Over the last several years, countless doyens of the American foreign policy establishment have called on the United States to recognize it’s fighting a “New Cold War” with China. In January 2019, Iraq War cheerleader Robert Kaplan warned that US-China antagonism represented “nothing less than a new cold war” that “will last decades and will only get worse.” Last December, imperial apologist Niall Ferguson likewise predicted an emergent “Cold War II” with Beijing. Writing in the New York Times, Ferguson claimed that “a cluster of . . . conflicts” ranging from a “technology war” to a potential “currency war” were fast approaching. He welcomed the conflict, insisting that “if Cold War II confines itself to an economic and technological competition between two systems — one democratic, the other not — its benefits could very well outweigh its costs.”

US leaders, for their part, are doing what they can to ensure the China hawks get their wish. Throughout the current pandemic, President Donald Trump has framed the virus in jingoistic terms, drawing on centuries of racist tropes that portray Asian immigrants as bacilli by calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus.” Missouri senator Josh Hawley has deployed similarly antagonistic rhetoric. “Beijing,” Hawley has asserted, “wants the world to trust it and grow dependent on it, so that it can control us. But the world won’t easily do that if it knows that Beijing is responsible for this pandemic.”

Anti-Chinese xenophobia is hardly confined to the Right. Last week, Joe Biden’s campaign released an attack ad in which the senescent septuagenarian attempted to out-racist Trump. In the ad, the Biden team accuses the president — over images of marching troops — of “roll[ing] over for the Chinese” because he naively “took [China’s] word” that it could contain the novel coronavirus. Only Biden, the ad proclaims, was willing to force China to allow US health officials into the country.