What role do ideological differences play in great power relations? Many frame current U.S.-China ideological competition as analogous to the Cold War. But Eun A Jo and Jessica Chen Weiss argue that there was no single Cold War, and that contemporary China differs in important ways from the Soviet Union. They discuss how ideologies vary on two dimensions: universal vs. particularist content, and expansive vs limited scope of promotion.
Guests: Eun A Jo is an Assistant Professor of Government at William & Mary. Jessica Chen Weiss is David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
International Security Article: Eun A Jo and Jessica Chen Weiss, “The Ideology Trap: China and the Limits of Cold War Analogies,” International Security, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Spring 2026), pp. 7–35, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC.a.403.
Originally released on July 16, 2026
Jeff: Hello, welcome to the International Security Podcast. We are produced by International Security, a quarterly journal edited at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and published by MIT Press. Each episode of the podcast highlights a piece of research from the journal, drawing out its implications for understanding the theory and practice of international politics. I'm Jeff Friedman from Dartmouth College. Our guests today are Eun A Jo and Jessica Chen Weiss. Eun A is an assistant professor of government at William and Mary, and I'm happy to say a former postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth. Jessica is the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS.
Their recent international security article is titled “The Ideology Trap: China and the Limits of Cold War Analogies.” The article explains how states' ideologies can vary in terms of their content and scope. The framework indicates that China's ideology today has more in common with the non-aligned movement during the 1970s than with Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1940s. That argument challenges the notion that Washington and Beijing are inevitably bound for global ideological conflict that resembles the Cold War. Eun A, good to see you.
Eun A: Nice to see you. Thanks for having us, Jeff.
Jeff: You bet. And Jessica, nice to see you as well.
Jessica: Great to be here. Thanks.
Jeff: Okay, Eun A, maybe we can start by having you tell us a bit about your framework for defining ideologies. There are two dimensions of that. The first of those distinguishes universalist and particularist ideologies. Could you just say a bit about what that distinction means and maybe give us an example of each one?
Eun A: Yeah, of course. So universalism and particularism both describe ideological content. So that's what the state believes. There are many ways to think about content, you could look at the kind of governance an ideology promotes, like how it organizes the economy, for instance. But we focus on this particular spectrum, universalism versus particularism, because we think it is the distinction that matters most for great power competition. And here the question really is whether the state sees its model as something for others to adopt or only for itself.
So a universalist ideology takes the model to be applicable beyond its own borders, so spreading that model is part of the belief itself. And there are many historical examples, Marxism-Leninism being the classic case, which treats socialism as a stage in a universal historical process. Liberalism is also universalist, holding that every individual possesses the inherent rights, and that principle is understood to hold everywhere. Particularist ideology is seen as historically and culturally bounded. So that's tied to a specific people, a place, a tradition, and that specificity is what makes it difficult to export. A key example that we give in the paper is Zionism. It concerns the specific religious and historical identity of the Jewish people and their connection to the land of Israel. And in that vein, I think nationalism tends to work in similar ways, treating the nation as a primary political unit and locating belonging in that distinct heritage of a people. That's that tTransnational ideologies can be particularist too, and we discussed the non-aligned movement as an example of this. But that's aAll that's to say, this is a key move that we make in the framework where we treat what the state believes, whether its vision is universal or particular, as separate from how it promotes those beliefs elsewhere.
Jeff: Could you say a bit more about the non-aligned movement, particularly because you draw a parallel between that and China today. So, just say more about what the non-aligned movement's ideology was and why you consider that to be particularist?
Eun A: Yeah, I think this is a very useful case for the distinction we're drawing. So one might expect the non-aligned movement to be universalist because it ran global campaigns, built global coalitions, and really tried to reorder the international system, but the content of its ideology was particularist. So a universalist movement would prescribe a single model for everyone to adopt, but the non-aligned movement did something quite different. It defended each state's right to choose its own political and economic path, and it made coexistence among diverse systems the goal. So principles of sovereignty, non-interference, and self-determination that marked the non-aligned movement were in many ways commitments to ideological difference. And in our framework, that makes the movement particularist in content.
