Western governments increasingly frame China as the defining long-term challenge to liberal values and the rules-based international order. In recent years, the US, UK and EU have all labelled Beijing a systemic rival capable of reshaping global governance. That view led former Chatham House Director Sir Robin Niblett to argue in 2024 that the world had entered a ‘new Cold War’ between the US and China. However, President Trump’s return to office has complicated that framework, and since his inauguration, he has repeatedly broken diplomatic convention: from threatening Greenland’s sovereignty to escalating tensions with Iran, all the while still casting China as a central strategic threat. As he put it in January 2026, discussing Greenland aboard Air Force One: ‘if we don’t do it, Russia or China will’. This was a backdrop that loomed large over Trump’s carefully orchestrated visit to Beijing, the first by a US president in a decade.
To discuss how Trump’s second term has impacted the new Cold War, the Oxford Political Review met with Niblett at Chatham House in July 2025, where he remains a Distinguished Fellow. What follows is a narrative and analysis of our conversation, based on his book, The New Cold War (2024). He discusses how far his proposed framework for managing strategic competition survives in an era marked less by rule-making than by transactional power politics, and in doing so, makes a broader reassessment of Western strategy, alliance structures, and the increasingly decisive role of the Global South, the region Niblett says Europe must integrate with, if it wishes to survive.
Niblett is exceptionally well positioned to answer these questions. Between 2007 and 2022, he was Director of Chatham House, after spending nearly twenty years at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). After leaving Chatham House, he became a Senior Adviser at Hakluyt & Company, before his election as Warden of New College, Oxford, where his term will begin in September 2026. He presently divides his time between contributing to international policy debates, writing, and advising private institutions on geopolitical risk, which he pursues through his own firm, Ledwell Advisory.
Niblett’s book seeks to define and explain escalating tensions between the United States and China, offering five rules to manage this competition. These include rallying the liberal democracies; creating peaceful economic competition; taking armament seriously; partnering with the Global South; and, most importantly, not considering a ‘hot war’ inevitable, lest the world finds itself ‘sleepwalking’ into an unnecessary, mythically manufactured global conflict (p. 162). The argument of the book is clear: the United States and China have already integrated their economies to the extent that ‘a complete U-turn is impossible for both’ (p. 6), and that in the face of this reality, the West needs certain rules to manage Sino-American rivalry and bring about greater international cooperation.
At just over 170 pages, The New Cold War is compact and easily digestible, though by no means lacking in analytical depth. Niblett’s original intention, he tells me, was to expand on his thesis, developed at CSIS in 2005, of the emergence of a ‘strategic triangle’ between the United States, China and EU – but the publisher wanted something more macro. Niblett notes that China is also different to the Soviet Union, America’s antagonist in the original Cold War, in that it is invested in globalisation. The goal of closer economic ties with China, in some industries, reflects this desire for global cooperation, and makes this new Cold War categorically different to the last.
However, at the heart of Niblett’s thesis lies a search for order, a search now unsettled by a US president who is unwilling to play by the usual rules of the game. This was partly foreseen by Niblett himself. In the conclusion to The New Cold War, he suggests that due to ‘the risks of another Trump or Trumpian presidency’, Europe and other countries within the Pacific should strengthen their alliance and garner a closer relationship with the Global South.
A few months after our conversation, the Pentagon said it would abandon ‘grandiose strategies’ and prioritise defending the American homeland. However, this should not be taken as a retreat from the new Cold War – quite the contrary. Trump took the game to Xi in Beijing, showing the rivalry to be alive and well, demanding that Xi ‘open up’ China to American business. Despite China agreeing to purchase 200 Boeing jets and extend the tariffs truce agreed in October, the relationship remains frosty. Dr Yu Jie, Senior Research Fellow on China at Chatham House, told Sky News that the US and China clearly remain in an era of ‘protracted competition and protracted rivalry’. This makes Niblett’s comments in 2025 ever more relevant.
As such, reflecting on how Trump’s second administration has contributed to the new Cold War, Niblett persuasively argues that it has delayed the emergence of rules governing the Sino-American relationship, rules that would have made international cooperation easier. The United States was ostensibly heading towards a ‘post-Cuban Missile Crisis moment’ under former President Biden, where bilateral habits vis-à-vis China were beginning to be codified. A Chinese state communiqué from November 2024, for example, suggested that twenty channels of communication had been ‘restarted or established’ by the time Biden met Chinese premier Xi Jinping on the fringes of the 2024 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Lima, Peru. Indeed, Niblett says that this nascent relationship looked as if it were on the course to act as a bulwark against conflict between the superpowers altogether, even if China’s military ambitions in Taiwan remain unclear.
