The New Cold War: How the Contest Between the US and China Will Shape Our Century

An urgent and essential assessment of the global contest between the US and China, and how looking to history will help us to navigate it, from former Director of Chatham House

"An illuminating book for the interested citizen as well as for those making policy" - Hillary Rodham Clinton

We have entered a new Cold War. The contest between America and China is global and unbridgeable, and it encompasses all major instruments of statecraft - economic, political and military. It has its tinder box: Taiwan. And both protagonists are working hard to draw allies to their side from across the world.

We stand at its beginning. But this Cold War is nothing like the conflict 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 avoid a globally devastating hot war. In this urgent and necessary book, Robin Niblett argues that only by looking back can we learn the 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 rules for navigating its onset.

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 will lead the twenty-first century and, quite simply, the course of all our futures.