While the US has long publicly presented its conflict with China as primarily geostrategic in nature, a 2018 National Security Council document declassified earlier this year states in plain terms the White House sees it as a fight between capitalism and socialism.
China's chief envoy to the United States castigated Washington leaders and thinkers on Tuesday for approaching US competition with China as a new “cold war,” calling the move a “misjudgment.”
Under former US President Donald Trump, the White House and Pentagon began a vast strategic shift away from the War on Terror and toward what it termed “great power competition” with Russia and China, particularly China, which has been singled out as the greatest threat worldwide to US supremacy. US President Joe Biden, who took office in January, has continued that approach by expanding sanctions against Chinese officials and companies, as well as attempting to rally regional nations against China.
Biden said in an April speech before Congress that the US was “in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century.” He also claimed he wanted “competition, not conflict” with the East Asian socialist state, but also cast that relationship as one between “autocracies” and democracy, mirroring much of the language used to frame the titanic mid-20th-century struggle between the US and its capitalist allies and the Soviet Union and its socialist allies, which for a time also included…
