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April 26, 2024

Cold War 2.0? The View from the Rest of the World

Event Series: Ways Forward in a Divided World

A new U.S. cold war with China would be a disaster for the international community. Intense strategic competition is already undermining cooperation on global issues from the economy to the environment and heightening the possibility of catastrophic armed conflict.

How does the rest of the world view the prospect of Cold War 2.0? Is there room for peaceful and productive rivalry between China and the United States that acknowledges ideological divides while seeking common ground? How can other countries, international institutions, and transnational movements help to avert a protracted and dangerous U.S.-Chinese confrontation? Mohsin Hamid, Nesrine Malik, Ece Temelkuran, and Anne Applebaum explored these questions in a conversation moderated by Isaac Chotiner.

This event was part of the Georgetown Global Dialogues, which featured leading intellectuals from the Global South in forward-looking conversations with U.S.-based thinkers across a range of topics. It is co-sponsored by the Department of Government, Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Master of Arts in Conflict Resolution program, and Master of Science in Foreign Service Program at Georgetown University.

Participants

Headshot of Mohsin Hamid.

Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid is an acclaimed British Pakistani author known for creative fiction and commentary that address contemporary global issues. His recent novels include The Last White Man (2022) and Exit West (2017), which received the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. His book The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and later adapted into a successful film. Hamid’s engagement with themes of political turmoil, cultural displacement, and shifting individual and collective identities informs his influential essays on contemporary affairs in leading outlets including The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Paris Review.

Headshot of Nesrine Malik.

Nesrine Malik

Nesrine Malik is an acclaimed British Sudanese author and journalist known for her wide-ranging commentary on issues of race, identity, politics, and international affairs. She is the author of We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent (2019) and has columns in leading outlets including The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post that address topics ranging from Islamophobia and feminism to African politics, with deep insights into the ways colonial and postcolonial legacies shape our contemporary world. Malik received the 2021 Robert B. Silvers Prize for Journalism.

Headshot of Ece Temelkuran.

Ece Temelkuran

Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish novelist, a political thinker, and a leading analyst of the erosion of democracy and the challenge of populism on a global scale. She is the author of Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now (2021) as well as the acclaimed How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship (2019). Her novels are published in several languages. A frequent contributor to The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, and other leading outlets, she is the recipient of the PEN Translates Award and the Freedom of Thought Award from the Human Rights Association of Turkey. In 2023 she received the El Mundo Award for her body of work.

Headshot of Anne Applebaum.

Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the Agora Institute. A columnist at The Washington Post for fifteen years and a former member of the editorial board, she has also worked as the foreign and deputy editor of The Spectator magazine in London, as the political editor of The Evening Standard, and as a columnist at Slate as well as The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. From 1988 to 1991, she covered the collapse of communism as the Warsaw correspondent of The Economist and The Independent.

Headshot of Isaac Chotiner.

Isaac Chotiner

Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to “Q. & A.,” a series of interviews with public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more. Previously, Chotiner was a staff writer at Slate and host of the podcast I Have to Ask. He has written for The New Yorker, The Times, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. After graduating from the University of California, Davis, Chotiner worked at Washington Monthly before joining The New Republic in 2006 as a reporter-researcher. He went on to run the magazine’s online books section and later became a senior editor.

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