Jeff: Okay, so that's one dimension of the framework, universalism and particularism. The other one is dividing expansive ideologies from selective ones. So same question: Can you can you just define those things and give an example of each one?
Eun A: Yeah, so expansive and selective for us mark the second component, the scope of promotion. And this is about how far and how hard the state pushes its beliefs onto the wider system, independent of what those beliefs hold in content. An expansive scope means global campaigns to reshape the international ideological order, right, with real resources committed across regions and across issues. And the clearest case of expansive promotion that we discuss is American democracy promotion after the Cold War. With the Soviet Union gone, there was real push to spread democracy, running democracy assistance programs around the world, conditioning foreign aid and governance and reform, and also being willing to back this up with force at times.
A selective scope means concentrating effort where promotion is most feasible or most valuable, usually in particular regions or over particular issues, while at the same time tolerating divergence elsewhere. So the state still holds its beliefs and still promotes them, but it just picks its battles. And the example we give in this regard is the post-war European Union. The EU also promotes liberal norms, but it does so in a much more sort of concentrated way. The effort is focused mainly on its own neighborhood and it works through the accession process where the prospect of membership in the EU gives it the leverage to ask for reform. But beyond that immediate periphery, the EU is far more willing to tolerate divergence. So the principles are the same as the ones that the United States holds, but the scope is narrower. And this scope is the most dynamic part of the state's ideological strategy because it's driven by resources, by domestic appetite for promotion, and also by expectations of any backlash that might happen. When those factors shift, the scope can also shift with them, and this is a key part of our framework.
Jeff: Yeah, I mean the idea that ideologies can move for a state over time in a dynamic way is really interesting and I want to bring Jessica in on this to get a sense of how that framework applies to China in different ways at different times. Jessica, in the article you write that China once did have a universalist ideology under Mao, but then later shifted to a more particularist one. Can you just say a bit about how and when that happened?
Jessica: Yeah, China's a really important case in showing that you can move on both dimensions. So under Mao you did have this sort of expansive universalistic aim to compete with the Soviet Union for leadership of the international communist bloc. But under Deng Xiaoping, you know, following the, you know the travesty of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, there was a major shift in gears where, you know, they didn't jettison socialism, but they, you know, qualified it as being something with Chinese characteristics and there was a far more pragmatic approach to domestic and international governance. You know, dDomestically, China broke with Marxist doctrine, incorporating capitalists into the party, focusing on peace and development, you know, rather than war and revolution as sort of the guiding principle of Chinese foreign policy, and internationally focusing much more on sovereignty again as an international law and that would permit differences in ideological and social systems.
Jeff: What are some aspects of international behavior that that goes along with that? Does that go along with tapering support for Maoist insurgencies around the world or like what are the observable indicators of that in China's foreign policy?
Jessica: Exactly. So, you know, China under Mao had been much more aggressive in the Third World, training insurgencies, looking to support alternatives to the ruling leadership in those third countries. Under Deng there was a much more pragmatic approach. And this continues actually under Xi Jinping, which is that, you know, China has a variety of interests, you know, sovereignty, security and development, but that they are much more agnostic as to the nature of the government that they are dealing with. So they have a pretty you know, regime-agnostic approach to working with incumbents of all stripes around the world, which, you know, is different from the kind of conditionality that the United States and other democracies have sought to use to push toward a kind of universal convergence. Of course China has its own conditions, but they have much more to do with China's kind of so-called core interests, you know, do these countries defer to China's position on Taiwan, you know, things like that.
Jeff: Just to stay with Xi for a moment, you mentioned in the article that under Xi Jinping, the other axis of China's ideology has also moved, particularly going from a more selective to a more expansive vision. Just say a bit more about what that transition entailed for China's ideology.
