America and China

 "Shortly after the conversation with US president Biden, Mr. Xi reportedly told local officials in northwest China that “the biggest source of chaos in the present-day world is the United States,” which he also described as “the biggest threat to our country’s development and security.”

Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Blinken are betting that Mr. Xi’s declaration reveals a pang of Chinese insecurity, a fear that, for all the country’s bluster about new weapons systems and advances in artificial intelligence, it is vulnerable to “choke points” where the United States remains in control of foundational technology.

The result is that both nations are racing to secure their own supply chains and to reduce dependency on each other — a reversal of 40 years of economic integration. But more broadly it reflects the end of a post-Cold War construct that assumed the interests of the two powers were inextricably intertwined.

America, Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner wrote, “underestimated China’s willingness to directly take on the United States, or use its economic might to rewrite the rules of trade and technology in its favor” and failed “to detect Mr. Xi’s authoritarian-nationalist instincts.”

Today Mr. Campbell is the White House Asia policy coordinator, with new authorities over a range of government departments. And Mr. Ratner, recently installed as the Pentagon’s top official for Asia, is in charge of a four-month rush project to reassess the military competition between the two countries.

Mr. Ratner’s review is expected to encompass everything from Beijing’s slow-but-steady embrace of a more sophisticated nuclear arsenal to its growing capabilities in space and hypersonic weaponry, much of it intended to keep American carrier groups at bay — and prevent the United States from taking the risk of mounting a defense of Taiwan.

“The Cold War was primarily a military competition,” Mr. Campbell said. But “the modern ramparts of competition will be in technology,” he said, such as 5G networks, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics and human sciences.

Competing in those areas, Mr. Sullivan said recently, would require “making progressive, ambitious public investment here in the United States so that we stay on the cutting edge.”

Elements of Mr. Trump’s approach remain, of course, including punishing tariffs on Chinese imports, which one Biden official briefing reporters last month called a source of “leverage.”"