Robin Niblett

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The New Cold War

We have entered a new Cold War, even if most people choose not to admit it. The contest between America and China is global and unbridgeable, and it encompasses all major instruments of statecraft: diplomacy, technology, military power, intelligence, trade and investment. It has its tinder box: Taiwan. And both protagonists are working hard to draw allies and friends to their side from east and west, north and south.

We stand at its beginning. But this Cold War is nothing like the last one between the Soviet Union and the West, which defined the second half of the twentieth century. We need new ideas to navigate its risks and to avoid a globally devastating hot war. In this short, urgent and indispensable book, Robin Niblett argues that only by looking back can we heed the warnings and learn the necessary lessons to guide us through this new reality: he goes through the ten ways in which the new cold war is different, and offers five new rules for navigating it. How we manage this contest will determine not only whether there is still space for international cooperation to deal with our many global challenges, from the climate emergency to the technological revolution, but also who gets to dominate the twenty-first century and, quite simply, the course of all our futures.