On Feb. 22, 1946, George Kennan, U.S. Chief of Mission in Moscow, sent the State Department a long telegram explaining the behavior of the Soviet Union and how best to deal with it. The gist of the telegram was that the Soviets, pressed by economic failure and bound by Marxist-Leninist ideology, found a perfect enemy in the United States and were uninterested in compromise.

This being the case, the best way for the U.S. to deal with the Soviet Union was to build up the still-free countries of Western Europe and do all it could to contain Soviet expansion. This policy became known as “containment” and its immediate result was the massive aid program to post-war Western Europe known as the Marshall Plan.

A year later in, writing under the byline “X” in Foreign Affairs, Kennan expanded upon these views. He was a realist who believed international relations ought to be “guided strictly by consideration of national interest,” not treaties and alliances. While often revised, Kennan’s containment strategy would largely define U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union until the end of the Cold War.

Now, more than 70 years later, the U.S. and its allies again face a communist rival that views the United States as an adversary, seeks global influence, and wants to supplant America as the world’s dominant power. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) challenge is generational and cuts across economic, military, political, and social spheres.

The United States is at war. Don’t be deceived because soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, a branch of the CCP, aren’t running down the street.

While America and the world are in the grip of the made in China COVID-19 pandemic, the CCP has launched a global disinformation campaign reminiscent of the Cold War, blaming others for the spread of the virus. Equally important, it is moving at warp speed as the first major world economy to end lockdowns and start up its economy. The CCP is acting to shape the pandemic narrative and geopolitical shifts in the post-COVID 19 world.

Ever since President Nixon’s opening to China in 1972, the U.S. has largely sought constructive engagement, which would supposedly help democratize China and integrate it into the American-led international economic order. As a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system, China would be highly motivated to maintain peaceful relations with other countries.

The integration strategy has not worked. Nor has the bipartisan support for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization. Recent events confirm that China is challenging the existing international order with impunity.

Look no further than its land reclamation efforts, claiming some 80 percent of the South China Sea as its sovereign territory, challenging Japan’s administrative control of the Senkaku islands, the “One Road, One Belt” new Silk Road Eurasian integration plan, and more.

While the United States has wasted decades in its dealings with the CCP, it is still not too late and George Kennan’s notion of containment remains relevant. The United States strategy should be to preserve and deepen relationships with Asian countries fearful of China’s power and aggressiveness.

China has few allies in the region. The United States should be working closely with India, Vietnam, Japan, Philippines, Australia, Taiwan, and others to contain China, and in the process advance America’s economic, political, and security interests in the Asia Pacific region. Closely related, the U.S. should be forging relationships with developing nations across the globe to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Today, George Kennan’s prescription that “the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies” offers the best hope of containing China’s ambitions. The challenge is that Americans seek instant gratification, while China plays the long game. One thing is certain: Everyone will be feeling their age before this contest is played out.

The outbreak of the Chinese Communist Party virus has accelerated the need for the United States and others to reset the relationship with this autocratic crowd that rules by repression rather than consent. For too long America and others have become economically dependent on the Chinese Communist Party’s totalitarian regime. Governments, corporations and even academic institutions that are ostensibly committed to human rights have been all too happy to do business with the Chinese Communist Party.

China is a global threat to human rights. Witness its terrible repression and systematic abuse of the Uighur Muslims, Christians, Falun Gong, Tibetan Buddhists, and the protesters in Hong Kong. The Chinese Communist Party has carried out arbitrary detention, torture, and imposed pervasive controls on daily life.

The Chinese Communist Party has constructed an Orwellian high-tech surveillance state to monitor and suppress criticism and free speech over China. It engages in these practices with total disregard of the world’s view of these abuses and uses its economic clout to silence critics. Economic clout translates into political influence.

Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign to aggressively silence criticism extends beyond its borders. Last year the party responded to a simple tweet by the general manager of the Houston Rockets supporting the Hong Kong protesters by demanding he be fired and by canceling broadcasts of N.B.A. games. After a series of obsequious apologies, the N.B.A. stood firm.

Also last year, the Chinese Communist Party demanded that foreign airlines remove references to Taiwan from their websites because it regards Taiwan as a renegade province. The four American airlines affected by the order – American, Delta, Hawaiian, and United – complied with the order. Clearly, they were ignorant of Churchill’s definition of appeasement: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last”.

In 2017, the Chinese Communist Party pressured the Cambridge University Press to remove more than 300 articles from its “China Quarterly” journal. The censored articles covered topics the Chinese Communist Party considered incriminating, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre, a subject that remains taboo in China.

