How will we know when a new Cold War has truly begun?
There are, lately, plenty of signs to choose from. In the past few months, China undertook the largest military exercises in the waters around Taiwan in almost three decades, and Americans learned about major recent hacks of the Treasury Department and several of the country’s largest telecommunications companies. President Trump announced the nominations of China hawks for secretary of state, ambassador to Beijing and under secretary of defense for policy, among other positions in the new government, having made an escalating tariff war with China as central to his third campaign as a border wall had been to his first. This month in Foreign Affairs, the conservative historian Niall Ferguson suggested America’s second Cold War was already at least five years old.
But if we are working through a strict comparison with the first Cold War, one big echo is conspicuously missing. For decades, part of how Americans made sense of their rivalry with the Soviet Union was through popular culture — movies and television and novels that dramatized and personalized the conflict, typically simplifying and mythologizing it as well. This time, there has been essentially none of that — no real effort in Hollywood to make use of high-stakes global conflict even as a narrative crutch, or by more auteurish creators to explore the layered human complexity of such conflicts.
Not only is there no “Hunt for Red October; there is also no “Dr. Strangelove” or real heir to John le Carré. That the United States is now engaged in some form of conflict with China has become a kind of commonplace among policy analysts and one of the few areas of consensus between the two political parties. But if there is a Cold War on, you wouldn’t know it from simply streaming movies or television, even if you left your favorite platform on auto-play forever. It’s not just that you can’t yet find a good movie about American rivalry with China on Netflix or Apple TV+. Outside of “3 Body Problem” and some historical documentaries, it’s hard to find anything new about China at all.
Just as striking is that we all know the reason — and know how craven it is. Simply put, the stuff we watch these days is overwhelmingly produced by large corporations far too dependent on China, in one form or another, to risk offending its audiences or its leaders by even broaching the subject.
This isn’t exactly news. As far back as 2020, PEN America published a backward-looking report on the subject called “Made in Hollywood, Censored by Beijing,” and in 2022 Erich Schwartzel published “Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy.” Some of the most conspicuous instances of capitulation have become, if often small-stakes, nevertheless notorious: a Taiwanese flag on Tom Cruise’s jacket was removed from a trailer for “Top Gun: Maverick”; the Chinese villains in the 2012 remake of “Red Dawn” became North Korean instead. Even the NBA has been forced to bend the knee to the Chinese government, and conflict over China coverage reportedly helped end Jon Stewart’s show on Apple TV+.
But even without these constraints, how much of a reckoning should we expect? As a streaming executive might tell you, Mandarin is forbidding, and China’s social mores foreign, and Americans are famously somewhat solipsistic in their tastes and culture. As many have lamented in recent years, the conditions of production in Hollywood also leave a lot to be desired these days, with what looked like a streaming gold rush drying up quite substantially. The new, grim horizon is lowest-common-denominator streaming content designed for falling asleep to. The nature of the conflict is different, too, with Americans dependent on China for our phones, pharmaceuticals and drones (to name just a few supply chains that bind the countries together).
In fact, this is part of what makes it such a strange war, even a cold one — two global powers simultaneously at loggerheads and in bed together, presumably a combination that makes out-and-out hot war, if not impossible, certainly less easily imaginable. But as the years have worn on, with the strange conflict both deepening and expanding, what is more striking than the superficial adjustments made to blockbusters is simply how mute Hollywood continues to be about the conflict.
The first Soviet nuclear test was in 1949. That same year, Hollywood gave us “The Red Menace” and “The Woman on Pier 13” (a.k.a. “I Married a Communist”). “The Iron Curtain” (1948) had been released before, and the decade that followed featured dozens of major movies with explicit Cold War plots — “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951), “Big Jim McLain” (1952) and “North by Northwest” (1959), along with far too many others to list in anything but a numbing spreadsheet — and allegories like “High Noon” (1952) and “On the Waterfront” (1954). Those like “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms” (1953), “Them!” (1954) and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) processed the story through science fiction and horror.
