Thank you, Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for their presentations.
Dr. Medeiros, I'm interested in your comments on this matter.
You talked about American foreign policy, and I have before me an article from over the weekend talking about Secretary of State Pompeo's speech in the Czech Republic last week. In his remarks, in the same speech, he said, “What’s happening now isn’t Cold War 2.0.” He talked about the challenge of resisting the CCP threat as being in some ways much more difficult; saying that the CCP is “enmeshed in our economies, in our politics, in our societies in ways the Soviet Union never was”, and made other references. All the references, apparently, to China were not to the People's Republic of China or to the government but to the Communist Party.
The language in his speech about it not being a cold war seems to me rather ideological in nature and not diplomatic in terms of a strategic action by a state vis-à-vis another state. Is that language helpful, or are we really talking about an ideological battle with the Communist Party, as opposed to dealing with authoritarianism or anti-democratic activity, etc.? Could you comment on that, please?