Are Sino-American ties being reassessed?

FOR months, the conventional wisdom in Western capitals has been that a coherent foreign policy consensus, that regards China as America’s leading geo-strategic and geo-economic adversary, has been solidified in Washington. It is a view that has brought together the White House and Congress, Democrats and Republicans, labour union leaders and business executives, and one backed by an increasingly anti-China public opinion.

This “welcome-to-Cold-War-2.0” notion of an inevitable confrontation between Washington and Beijing – which required avoiding excessive dependency on Chinese supplies of critical commodities and products and restricting Chinese access to high-value Western technology – has produced the talk about the need for “de-coupling” the American (and by definition, Western) and Chinese economies.

At the same time, the perception that China was siding with Russia in its war of aggression against Ukraine has led to growing concern in Washington about the evolution of a Beijing-Moscow axis of authoritarian governments challenging the democratic West.