Condoleezza Rice: Die Gefahren des Isolationismus

[SS from essay by Condoleezza Rice, Director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. She served as U.S. Secretary of State from 2005 to 2009 and as U.S. National Security Adviser from 2001 to 2005.]

Today’s favorite analogy is the [Cold War](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/tags/cold-war). The United States again faces an adversary that has global reach and insatiable ambition, with China taking the place of the Soviet Union. This is a particularly attractive comparison, of course, because the United States and its allies won the Cold War. But the current period is not a Cold War redux. It is more dangerous.

[China](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/regions/china) is not the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was self-isolating, preferring autarky to integration, whereas China ended its isolation in the late 1970s. A second difference between the Soviet Union and China is the role of ideology. Under the Brezhnev Doctrine that governed Eastern Europe, an ally had to be a carbon copy of Soviet-style communism. China, by contrast, is largely agnostic about the internal composition of other states. It fiercely defends the primacy and superiority of the Chinese Communist Party but does not insist that others do the equivalent, even if it is happy to support authoritarian states by exporting its surveillance technology and social media services.