The New York Times talks up war with China

The New York Times daily email included  Biden’s foreign policy priorities, which emphasized the need to pivot from Afghanistan to big-power competition with China and Russia. It shows how Times promotes a pro-war narrative.

We have an interest in facing down the terrorist threat, the president said, but that threat is no longer centered in Afghanistan. More important, he said, is recognizing that “strategic competition with China” will “determine our future.” Other threats — particularly cyberthreats — have also moved from peripheral issues to center stage.
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The logic is hard to argue with. The China challenge is unquestionably the most important and complex problem in American national security — part military, part technological, part economic.

And the attack on Colonial Pipeline this year, which shut off a quarter of the fuel running up the East Coast, was a reminder that a well-organized cyberattack can do a lot more damage than a localized terrorism incident, even if it makes for less dramatic television

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It is hard to get Americans to focus on a China strategy when their screens are filled with images of desperate Americans, and the thousands of Afghans who helped them over two decades, trying to get out of Afghanistan before they are hunted down.

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Second, superpowers need to be able to walk and chew on their competitors at the same time. The resources needed to deal with the Afghan airlift — the one Biden on Sunday compared to the challenge of the great Berlin airlift of Cold War fame — are drastically different than the ones needed to compete with China, or to deal with cyberattacks originating from Russia.

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[Biden said that] the leaders of China and Russia would “love nothing better for us to continue to be bogged down there.”