America vs China…A New Cold War developing?

Without a doubt, the past few weeks have resounded with echoes of old-style Cold War behavior: the Chinese Air Force running sorties inside Taiwan’s air identification zone; Beijing expanding its space program, launching three more astronauts to its space station and accelerating its tests of hypersonic missiles meant to defeat American missile defenses; and the release of a top Huawei executive for two Canadians and two Americans inwhat looked like a prisoner swap. At the same time, the U.S. announced it would provide nuclear submarine technology to Australia, with the prospect that its subs could pop up, undetected, along the Chinese coast. It didn’t escape Chinese commentators that the last time the United States shared that kind of technology was in 1958, when Britain adopted naval reactors as part of the effort to counter Russia’s expanding nuclear arsenals.

And just before the announcement of the Australia deal, satellite photographs revealed new Chinese nuclear missile fields, whose existence Beijing has not explained. American analysts are uncertain about the Chinese government’s intentions, but some inside American intelligence agencies and the Pentagon are wondering whether President Xi Jinping has decided to abandon six decades of a Chinese “minimum deterrent” strategy, even at the risk of setting off a new arms race.

The constant background din of cyberconflict and technology theft was one factor behind the Central Intelligence Agency’s announcement this month that it had created a new China mission center to position the United States, in the words of its director, William J. Burns, to confront “the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government.”

For all this, Mr. Biden’s top aides say that the old Cold War is the wrong way to frame what is happening — and that the use of the term can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead, they argue that it should be possible for the two superpowers to compartmentalize, cooperating on the climate and containing North Korea’s arsenal, even while competing on technology and trade, or jousting for advantage in the South China Sea and around Taiwan….

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