However, as Niblett tells me, ‘Trump is instinctively not a Cold War person’, because ‘anything that ties him down, he hates’. Whilst Biden was willing to play within the confines of a carefully orchestrated diplomatic game, Trump is at pains to emphasise that he operates above diplomatic rules and precedent. In an interview the week prior to our discussion, Niblett was asked: what is the essence of Trump’s foreign policy? His reply was, ‘It’s Trump looking like he’s winning’.
This has become ever more apparent with the President’s recent actions on Iran, Venezuela, and Greenland, where he has signalled his willingness to accelerate towards ‘hot wars’. Niblett makes this clear in an essay for CSIS earlier this year, arguing that Trump’s wider ambitions concern the projection of American strength and power, rather than building rational and strategic alliances. In our interview, he makes the crucial statement that the US President is ‘almost unique in that utterly transactional way of seeing the world’.
However, Niblett maintains that Trump is more a passenger of the new Cold War than he is an architect. The New Cold War notes that all parties in Washington are highly sceptical of the Chinese government, and that Trump has pursued a remarkably similar trade policy to Biden on Chinese tariffs. Moreover, Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act created tax incentives for domestically manufactured goods over European as well as Chinese imports, showing that Biden ‘adapted, rather than rejected Trump’s economic doctrine’ (p. 41). Biden’s engagement with the Chinese should not, therefore, be equated with favour or privilege.
Indeed, Niblett makes the off-hand quip that Trump is ‘sort of right about everything’, and offers sympathy for the President’s protectionism, in a suggestion that US companies have not always operated on a level playing field in China. This perhaps points to historic grievances, levelled by President Trump again last week, that US companies suffer from weak intellectual property rights, market access restrictions, and regulatory favouritism towards domestic firms in China. Indeed, this imbalance is underscored by the success of Chinese companies penetrating the US market since President Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972. Scepticism toward China is thus rife throughout the United States, and it is an increasingly common denominator in an ever-polarised nation. This is so much so, Niblett says, that it is impossible to get a job anywhere in Washington today with as much as a whiff of association with China, regardless of one’s political colour.
Of course, today’s United States is not unique in asking the question: how should China be managed? During our conversation, Niblett charts a history of American relations with China, arguing that the US ‘swung from a late Truman-Eisenhower period’ of building alliances with other Western nations, to a ‘Nixonian’ agenda which said, ‘let’s dump [the] gold standard, let everyone look after themselves and we’ll go and do a deal with China’. Whether guided by principled opposition or strategic cooperation, American policy on China has never been fixed once and for all. Modern conundrums are thus perennial questions, even if Trump 2.0 is raising new problems.
‘Trump is revealing certain things about America,’ Niblett says, ‘about the risks to [its] allies that come from over-depending on an America that’s going through its own internal drama’. On 17 January 2026, when Trump announced tariffs on all NATO allies that refused to cede Greenland to the United States, this sense of over-dependence was perfectly echoed by Tony Blair’s former Director of Communications, Alastair Campbell, who posted on X that this must be the ‘over reach moment when Europe stops pretending this guy is normal […] and they get their act together and fight back.’
Following Trump’s second term, Niblett warns that the ‘darkest’ of the new Cold War’s consequences is ‘regionalisation’, where the United States focuses on its Western hemisphere and Pacific interests, and the EU, for its part, becomes a ‘fortress’. This would reduce the critical cooperation required to tackle some of the world’s most challenging problems, which Niblett identifies as climate change and artificial intelligence. I sense that Niblett is unsure about whether this will happen: ‘China’s not going to collapse anytime soon’, he says, whilst America could return to ‘an older version of itself before’, perhaps embracing the isolationism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Beyond the expedient threats of Trump’s second presidency, talk of the long-term consequences of geopolitical tensions forms the basis of one of the most important questions I pose to Niblett during our interview: ‘What does a post-new Cold War world look like?’ Niblett argues in the introduction of his book that the United States and China are now engaged in a contest that is ‘unbridgeable’, a seemingly striking contention considering his prescriptive conclusions in the book for how strategic competition should be managed between the two. Indeed, he writes that his rules ‘offer the possibility that when [the new Cold War] finally ends, more peoples will have embraced the freedoms enshrined in democratic systems of governance than do today’ (p. 7).
In response to this vision, I suggest to him that this draws some parallels with Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis, which stated that the end of the first Cold War marked the triumph of liberal democracy as the only viable system of government. Fukuyama’s thesis has been widely challenged, particularly by scholars of religious history writing in the post–9/11 context of Islamic fundamentalism, noting that not all peoples have been willing to submit to secular liberal democracy as the final, true form of government, as Fukuyama originally envisioned in 1989.