In April and May of 1989 thousands of students and civilians protested in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, calling for a more democratic government. The Chinese Communist Party prohibited foreign newscasts of the protests.

On June 3 and 4, Chinese troops entered the square and fired on the protestors, ending the demonstrations. Estimates of the death toll range from several hundred to thousands. It has been estimated that 10,000 people were arrested during and after the protests. If the protestors had hoped the United States and other countries that had rhetorically championed the universal human right to freedom would support them, they were sorely disappointed.

Though President George H. W. Bush initially criticized the crackdown and announced some sanctions, nothing else happened. The Bush administration believed that as the West opened up to China and the country became more prosperous it would also become more democratic. Is anyone surprised that they were wrong?

The authoritarian regime of the Chinese Communist Party is not a friend. The global pandemic could have been stopped at its source. Instead, the Chinese Communist Party suppressed the truth, destroyed evidence, and lied to the world.

It’s not surprising that the Chinese Communist Party lied to the world. If it is willing to lie to its own citizens about how many the virus killed, why would you ever assume that it would tell the world the truth? If they don’t treat their own people with respect, why would anyone believe they would treat others differently? Put another way, if the Chinese Communist Party has its way, it is not just China’s 1.4 billion people who won’t get justice – it will be the whole world.

It is an open question whether the international community and the United States will make common cause and robustly respond to the Chinese Communist Party’s role in unleashing the coronavirus. But given the Chinese Communist Party’s dishonesty and duplicity, now is the time to recall President Reagan’s famous formula when dealing with the Soviet Union: “Trust but verify.

More than 18 years since President George W. Bush ordered bombing in response to the 9/11 attacks, America’s “forever war” in Afghanistan may finally be nearing an end. The United States signed a dicey deal with the Taliban on February 29 amid upbeat rhetoric to end the war and lead to the withdrawal of American forces.

The peace is fragile. To make it work, the Taliban and the Afghan government negotiate the political terms for ending the war and sharing power.

Afghanistan is but one of a string of dicey foreign entanglements that mark U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War America’s longest war came at a tremendous cost of blood and treasure. By the numbers, it claimed the lives of more than 2,300 American soldiers, and 20,000 more have been injured. Tens of thousands of Afghans have been killed. It has cost U.S. taxpayers $2 trillion, according to Brown University’s Cost of War Project.

Since the disappearance of the existential threat of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has indulged a missionary calling to remake the world in its image. It has ranged far and wide to export American values: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and the beat goes on.

In the decades before the Cold War ended, the United States used its military and economic power to defend American interests at home and abroad. America’s desire to remake the world in its image was held in check by the existence of a powerful geopolitical rival: The Soviet Union.

When the fall of the Berlin Wall ended the Cold War, the American political establishment believed it had prevailed in a cosmic struggle with communism. The United States could bask in its new role as the world’s sole superpower. It was perched at the pinnacle of power.

History had validated American-style liberal democratic capitalism. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that humanity had reached its final stage: liberal capitalist democracy. The world was witnessing the End of History. He predicted that unipolar American influence would bring lasting world peace. The U.S. had no major existential threats and everything seemed possible. The future looked bright.

This was a seismic event, yet there was no debate about America’s role in world affairs. Instead, the United States under three presidents chose to pursue a policy of promoting American values as universal values, what some have described as “missionary work” or, alternatively, “nation building” – using American power to reshape domestic institutions in foreign lands, regardless of whether American interests were at stake.

This foreign policy shift was embraced by both political parties. The post-Cold War presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama wandered into well-intentioned but clueless adventures in nation building, most of which have turned out badly. Elites had their heads up their hindquarters.

But it was in Afghanistan and Iraq that the notion of nation building became the ultimate policy objective. The Bush crowd, with extravagant hubris and ignorant of local conditions, thought that such transformations were feasible with limited resources. The United States failed to achieve a decisive victory in either war.

It is ironic that because the United States is so powerful and intrinsically secure, it has the freedom to wander around the world intruding in various places. The outcomes don’t have a decisive impact on American security, even if things go as badly as in the Vietnam debacle.

But the emergence of China as a global superpower and the reemergence of Russia have put an end to that post-Cold War world. Truth be told, the United States no longer has the power to make unilateral changes in other political cultures.

On the other hand, Americans can take comfort in the German statesman Otto Bismarck’s reputed comment that “There appears to be a special providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.” Hopefully that is true.