U.S. Could Lose New Cold War, Stiglitz Warns Washington

If the United States is serious about competing with China for global supremacy, it needs to start cleaning up its own house first.

Photo Insert: US President Joe Biden and Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping during a virtual meeting

Other countries will be hesitant to join forces with a power whose economic, social, and political foundations are becoming increasingly shaky, Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz warned Washington in an essay for Project Syndicate.

The United States appears to have re-entered a cold war with both China and Russia. And US leaders' portrayal of the conflict as one between democracy and authoritarianism fails the smell test, Stiglitz argued, especially when the same leaders are actively courting a systematic human-rights violator like Saudi Arabia. Such hypocrisy suggests that, at least in part, global hegemony, rather than values, is at stake.

For two decades following the fall of the Iron Curtain, the United States was clearly number one. But then there were the disastrously misguided wars in the Middle East, the 2008 financial crash, rising inequality, the opioid epidemic, and other crises that seemed to call America's economic model into question.

Furthermore, there is more than enough evidence to suggest that some aspects of American political and social life have become deeply pathological, including Donald Trump's election, the attempted coup at the US Capitol, numerous mass shootings, a Republican Party bent on voter suppression, and the rise of conspiracy cults like QAnon.

America, of course, does not want to be dethroned. However, regardless of which official indicator is used, China will simply outperform the US economically. Not only is its population four times that of America, but its economy has grown three times faster for many years (indeed, it already surpassed the US in purchasing-power-parity terms back in 2015).

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