In light of Fukuyama’s diagnosis following the demise of the first Cold War, Niblett’s answer to my question is thus refreshing. He in fact does not know what a world after this second Cold War looks like, and indeed, at this moment, it does not really interest him. He is into solutions, not theories, and this involves understanding where the US stands with China todayin a new period of hostility that has only just begun. I immediately thought this mirrored many of the presuppositions of the oft-cited and oft-criticised E.H. Carr, whose The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939)urged its readers to beware of the pitfalls of idealism.
Despite Niblett’s contention that the new Cold War is ‘unbridgeable’, his book suggests that closer economic cooperation with China will maintain peace. This is not economic integration in toto, but rather cooperation in noncritical sectors, including cars and car parts, consumer electronics, civilian purpose machine tools, luxury goods, clothing, processed foods, financial and other services, and entertainment. Niblett noticeably leaves energy generation infrastructure off the list, as well as most areas of high technology – unsurprisingly, given reports of Chinese manufacturers installing ‘kill switches’ in goods sold to Europe and North America.
To Niblett, China should be kept at arm’s length, with economic relations cultivated in the 90% of sectors that are without security implications, whilst in certain important technologies, the rising superpower should be kept ‘one step behind’ where possible. He recognises, however, that delineating what is critical and what is not can often be difficult. Superficially, this narrative of closer economic integration mirrors the failed story of nineteenth-century free trade liberalism. Richard Cobden (1804–65), the British Radical best known for advocating the abolition of the protectionist Corn Laws in mid-nineteenth century Britain, famously claimed in 1850 that free trade would ‘unite mankind in the bonds of peace’. Nevertheless, conflict proceeded apace throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Niblett refutes my pushback on two grounds. First, he rightly acknowledges the false orthodoxy of the nineteenth-century zeal for free trade, noting that, despite its advocates’ calls for trade liberalisation, global tariffs remained high throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, Niblett says that the First World War, as a conflict driven by imperial conquest, was greatly influenced by protectionism. However, he says that humanity does learn, and that war has become less of a raison d’état. Even if it lingers in Russia, nuclear weapons makes all-out war between the superpowers unlikely. His answer reveals glimpses of an economic liberalism mixed with a strong faith in humanity’s rationality that one needs to lead the world’s foremost international affairs think tank for well over a decade.
One of the most important points that Niblett seeks to underscore to me, however, is that the key battleground of the new Cold War will be the Global South. China is investing significantly in developing countries through what was known as its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), as well as through international organisations. China’s proportional contribution to the United Nations’ regular budget has skyrocketed in the twenty-first century, rising from around 1% in 2000 to 20% in 2025 (only second to the United States, capped at 22%). Given the unforgiving climate for international aid in the West, however, with Trump’s mandate that NATO members spend 5% of GDP on defence, I am sceptical that the West can match China’s enthusiasm.
Niblett emphasises, however, that the key is investment, not aid. When he speaks to leaders from countries in the Global South, they say: ‘We want the trade, not the aid’, and that official development assistance has made little difference. As part of his experience with the private equity arm of a Nordic company, whose principal investments are in Africa, Niblett knows that corporations on the continent are interested in partnering with Western companies backed by Western credit guarantees. Such guarantees, he says, can sometimes create more attractive offers than those offered by Chinese entities, whose loans have come in the past with extortionately high interest rates that trap countries in spirals of debt.
Why do his arguments matter? Niblett’s most striking contention in our interview is that ‘Europe can only survive […] if we integrate with Africa’ – a strategy rarely mooted by the press. Niblett sees Africa as central to the West’s global security, with each side partnering in the other’s economic future – above all on renewable energy – and creating a buffer against Chinese economic dominance and political influence.
Closer economic integration means that, according to Niblett, ‘once you invest in other countries, you get skin in the game of their survival’. From there, facing international challenges together, such as climate change, becomes more necessary and also much easier. It is a hopeful message, but despite Niblett’s faith in free trade, he is no idealist. He makes a persuasive case for pragmatic economic integration with China, recognising that this new world order is here to stay.
Two years on since publication, The New Cold War’s predictions ring truer than ever. On America’s traditional role as Europe’s strategic military guarantor, Niblett writes that ‘it is doubtful that the political will is going to exist in Washington and across the United States to continue playing this role to the same extent that it has in the past’ (p. 43). The possible collapse of the Western alliance over Iran and Greenland has made this clear. Policymakers in Westminster and Brussels may thus be wise to heed Niblett’s call to strengthen their alliances in the Pacific and Global South, even if it remains unclear what a troubled United States may mean for the future of Western security, against the backdrop of a new, hostile superpower in China.