the US, but also in Japan and Europe and Singapore and elsewhere to really diversify the manufacturing base.

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FS: The CHIPS Act also really tightens sanctions on China specifically.

CM: The CHIPS Act bans any company that receives US government funding from also investing in cutting edge facilities in China, and then, relatedly, the US government last year banned the transfer of cutting-edge chip-making tools and cutting-edge AI chips to China. And although Taiwan is the country that can manufacture chips most efficiently, the tools inside the facility in Taiwan and inside of every advanced shipping facility in the world are produced by US, Japanese and Dutch firms. The US wants to stop these tools from going to China, with the aim of stopping China’s chip industry from catching up. And this is going to cause dramatic problems for Chinese firms, because, for the past several decades, they’ve made real advances, but they’ve relied on imported tools. There are no Chinese firms that can produce comparable tools domestically. China’s ship industry faces a dilemma whereby they can produce not-cutting-edge chips, using tools they import, but they can’t produce cutting-edge chips because they can’t get the machinery that’s necessary from the US, from Japan or from the Netherlands.

FS: Is this a rare case of sanctions actually working?

CM: I think they’re certainly working in terms of having an impact on the Chinese ship industry. But that’s only the intermediate goal. The long-run goal of the export controls is to stop China from developing advanced AI systems that can be deployed for military and intelligence uses. And to train an AI system, you need access to the most advanced chips in a vast data centre. The US’s goal over the next decade is to make it harder for China to acquire the chips needed to train AI systems, so that China’s intelligence and military systems are less capable, and America is able to apply AI faster than China. That’s the goal. The success or failure of that will be measured over five or ten years; it can’t really be measured today.

FS: Do you think it’s the military application of this that makes it so central?

CM: The concern isn’t only the specific chips that are in missiles or in planes — more important than that is the chips that are in the data centres where AI systems are trained. So if you want to train a car to drive autonomously, or a drone to fly autonomously, you do it in a data centre. And these data centres are immensely computationally intensive. If you want to train a computer-vision algorithm to recognise a cat versus a dog, you need to show it millions and millions of pictures of cats and dogs before it learns. And you need ultra-advanced chips to do that processing efficiently. So for training drones for defence systems, advanced data centres are key, which means advanced chips are key and that’s what militaries are really focused on right now. If you want more autonomous, smarter military systems, you need to train them in advanced data centres. That’s the key use of chips in next-generation military systems.

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FS: Given their value, might a black market for chips develop?

CM: It’s certainly going to happen — we see that with Russia today. It’s now illegal to transfer many different types of chips to Russia for military purposes, but Russia’s smuggling them in from Turkey and Kazakhstan, and from China. The types of chips the US is controlling for AI purposes are different, because they’re only used in a relatively small number of use cases. And the data centres that we’re worried about are vast buildings that can be seen from space. So it’s hard to say if we’re going to stop 100 types of a given chip from getting into Russia — I’m pretty confident the Russian security service services can smuggle most of those in. But if you’re talking about bringing in tens of thousands of chips to fill up an advanced data centre, that’s a much more tractable problem for intelligence agencies to keep an eye on.

FS: So it’s a race between the US and China as to who can onshore sophisticated chip production fastest?

CM: I think that’s how China sees it. I think the US sees it slightly differently, because the US is capable of producing advanced chips, not on its own, but in cooperation with Japan, with the Netherlands, with Korean, with Taiwan. It’s only by acquiring software designs, machine tools, and materials from all of those countries that you can make an advanced chip. The US strategy is not to onshore everything; it’s not to create a self-sufficient sphere. It’s to cut China out of the international supply chain, but keep all of its existing allies together. And the goal of that is that we collectively are going to produce chips and sell them to 80% of the world economy; China’s going to try to produce chips using less advanced machines and sell it domestically to 20% of the world’s economy. That puts China in a very bad competitive position: smaller market, worse machine tools, starting from a position of backwardness. It’s a race that China doesn’t look likely to win.

