President Joe Biden and his national security team have contended since he took office that all the easy, tempting comparisons between this era and the Cold War are misleading, a vast oversimplification of a complex geopolitical moment.
The differences are, indeed, stark: The United States never had the kind of technological and financial interdependence with its Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, that so complicates the increasingly bitter and dangerous downward spiral in the relationship with China.