Jessica: Right, so if under Deng Xiaoping China moved to a much more particularist narrative, Xi Jinping maintained the particularism but became much more expansive about how China, under his leadership, was trying to reshape kind of international norms to be permissive of these differences in ideological and political systems. You know, hHe's championed much more actively through a series of global governance initiatives and the like that each country should be able to choose its own path to modernization. He's been much more forthright that China's example shows that countries don't have to democratize to develop, and so he's really put a lot more kind of weight behind—of course China's own material capabilities have also, and weight in the world, has also grown over this period. And so he's, you know, aligned that with creating more space for different kinds of leaders to rule in the world, rather than tipping, as under Mao, rather than trying to push countries in a particular direction.
Jeff: Okay, so now we've established we've got, like many political science works, we've got a two-by-two way of organizing the world. We've fit China today in one cell of that box, saying that their ideology is expansive and particularist. Jessica, tell us a bit about the upshot of that and in particular, why do you think that challenges the idea that the United States and China are headed for a new Cold War?
Jessica: So I think it's really important because the Cold War analogy really obscures really important variation, both in how a country conducts itself and how that can change over time, both, you know, China, but also the United States. And that there was no single Cold War, and so these kind of analogies I think obscure you know, more than they reveal. And in particular, you know, China has changed and is changing, and in the second Trump administration we may even be seeing not only just a retreat from democracy promotion, but also even a kind of emerging particularism, one that's much more focused on kind of a nationalist outlook than a universalist one. And so we see this as very much interactive and dynamic, and we introduce the concept that others have also, this idea of a security dilemma in the ideological domain, which suggests that these tensions can escalate, but they can also be tempered, depending on the choices that leaders make to promote their ideologies, as well as on how they are in turn perceived. So all of this means that, you know, China today is no Soviet Union, right, with no longer pushing this kind of expansive universalist project, and that further changes in both countries could allow the two, the United States and China, to forge a new modus vivendi while reducing the role of ideological frictions in this relationship even as frictions persist over other issues.
Jeff: I take your point that China emphasizes sovereignty and the idea that different countries should be allowed to go in different directions with their political systems. There are other ways that analysts say China's trying to undermine the liberal international order or at least the United States' dominance over it. Why doesn't that amount to the same thing as a global ideological competition in your view? I mean if the question is essentially what the world order is going to be, why does calling it particularist rather than universal change the way we would think about US-China competition?
Jessica: I think that it was a couple of things. One, you know, competition as a word I think is pretty underspecified here because we do have, they're proposing a particularist notion of how the world order should be shaped, and if the United States clings to or remains you know, focused on promoting a kind of universalist conception of convergence toward democracy, then you can say yes, these are differences in ideological visions. And indeed I think that that interpretation would, some would say, that's an ideological competition. But what we're saying is that it's not a kind of a competition between two universalist visions, and that means that there is room for a kind of coexistence or détente, especially if the United States is no longer focused as it was on a expansive universalist strategy of whether it's regime change and democratization in China or in other parts of the world. So it is a, you know, wWhat China is championing is a move away from a much more liberal international order, but it doesn't mean installing an authoritarian or Sinocentric international order.
Jeff: Yeah, that does make sense. It is, I think, a pretty clear contrast from sort of early Cold War competition for exactly the reasons you say. You and Eun A do write in the article or acknowledge that China has engaged in what you call transnational repressive acts that violate norms of sovereignty and territorial integrity. Can you say a little bit more about what that entails and whether it poses any tension with the idea that China doesn't try to interfere in other countries' sovereign politics?
Jessica: So China absolutely has, you know, engaged in acts of what they're calling, being called “transnational repression,” whether that is, you know, intimidating or persecuting members of the Chinese diaspora, but also beyond that, seeking to quell dissent or, you know, opposition to the Chinese Communist Party. And so, you know, that is absolutely an infringement on the kind of the so-called sovereign or internal affairs of other countries, the language that they like to use.
I think that the key distinction here is that it may be you know, sort of a byproduct of their effort to defend the security of the Chinese Communist Party's continued authoritarian rule rather than a deliberate strategic effort to subvert these democracies and change them into a different form of government. But this is really important in our framework because of this concern about how actions taken defensively may still be perceived as offensive efforts at subversion or ideological promotion. And so we state in the paper that this is a key factor that will determine whether these, you know, these differences can settle out or whether they will in turn provoke escalation, even when they are acknowledged to be part of a tit-for-tat spiral of insecurity.