FS: In the next five years’ time, do you think there will be a major military standoff in the area around Taiwan, which would lead to major global hostility?

CM: I think the most likely outcome is that we have a period of tension, but we avoid a major military standoff. But if you asked me to put a probability on it, I’d give you a 20% probability over five years. And that’s a much higher probability than I put on it five years ago. I think — if you accept my probability of 20% — a 20% probability of both a very dangerous military situation and an economic crisis that would be equivalent to the Great Depression in terms of its shock to manufacturing: we ought to be willing to spend a lot of money, diplomatic attention and military resources to avert this type of crisis. My fear is that we’re not spending nearly enough given that the probability is far from zero. And the magnitude of the shock would be catastrophic.

China’s top diplomat Wang Yi has already said that the US and China now stand at the “brink of a new Cold War”. But this time America faces a far stronger enemy, and the prize at hand is even greater.

The old Cold War was essentially an intercontinental nuclear arms race between the USSR and the USA, a balance of terror that came to be known by the acronym MAD — Mutually Assured Destruction. After the near-catastrophe of the Cuban missile crisis, this hugely expensive military competition led to a stalemate that allowed for diplomacy to resurface, and eventually for Gorbachev’s Perestroika reforms.

The US won the first Cold War, largely due to its rival’s economic ineptitude, and afterwards political scholar Francis Fukuyama was so jubilant that he somewhat prematurely declared the End of History. Not Quite.

But if the old Cold War was a nuclear arms race, then Cold War II is a race for quantum supremacy. Control over Big Data determines which of the world’s superpowers emerges triumphant, because to reliably master quantum supremacy is to master the world.

Last October, US technology giant Google announced that it had built a quantum computer that performed calculations in 200 seconds that would have taken a conventional supercomputer 10,000 years to perform. What this could mean for human civilisation is unprecedented. A stable quantum computer with that much computing power would transform complex financial risk management into child’s play, take years off pharmaceutical research and development, leave vast amounts of personal data open to manipulation, and trigger a revolution in artificial intelligence and machine learning, which in turn would give modern militaries unmatched advantage in war.

Most crucially, a powerful quantum computer able to shave 10,000 years off its calculations would render previously unbreakable internet encryption useless, and replace it with unbreakable quantum encryption. Quantum calculations would be able to crack any current encryption code in existence. It follows, therefore, that whichever nation masters quantum supremacy first could instantly hack the entire internet, from the highly personal information of world leaders to every nation’s state bank encryption.

Whereas classical computers store and transmit information in bits — binary states of 0 or 1 — a quantum bit (or a “qubit“) can occupy both 1 and 0 at the same time, enabling exponentially greater simultaneous calculations. The leap forward this represents is akin to the difference between an abacus and modern computers. To put this into context, a quantum computer with ‘only’ 500 qubits would be able to encode more bits of information than there are atoms in the observable universe. Let there be no doubt that, if reliably achieved, quantum supremacy changes the world.

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This is why the US and China are in a race to determine who will first achieve quantum supremacy. And just as in the old Cold War, the economy will be a decisive factor. In August last year, the US Department of the Army issued a request for information on quantum technologies for ‘Threat Military Applications’, stating that “A global race has ensued to exploit and operationalise quantum technologies for the use of military effects.”

In December 2018, President Trump authorised the National Quantum Initiative Act (NQI), providing for $1.2b (£1b) to be invested in quantum technology over five years. Trump then signed an Executive Order to establish a National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee composed of 22 experts from industry, research and federal agencies.

But China also has an awesome quantum programme to match its rival. President Xi  has funded a multi-billion dollar quantum computing initiative  aiming to achieve significant breakthroughs by 2030. In November 2018, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), the country’s largest defence electronics company, unveiled a prototype quantum radar that it claims can detect stealth aircraft in flight.

Chinese researchers also claim to have built a satellite that can send quantum-entangled encrypted messages between distant locations. Meanwhile, a team of researchers at the US Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Maryland, is working on a similar approach called quantum teleportation.

