McManus: Here's why our new Cold War with China could be a good thing
President Biden has a strategy for selling his next massive economic recovery bill: exploiting fear of losing out to China.
For years, foreign policy pundits worried that the United States and China might be sliding into a new cold war — an updated version of the nuclear standoff that pitted the United States against the Soviet Union for almost half of the 20th century.They can stop worrying. They were right about the new cold war’s imminence. But it’s already arrived, and it isn’t likely to become the terrifying kind.
Now they’ve found common cause — and an opportunity to write the kind of bipartisan legislation Biden has long said he’d like to see.One leading Senate bill is written by a political odd couple, Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer of New York and conservative Republican Todd Young of Indiana. It would funnel $100 billion to the National Science Foundation for technology research, strengthen U.S.
Several of those innovations occurred after the Soviet Union shocked Americans by launching a satellite into space in 1957 — the “Sputnik moment” that suggested the United States might be falling behind technologically.The U.S.-China competition is approaching a Sputnik moment of its own: the point at which China’s economy, as measured by gross domestic product, exceeds that of the United States.