All of this was in keeping with President Donald Trump’s blunt insistence that “we’ve found that China has been attempting to interfere in our upcoming 2018 election coming up in November against my administration,” and, more pointedly, that “they do not want me—or us—to win because I am the first president ever to challenge China on trade.”

The implicit question raised by both Pence and Trump is this: Should we be more worried about Chinese meddling than Russian meddling? Some observers have dismissed the idea, warning that it represents a distraction from ongoing Russian meddling. Others acknowledge that while China’s efforts to influence democratic outcomes are different in character from Russia’s approach, which Beijing seems to see as “ ineffective and counterproductive ,” there is no question that, as Rush Doshi and Robert D. Williams of the Brookings Institution have cautiously observed , “China has long pursued a wide-ranging and very real campaign to influence the political and informational environment of other countries, including the United States.”

Needless to say, one could see both Russia and China as dangerous rivals, and I certainly do. But in an age of intensifying partisan enmity, when large numbers of Americans question the legitimacy of the Trump presidency while similarly large numbers see Donald Trump as their champion, it is fitting that Democrats and Republicans can’t bring themselves to agree on which of the world’s revanchist powers ought to serve as what you might call our orienting enemy or, as the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington once put it, the “other” that gives our grand strategy its ideological shape.

In 1997, not long after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Huntington warned that American grand strategy was losing its coherence in part because America’s creedal identity had long been defined in opposition to just such an “other.” In the early days of the republic, he observed, it was Britain that offered this necessary contrast: While the British lived under tyranny and hierarchy, Americans told themselves, we enjoyed freedom and equality. So, too, in later years did Wilhelmine Germany provide an orienting rivalry, and then the Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms that ravaged the world for much of the 20th century. The Soviet Union’s demise therefore prompted a kind of identity crisis. “While wars at times may have a divisive effect on society,” wrote Huntington, “a common enemy can often help to promote identity and cohesion among people. The weakening or absence of a common enemy can do just the reverse.”

What Huntington did not quite anticipate is that America would find itself divided between two creedal identities—one right, one left—each of which defines itself against a different enemy. This is a pattern that has obtained in earlier eras. Consider that the founding generation was bitterly divided over whether Revolutionary France or the British Empire represented the greater threat to American liberty. The early 1900s saw debates between Germanophiles, many of whom were progressives and socialists of German extraction, and Anglophiles who embraced the idea of a world order jointly administered by a British-American condominium. The difference now is that even in the supposed twilight of American global leadership, our creedal clashes reverberate around the world.