Though China apparently suffers from a skills shortage hampering her companies’ attempts to supersede their U.S. competitors, a January 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment report to the Senate  concluded that the US lead in science and technology had been significantly eroded, as China rapidly catches up.

China has the funds, and is biding its time. Meanwhile, Beijing’s key aim is to disrupt its rivals as the country rises to supremacy, increasing the risks of the ‘Thucydides trap’.

Last week, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison revealed ongoing and multiple state-backed cyber attacks on a wide range of the country’s systems. The attackers primarily used a tactic called “remote code execution vulnerability”, which involves hackers attempting to insert their own software code into a vulnerable system like a server, in order to steal information. Cyber-security experts have said that some of the same computer code and tactics used in these cyber-attacks were also used in a February 2019 hack into Parliament House, also blamed on China.

Beijing has also imposed tariffs on Australian barley, stopped buying Australian beef and urged Chinese tourists and students to avoid the country, after Morrison called for an independent inquiry into the coronavirus.

Sydney’s cyber-attack was deemed serious enough for the Australian PM to confirm that he “spoke to Boris Johnson last night”. But Britain is also beset by problems with potential Chinese spytech, largely of our own making. The US security services have long warned us  that Chinese 5G equipment from Huawei poses a spying threat. The Chinese state is suspected of inserting “hidden backdoors” into Huawei’s 5G equipment to spy on data passed through mobile and data networks.

Google’s former Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt, who is now chairman of the Pentagon’s Defence Innovation Board, reaffirmed this month that “There’s no question that Huawei has engaged in some practices that are not acceptable in national security”.

He compared Huawei to “signals intelligence” – or spy agencies – and said that information “from Huawei routers has ultimately ended up in hands that would appear to be the state”. However it happened, he said, “we’re sure it happened”.

To protect China’s Huawei deal from being rescinded, Beijing has unleashed a series of economic threats against Britain. The state-backed Global Times warned that the British economy faces “substantial damage” if Boris Johnson’s government did not change course on Huawei as well on the political situation in Hong Kong.

Beijing, it said, would “strike back… where the UK steps out of line”. Citing British operations in China, in particular the HSBC bank, as well as Chinese investment at a nuclear plant in Somerset, the editorial said Britain “does not have many cards to play” and “further moves to cut co-operation could lead to the UK shooting itself in its own foot”. In response, in a review called Project Defend, Downing Street is now investigating how to reduce reliance on China for critical products.

In response to China’s threats to Britain, the US State Department issued what only a few years ago would have been considered a shockingly bullish reply.

“The United States stands with our allies and partners against the Chinese Communist Party’s coercive bullying tactics,” it stated: “Shenzhen-based Huawei is an extension of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state. Beijing’s aggressive behavior shows why countries should avoid economic overreliance on China and should guard their critical infrastructure from CCP influence. Australia, Denmark, and other free nations have recently faced pressure from CCP interests to bow to China’s political wishes. The United States stands ready to assist our friends in the U.K. with any needs they have.”

China’s cyber warfare is also evident on Twitter, the social media company disclosing that it had discovered hundreds of thousands of accounts linked to state disinformation operations. The People’s Republic was exposed as running the largest operation, followed by Russia and Turkey, using manipulation to spread pro-Beijing propaganda and pushing deceptive narratives about the political dynamics in Hong Kong.

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Similar to Iran, China has also been engaging in ‘hostage diplomacy’. Chinese courts sentenced Australian Cam Gillespie to death for drug smuggling, seven years after his arrest, and also increasing the sentence of a convicted Canadian drug smuggler from life imprisonment to death, shortly after Huawei Director Meng Wanzhou was detained in Canada. Two Canadians, a former diplomat and a businessman, were also arrested in China on allegations of espionage after Meng’s arrest.