Jeff: Yeah, I'd like to come back to the ideological security dilemma idea in a bit, because it does seem crucial. One more question for you, Jessica, before bringing Eun A back in. Jessica, what would you say to scholars who would claim that ideology is largely downstream from state power? So for example, you point out in the article that the United States seems to be tapering its ambitions of promoting liberalism, which is consistent with facing rising competition. You also note that as China's power has grown, it's become more expansive in its objectives. I mean do we think that just as if China continues to rise, its ideological ambitions will grow too? And I suppose one reason that matters is that if that's the case, you know, then even if China doesn't have universalist ambitions now, one might still think the United States and other countries have an interest in containing China's rise before it creates the kind of competition that people are worried about. So you just sort of unpack how you see the relationship between power and ideology in in your piece.
Jessica: Thanks. We note, just as you do, that there are some ways in which power can constrain the resources that state leaders feel that they have at their disposal. But I think it's really important to note that there is no one-to-one correspondence between power and ideological strategies. China was at its most expansive and universalist under Mao, when China was significantly weaker and frankly outmatched in many of these cases.
I would also, you know, point to the United States, which, you know, there was no significant change in US power between, you know, the Biden and the second Trump administration, and yet the ways in which, you know the United States sought to use that power or believed it appropriate dramatically differed. And so all of this points to a really significant role for ideas and beliefs, both about power and how much a state has and but also about how it should be wielded and for what purposes. So, you know, even as China grows more powerful, I think I would look more to, you know, concerns about how China would use that power to advance its nationalist aims as opposed to how it would somehow move from a particularist to a universalist ideological orientation.
Jeff: That makes sense. And it is interesting in the article that that transition under Xi is on one dimension of ideology but not the other. And I think that's one value that the framework holds. Hey Eun A, I'd like to bring you back in and maybe talk about some more historical material for a moment. One of the very interesting claims you make in the article is that there really wasn't a single Cold War in ideological terms. And one example of that is how the Soviet ideology shifted from a fairly expansive concept in the early days to a more selective application under Brezhnev. I wonder if you can first tell us a little bit about how that transition happened. And then also if, why do you think that the Cold War heated up at the end of Brezhnev's term? If the country was becoming more selective, how did the Cold War escalate with, say, the invasion of Afghanistan and the Reagan administration and the so called Second Cold War in the early 1980s?
Eun A: Yeah, I think a lot of what we associate with the Cold War actually comes from the universalism of the Stalin era. But we do see a shift toward more selective universalism under Brezhnev, who really wanted to move away from that sort of brinkmanship that rendered the US-Soviet relations so unstable. The escalation that you talk about, which we don't trace in greatest detail, but which we do mention, we think came from a spiral of misperception rather than from any Soviet decision to become expansive again. So during the détente years, Brezhnev was selective and Soviet behavior through to about 1977 was fairly restrained, even though the United States increasingly perceived it as expansive. It's well established by now that the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan was driven more by fear than by ideological ambition. And, you know, the Soviets were very anxious about losing Afghanistan. And we find little evidence that they intended to use it as a springboard for further expansion. And in fact we also show that they resisted intervening for some time before finally committing. But of course critics of détente in the US read the invasion very differently and to them it looked like proof of a renewed expansive and universalist drive and that interpretation really hardens under Carter and détente collapses. So each side came to treat the other's defensive moves as the opening of a new expansionary competition and responded accordingly and that reciprocal dynamic is what we termed ideological security dilemma.
Jeff: Yeah, it's a really useful term and I think the article is a helpful warning against heading down a similar spiral with the United States and China today. Did your research reveal any guidance for how one avoids an ideological security dilemma? Or do you have any suggestions for how one might guard against that?
