This book has sought to make sense of the contemporary relationship between the US and China. While this has become a hot topic discussed in many fora by an increasing number of pundits, it continues to be a complex phenomenon in international politics, in as far as this relationship is characterized by deep economic interdependence and major security concerns. Before Trump was elected president of the US in 2016, however, the academic debate on US– China relations was not as lively as it is today. There has been an acceleration of production as the two countries are entering a security dilemma whose influence will be a challenge to escape; in parallel to this, many pundits have been deploying the phrase New Cold War as they see many similarities with the confrontation that involved the West and the East between 1947 and 1991. Therefore, this book has attempted to both disentangle the crux of the problem of US– China relations and, at the same time, to contribute to the most recent academic discussions on the topic.

With the majority of the debate leading to a polarization between those who see the concept of a New Cold War accurately reflecting US– China relations and those who find it methodologically flawed, and with a group of middle- ground contributions which remain undeveloped, this book has sought to contribute to the latter from a different perspective. Firstly, contrary to any other contribution, it provided a thorough conceptual analysis of the Cold War. Secondly, it intentionally avoided a comparative analysis between the Cold War and the New Cold War, acknowledging that this would involve too many important differences and similarities to be of any rigorous value. However, by deconstructing and defining both the Cold War and cold wars in Chapter 1, it provided the required tools to infer abstract features of the Cold War that could be considered when studying US– China relations or any other great powers’ cold war. From this analysis it was evident that more attention needed to be put on the fact that the relationship between the US and China displays both a tendency towards competition while falling short of direct confrontation and a tendency towards economic cooperation which, at the same time, has been the cause of frictions between the two great powers.