It's fast becoming obvious that we've stumbled into a new Cold War with China. The trade war was only the opening act.
Funny as hell, I think this is precisely what China needs to push themselves over the brink and achieve true superpower status. They couldn't do it through just a 'peaceful' rise.
Vice President Pence’s speech to the Hudson Institute Thursday has been widely portrayed in the global press as an official declaration that the world’s two largest economies are engaged in a “New Cold War.” It’s hard to read it any other way.The origin of the term “Cold War” is generally credited to George Orwell, who used it in a trenchant 1945 essay pondering the geo-strategic implications of the atomic bomb. The existence of a weapon so destructive, Orwell predicted, would put an end to overt shooting wars between great powers, and replace them instead with endless below-the-brink hostilities: espionage, subterfuge, influence-peddling, propaganda, and proxy wars. Conflict would stop short of direct combat—but drag on across many fronts without resolution; the bomb’s legacy, he warned, would be a “peace that is no peace.”That proved a prescient description of the rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union from 1945 until the collapse of the Berlin Wall—and, in recent months, has become an apt characterization of the Sino-American relationship.In his Hudson Institute address, Pence detailed a litany of Chinese offenses: meddling in domestic US elections; doling out unfair subsidies to state-owned companies; forcing US companies to surrender technology as the price of competing in the Chinese market; mounting cyber-attacks on US companies and government agencies; recklessly confronting the US naval forces in the South China Sea; bullying Taiwan; and trampling the rights of its own citizens.China’s goal, Pence charged, was to thwart a second term for Donald Trump, “push the United States of America from the Western Pacific and attempt to prevent us from coming to the aid of our allies.”Pence’s speech came two days after a Chinese warship sailed within 45 yards of a US destroyer in waters near one of the disputed islets China claims in the Spratly archipelago.