Eun A: Yeah, I think we begin to give some suggestions. Jessica already mentioned there are some encouraging signs of relief in this regard. Washington's retreat from expansive universalism does seem to have eased some of China's anxiety about regime security, and Chinese analysts increasingly attribute American behavior to sort of ordinary power competition rather than this campaign or crusade to transform China from within. We also do note that that this breathing room may be fragile, right? So the goal should really be to recognize the dilemma and to manage it and in particular to avoid treating every sort of move or defensive move as evidence of a fundamental shift in the other side's ideological strategy. And so our argument being that this overall framing matters enormously. And that's why we caution against leaning on the Cold War analogies, which can foreclose that kind of management that's actually still possible even when frictions in US-China relations do exist.
Jeff: I'd like to close by asking you each to say a bit about how you went about studying China's ideology in this paper. And I ask that partly because as a someone who consumes this literature but isn't an expert, I'm often just daunted by the debates that take place over what China's ideology is. So for example, there's Rush Doshi’s Long Game, and he's got sort of a very worrisome portrayal of CCP ideology. And then there's a recent International Security article on what China wants and that's much more benign. And obviously it makes sense that it's hard to pin down any state's ideology, particularly one that's as secretive as China's. So, I just wonder how you did that. Jessica can you maybe just say what are some of the sources or resources that you use in order to figure out where to locate China's ideology in your framework?
Jessica: Thanks for that. And it is a really important set of questions and ones that I take up in my forthcoming book with Oxford, What China Wants and What It Means for the World, so I spent a lot of time wrestling with this set of questions. And I think that a couple of really key points is that what is said or written often permits a gap between rhetoric and reality. And so it's really critical that one pairs the analysis of text, whether that's speeches or writings, with what the country is doing out in the world. And of course that's very messy and it needs to be and it evolves over time. And so the second point I would make is that we, although it's not as much a focus here, we do note very much the importance of the kind of pluralism of voices and debates within a country, which then are part of the story of how a country's ideology or its scope can evolve over time. And so there very much are these domestic debates and divisions over just how expansive or selective a country should be as well as how universalist or particularist. They may not use those precise labels, but these are active and ongoing debates and that means that the text and the rhetoric or the set of policy assessments are going to vary and you actually need to look across all of them and then infer which have become over time more influential based on behavior or prominence of the thinking.
All of this is to say is that it's not an exact science. The many, tThe pluralism and the noise there actually is part of why we think the ideological securitydilemma is particularly pernicious, because there are many signals. There's not just one signal that is being sent or can be read from these different texts or, you know, patterns of behavior. I mean so I think that the last point I'd end with is that we need much more humility. Right? You asked what are some of the prescriptions here for mitigating an ideological security dilemma. I think as Eun A said, we need to first resist the temptation to look at any particular piece of evidence and say, “Gotcha. Like there it is. That's the definitive evidence. There is no other interpretation possible.” And when you allow for multiple potential explanations and their evolution over time, I think you've taken a significant analytic step toward recognizing that these are mutable, right? They're changeable and they can co-evolve with actions taken by others on the international stage.
Jeff: Eun A, I'd like to give you the last word. So same question. What sort of resources or things allowed you to get your bearings on China's ideology, or in general if there's anything else you'd like to add to the conversation we haven't touched on yet?
Eun A: Yeah, mean, I think Jessica has been thinking about this far longer than I have. My foray into this was working with Jessica on our chapter together for the Routledge Handbook on Ideology and International Relations, where we tried to unpack ideology in Xi's China. And there I think we really started developing an approach that takes contestation as a crucial part of how ideology actually works, rather than a sign that ideology doesn't matter or it's just this fluffy, messy thing. And so that was useful exercise for us and hopefully also useful reading for anybody seeking to study ideology in IR.
Jeff: Thank you, Eun A, and thank you, Jessica, and thanks everyone to listening to the International Security Podcast. If you like the conversation, please take a moment to rate and review us or share us on social media because that helps other people find the show. I'm Jeff Friedman. The executive editor of International Security is Jacqueline L. Hazelton. Our producer is Monica Achen. Our guests today have been Eun A Jo and Jessica Chen Weiss. See you next time.