International relations amid the pandemic suddenly acquired definition when the United States launched its new Cold War against China. No Trumpian discontinuity, it follows Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ signalling defeat after decades trying to win China over to neoliberal capitalism. Like the original Cold War, the new one responds to an existential threat. Only stupefying ‘end-of-history’ triumphalism prevents most from recalling the seriousness of the Soviet threat and the strenuousness of the West’s original Cold War.