India, another US ally, has been experiencing increased tensions along its 2,500 mile disputed Himalayan border with China. In one of the worst incidents for years, up to 20 Indian soldiers were killed last week in skirmishes with Chinese counterparts.

The conflict between these two rival nuclear powers largely centres on the effects of climate change on the glaciers. Roughly 47% of the water used by India comes from the river Ganges, fed by the Kosi river rising in Chinese-controlled Tibet. As a result, both countries are building dams in order to better control the most vital of resources.

To make matters more complicated, and volatile, this border dispute also involves a third nuclear power in the form of Pakistan.

President Trump has offered American mediation over the border dispute, but the move was largely interpreted as being hostile to China. Meanwhile US Secretary of State Pompeo recently confronted China’s foreign minister Yang Jiechi with a list of China’s actions around the globe. “I ticked through a few of them,” he said: “Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, what they’re doing in India, what they’ve done in the economic zones along the Philippines and Malaysia and Indonesia and Vietnam, the coercion on Australia.”

Yet the US does not have the strength to fight the new cold war alone, and it will require a new NATO-style containment and security policy for Asia, whereas until recently, most European nations had not been alert to the threat posed by an increasingly assertive China.

This has led to a particularly insidious and weak policy response, barely disguised as typical and unoriginal European anti-Americanism, but dressed up as realpolitik. “Analysts have long talked about the end of an American-led system and the arrival of an Asian century,” the European Union’s Foreign Policy chief Josep Borrell Fontelles stated: “This is now happening in front of our eyes… the pressure to choose sides is growing. As the EU, we should follow our own interests and values and avoid being instrumentalised by one or the other.”

French Foreign Minister Yves Le Drian declared in the French Senate that “regarding China, I do not think we should be locked into a logic of confrontation bipolar world. To not start a second Cold War we must affirm Europe’s autonomy”.

Indeed, Macron’s chief diplomatic advisor Emmanuelle Bonne is reported to have confirmed to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi about “France’s readiness to step up strategic communication with China” assuring China that “France respects China’s sovereignty, appreciates the sensitivity of Hong Kong-related issues, and has no intention of interfering in Hong Kong affairs.”

Germany’s powerful business lobbies are also drawn towards China, while Italy considers herself a “most trusted ally” to the country. Chinese investment in infrastructural projects like the high-speed rail link from Greece to Budapest, also presents economic and political vulnerabilities due to China’s Belt and Road initiative.

Suggested reading

Britain should stay out of Cold War II

By Aris Roussinos

But those in Europe who argue that the continent’s interests lie in “remaining neutral” while this US-China Cold War II unfolds, are deluding themselves and everyone else. They seem not to have yet realised, blissfully wish to ignore, or indeed wilfully mislead others about the fact that ‘deciding’ which side to take is a choice we simply no longer have.

Through its cyber espionage, aggressive domination of supply chains, and belligerent domestic political and foreign policies, China has made that choice for us.

Although some may wish to ignore it, or make the argument for a parochial ‘national hobbitism’, the stakes are too high to avoid choosing a side.

Attaining quantum supremacy changes everything, and whoever masters it will have instant access to, and domination of, the rest of the world for the foreseeable future. If China wins that struggle, the sort of organ harvesting, social-credit enforcing, Uighur-Muslim interning, dark tyranny that governs most of the Chinese mainland will come to dominate the rest of the world.

By this, I do not mean to imply that we should go to war with China. Of course not. But we must at the very least recognise that we are in the midst of a new Cold War, and this will help us formulate appropriate policy responses with our eyes open. Quantum supremacy changes everything. Similar to Tolkien’s One Ring, it is a power too great to be wielded by one man in Beijing alone. If this were to happen, global democracy could be in permanent retreat.

That was the harsh lesson learned by Bilbo Baggins, when he left his Shire in support of the free world. And even though the Hobbits were initially oblivious to it, the battle eventually came to them regardless. The rise of Mordor was simply too powerful and too dangerous an event to countenance, even for the little people in the Shire.