If this sounds an awful lot like the threat the United States faced from North Korea, it’s because it is. As the Trump administration is engaged in some kind of detente with North Korea (meaning Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is talking to the North Koreans about denuclearization as Pyongyang continues to develop its weapons program), it has managed to increase tensions with China.

The report also mentions China strengthening “its military space capabilities” at a time when President Trump’s “Space Force” idea for militarizing space is meeting with skepticism and pushback.

As Reuters points out, the military-to-military relations between the United States and China have been tested, and the cracks started to show in May, when the Pentagon withdrew an invitation for China to participate in multinational naval exercises.

All of this comes on top of recent reports that China is testing a hypersonic missile that could be developed to carry a nuclear warhead that can evade all current U.S. detecting systems and travel at up to six times the speed of sound (4,563 mph).

An escalating trade war

If taken at face value (rather than at attempt to ratchet support for increased defense spending and the president’s increasingly hard line on China), then the Pentatgon report sheds light on on yet another troubling development in U.S.-China relations.

Things have been nothing short of horrendous on the trade front, when in an attempt to close the trade gap with China, President Trump slapped tariffs on Chinese goods, and China responded in kind, which has so far served to hurt American businesses.

In a very clear power move, China earlier this month said that it would continue to buy oil from Iran, a country the Trump administration is trying to ostensibly sanction into regime change.

Having pulled out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, President Trump reimposed sanctions on Iran, with oil sanctions coming into effect on November 5. The Trump administration has said it will sanction countries still buying oil from Iran — unless they can get waivers. China, being the top importer of Iranian oil, is unlikely to get one, and has already declared that it will very much continue to buy Iranian crude.

When asked about his China strategy at a dinner in early August, the president replied that he wasn’t going to “go there,” presumably because he hopes the new Iran Action Group, whose creation was announced on Thursday, will handle it.

But the man leading the team, Brian Hook, did not have much to say when asked specifically about China’s defiance of U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil. Here’s his full answer in his first interaction with the press in his new position: