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Biden administration officials, like most of their recent predecessors, defensively deny that U.S. policy is to contain, hold down, or wage a new Cold War against China.
By contrast, the Chinese Communist Party continues to pursue expansionist economic, political and military goals and challenge the West at every level, especially in the informational and ideological domains. Beijing — along with its strategic allies and partners Russia, Iran and North Korea — sees the West in decline and strives to hasten its fall, just as the Soviet Union and its acolytes attempted in the original Cold War.
In fact, Moscow continues to roll out and recycle some of the same disinformation and propaganda gambits it employed for the Soviet Union, such as its recent accusations of a U.S. biological warfare campaign in Ukraine. Baseless as the claims are, they divert attention, at least for some, from the actual crimes against humanity being perpetrated by Russian forces in Ukraine as well as Vladimir Putin’s criminal actions in Russia itself, where he crushes domestic opposition to the war and his regime, often murderously.
What is missing from the West’s response to the open assault of Russia and China on the rules-based international order is a sustained information counter-offensive similar to the strategic communications campaign waged by the United States and the Free World against the Soviet Union.
In a series of major speeches, key national security and diplomatic officials in the Trump administration began the process of alerting the nation and the world, as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it, to “what the China threat means for our economy, for our liberty, and indeed for the future of free democracies around the world.”
National security adviser Robert O’Brien led off the coordinated messaging in a June 2020 speech where he described the ideological roots of the China threat. “The [Chinese Communist Party’s] stated goal is to […] remake the world according to the CCP. The effort to control thought beyond the borders of China is well under way. Over the past decade, the Party has invested billions of dollars into overseas propaganda operations to great effect.
