The testimony this tweet links to is completely off the rails. But my critique would be different from most who see the author Daniel Tobin err in that he projects Cold War ideological rivalry onto current Sino-American relations. https://twitter.com/PLMattis/status/1258952003671199746

Today's Sino-American relationship is indeed in some ways similar to the Cold War but not because Beijing seeks to convert the world to Marxism-Leninism (as Tobin in his ignorance suggests).

Rather what we see here is an effort to recast a struggle for power and influence in explicitly ideological terms, which would allow the US to claim moral superiority. Every action taken in defence of one's position in the global hierarchy is then seen as a priori justifiable.

Containment is justifiable and, indeed, roll-back may be justifiable because you have the moral right, even the moral responsibility, to contain and roll back. But the key lesson of the Cold War is that the other side was *never* the ideological threat we imagined it was.

Soviet grand ambitions, such as they were, were invariably constrained by realities: economic problems, the difficulty of keeping allies in line, the imperative of acceptance by the West. The Soviet Union was not as formidable an enemy as we like to imagine.

So, yeah, the Sino-American relationship could be heading towards a Cold War. Not because Beijing is an ideological threat. It is not. But because the Soviet Union never was. It became a bogeyman as a result of a process driven primarily by US domestic politics.

This is what might happen to China, too.