America and China Are Entering the Dark Forest | Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
How did relations between Beijing and Washington sour so quickly that even Kissinger now speaks of Cold War?
The conventional answer to that question is that President Donald Trump has swung like a wrecking ball into the liberal international order and that Cold War II is only one of the adverse consequences of his America First strategy.
Yet that view attaches too much importance to the change in U.S. foreign policy since 2016, and not enough to the change in Chinese foreign policy that came four years earlier, when Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Future historians will discern that the decline and fall of Chimerica began in the wake of the global financial crisis, as a new Chinese leader drew the conclusion that there was no longer any need to hide the light of China s ambition under the bushel that Deng Xiaoping had famously recommended.
Niall Ferguson