China wants to “break the West” and is spending a lot of money in Europe to achieve that goal, a senior State Department official warned Tuesday.

“Both Russia and China want to break the West: Russia wants to splinter it and China wants to supplant it,” Wess Mitchell, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee. “One place where they are especially aggressive is in Central and Eastern Europe.”

Mitchell pointed to instances in which Russia has “intimidated and attacked neighbors,” but he put extra emphasis on the Chinese Communist Party’s bid for influence on the doorstep of the West. China, he noted, spent more than $24 billion financing infrastructure and other investment projects in the region between 2005 and 2017 with the overall goal of acquiring strategically-significant footholds in Europe.

“They use what you could call debt-book diplomacy where they invest in strategic properties and infrastructure on pretty easy terms and then they wait until countries can't service the debt and they claim the infrastructure,” Mitchell said of China. “They're sharpening their outreach and soft power, the creation of Confucius centers. So, they're competing for influence.”

Those efforts haven’t been matched by the United States in recent years. He said “we have lost a lot of ground" due to “unforced errors” and strategic mistakes. He pointed, in particular, to former President Obama’s decision to “pivot to Asia” at the expense of Central and Eastern Europe, a strategic shift that coincided with his administration’s attempt to “reset” relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin following Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008.

“I think in the recent past when the United States has often been harder on our allies — like Hungary and Poland — than we are on Russia, through periods like the reset, I think that that has been a mistake,” Mitchell said. “I think it created vacuums that others have filled.”