New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

by David E. Sanger

That narrative fit Washington’s global agenda so perfectly that few questioned the underlying logic. And so Washington—willfully—began to see every bit of progress in China through this lens and every setback as a brief deviation from Beijing’s inevitable destiny. Over the next two decades Washington assumed China’s economic interests would overwhelm its other national objectives. For years, until they could no longer ignore what was occurring in plain sight, Republican and Democratic presidents publicly played down the mounting evidence that China had territorial ambitions that stretched throughout the Pacific, that its use of cyber tools to steal both industrial and state secrets was designed to serve a broader national agenda, and that its growing economic power would foster a commensurate desire for political influence—as it did for every other rising power across history. Some of this misreading was encouraged by the Chinese leadership, who talked about the need to “hide one’s strength and bide one’s time,” but few asked many questions about what would happen when China moved to the next phase.