Almost certainly, this wasn’t a particularly healthy way to process the arrival of a new kind of imperial rivalry on which the future of the country, global politics and possibly human existence seemed to hang. Plenty of undergraduate film theses have been written on the distortions, mostly propagandistic, of the Cold War film wave, which didn’t really abate before Sylvester Stallone was single-handedly defending the free world in “Rocky IV” and a Hollywood actor playing the role of the American president won the Cold War by speechifying to “tear down this wall.”
But if we are even just tiptoeing into a new geopolitical era, defined partly by American rivalry with a rising superpower, it’s a bit strange that those looking for a cultural reckoning will have to look to the pages of Foreign Policy or Financial Times, having struck out scrolling their favorite streamer — where, this time, they’d find a void.
Instead, we seem to be making sense of things where we do everything else nowadays — on social media, which among other functions has become something like the world’s most popular reality television show. And there, over the past few weeks, one central drama has been the evolving and still unclear fate of TikTok — the video-based social media app owned by ByteDance, a Chinese tech company — and the American effort to shut it down.
A bipartisan law, passed last year, required TikTok’s sale or closing. Presumably this was in order to blunt its utility in information warfare, but the public justification was never all that clearly stated But as Joe Biden left office, it was reported that he would not enforce the law, perhaps in an effort to simply dump the problem on his successor — though Mr. Biden offered no real explanation.
But Donald Trump appears to see it as an opportunity, instead. The Supreme Court unanimously announced that the law — which had passed through the Senate with votes from 31 Republicans — must be upheld. But although Trump had called for the ban as early as 2020, he has since reversed positions, presumably persuaded by the Republican super-supporter and ByteDance investor Jeff Yass. He saved a seat for the TikTok C.E.O. at the inauguration dais and in his Inauguration Day signing spree delivered an executive order preserving access (at least temporarily) for the more than 100 million Americans who use the app.
Chinese authorities are reportedly considering a way the law could be circumvented: a sale to Trump’s right hand Elon Musk, who blew up a congressional spending deal last year, seemingly in part to preserve his economic interests in China. Musk has already single-handedly reshaped American political discourse through X, and TikTok grew conspicuously more pro-Trump in the aftermath of the congressional vote. It’s not hard to imagine which direction things would go in Musk’s hands.
ByteDance initially shut down American access ahead of schedule, perhaps to inspire user outrage, then reopened it, with no executive action in hand, confident enough that there was no real threat from the Trump administration. And loyal American users of TikTok fled to the Chinese alternative RedNote in such numbers that it became the most downloaded app on Apple’s U.S. App Store — alarming its corporate censors, who rushed to block Chinese users from seeing content produced by the new American arrivals. For their part, the Americans might’ve been wondering, as they looked around, who was a bot and who was a troll, who might be a stooge and who a censor, who could be a spy and who an operator.
I don’t know what the fight over TikTok ultimately means for freedom of speech — or, for that matter, for the country’s increasingly naked rule by self-interested billionaires or its evolving posture toward China. But in that one paragraph above I can see elevator pitches for six decent B-movies, at least.
On Day 1, Trump Allies America With Climate Disaster
As I wrote on Opinion’s blog today, Trump has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement before, but this time, it’s much worse.
Eight years ago, when Trump made a show of exiting Paris while “Summertime” played in the White House Rose Garden, it helped kick off a remarkable period of worldwide solidaristic backlash — the global climate equivalent of the liberal “resistance.” We owe much of the climate progress of the last decade to that resistance — to climate protesters, sympathetic prime ministers and presidents and legislators, entrepreneurs and banks and asset managers who understood the urgency of action clearly enough to see it as a financial opportunity, too.It is early, but there are not obvious signs of anything like that on the horizon now — no large-scale protest movements adding adherents and gaining steam, few major global leaders treating the climate crisis in existential terms or pushing policy that would make decarbonization a core goal of economic development, and a rapidly dwindling number of corporate leaders even paying lip service to climate urgency.
Read the whole thing here.
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