In pursuing their new anti-Chinese line, American officials liked to describe themselves as “principled realists.”91 They criticized their predecessors for failing to realize the extent of the China threat. But what exactly was the nature of this American realism? Clearly, China’s rise was a world historic event reversing a power asymmetry that had framed the last quarter millennium. The CCP was indeed an ideological antagonist and its ambition was formidable, but was “containing” China a realistic twenty-first-century prospect, or was it a distorted echo of the Cold War with the Soviet Union?
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