Donald Trump and Xi Jinping: meet the new cold warriors

United States Foreign policy does not usually draw much attention in US election campaigns. It was given a few token minutes in the Democratic primary debates. But that was before coronavirus. Anti-China sentiment is now the primary fuel of Donald Trump’s re-election effort, in the absence of a workable alternative. It will be increasingly hard to run on the economy, as the president had hoped, or on the administration’s pandemic response, as the human cost of the debacle becomes clear. Sinophobia has proven all the more attractive an option as it claims to explain both failures. “Unfortunately, this is sometimes the tunnelling logic of democratic systems,” Jude Blanchette, a China expert at...