While the president himself also tends to describe China as primarily an economic threat, he oscillates between these two camps. Sometimes it seems as if he’s hunkering down in the trenches for a prolonged economic cold war, other times as if he’s prepared to call the whole thing off and resume being best friends with Xi if the two sides can strike a deal.

“I think we’re very close to doing something with China, but I don’t know that I want to do it,” Trump told reporters on Thursday before leaving for Argentina. “I’m open to making a deal. But frankly I like the deal that we have right now.”

Other White House officials have different priorities when it comes to China. National-Security Adviser John Bolton has ventured beyond the economic realm, arguing that the trade dispute is really “a question of power” because practices such as intellectual-property theft enhance China’s economic clout and thus its military clout. (One of the main reasons Bolton supports withdrawing from a nuclear-arms-control treaty with Russia is that it restricts the United States’ capacity to counter the Chinese nuclear arsenal.)

Mike Pence has gone further still. This fall in Washington, D.C., with an air of Reagan admonishing Gorbachev at the Brandenburg Gate, the vice president took issue not just with Beijing’s predatory trade policies and military adventurism in the South and East China Seas, but also with everything from its meddling in U.S. politics to its “Orwellian” surveillance state and persecution of religious minorities. Even as he called for a new, mutually beneficial relationship with China, Pence hinted darkly at a future of all-encompassing economic, political, military, and ideological competition.

China, the vice president warned, seeks to revise the “international order” at the expense of the United States. “A country that oppresses its own people rarely stops there,” he observed. Pence then headed off to Asia, where he championed the United States’ $60 billion answer to the billions of dollars in infrastructure loans and other investments that China is doling out around the world.

This multifaceted view of the threat from China, moreover, isn’t exclusive to the Trump administration or the Republican Party. On Thursday, in a foreign-policy address, Democratic Senator and possible 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren cast China’s “combination of authoritarianism and corrupt capitalism” as “a fundamental threat to democracy” and accused Beijing of undermining American workers and the “global order.”

Among the lessons of the pre–Cold War period is that the repercussions of these policy debates endure long after the haphazard circumstances in which policy makers resolved them. The historian Robert Messer, for example, has documented serious proposals by State Department officials in 1945 and 1946 for the United States to share its atomic secrets with the Russians, support Soviet control over Eastern Europe, and collaborate with the Kremlin on establishing nonaligned “buffer regimes” in China, Germany, and Japan. The plans were all based on the assessment that the Soviet Union did not represent an existential, intractable threat to the United States.