Is the U.S. Headed to a Cold War with China?

New York Times: “It is true… that China is emerging as a far broader strategic adversary than the Soviet Union ever was — a technological threat, a military threat, an economic rival. And while President Biden insisted at the United Nations last month that ‘we are not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs,’ his repeated references this year to a generational struggle between ‘autocracy and democracy’ conjured for some the ideological edge of the 1950s and ’60s.”

“Yet the question of whether the United States is entering a new Cold War is about more than just finding the right metaphor for this odd turn in superpower politics. Governments that plunge into a Cold War mind-set can exaggerate every conflict, convinced that they are part of a larger struggle. They can miss opportunities for cooperation, as the United States and China did in battling Covid-19, and may yet on the climate.”

“And the issue of whether this is a Cold War, or something quite different, lurks just beneath the escalating tensions over economic strategy, technological competition and military maneuvers — undersea, in space and in cyberspace.”