‘The Post-Cold War Era Is Over’: White House National Security Advisor

Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The international order has entered a new epoch and the United States will need to vigorously defend its way of life from encroaching authoritarianism from China and Russia, according to a senior U.S. official.

White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan speaks at a press conference in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, on Aug. 17, 2021. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

How the United States acts over the course of the next decade will make or break its efforts to preserve a liberal international order against the autocratic advances of China’s communist regime, said White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan.

“We’re in the early years of a decisive decade,” Sullivan said at an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security and the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington.

“The terms of our competition with the People’s Republic of China will be set. The window of opportunity to deal with shared challenges like climate change will narrow drastically even as the intensity of those challenges grows.”

Sullivan delivered the remarks hours after the unveiling of the Biden administration’s national security strategy, which designated communist China as the greatest challenge facing the United States.

“The PRC’s assertiveness at home and abroad is advancing an illiberal vision across economic, political, security, and technological realms in competition with the west,” Sullivan said, using the acronym for the regime’s official name.

“It is the only competitor with the intent to reshape the international order and the growing capacity to do it.”

Sullivan said that the world had left the post-Cold War era, often associated with the rise of globalization, international cooperation, and a general lack of military conflict between great powers.

Now, he said, a new era of geopolitical competition has arisen, tied closely to the push by China and Russia towards a multipolar world order. In this burgeoning era, autocratic nations would seek to rewrite the rules of the international system according to their whims, he said.

“The world’s major autocracies believe that the democratic world is in decline,” Sullivan said.

“They seek to advance a very different vision, where might makes right and technological and economic coercion squeezes anyone who steps out of line.”

To that end, Sullivan said that the authoritarian philosophies of Chinese communist leader Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin contained a “fundamental fragility” that could be overcome by a united “free, open, and prosperous international order.”

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