Starting new cold war 'dangerous'

Confronting China has become one of the few issues that unites both parties in Congress at a time of intense partisan division.

Last week, the Senate passed The US Innovation and Competition Act, one of the largest industrial bills in US history to ramp up technology manufacturing aimed at outcompeting China.

It was one of the hundreds of bills introduced on Capitol Hill over the past five years aimed at shaping US-China policy.

In his article, Sanders said casting China as an existential threat to the US served some purposes.

"We are already hearing politicians and representatives of the military-industrial complex using this as the latest pretext for larger and larger defense budgets," the 79-year-old wrote.

Sanders acknowledged developing a mutually beneficial relationship with China will not be easy.

"But we can do better than a new Cold War," he concluded.

The subject of a climate change crisis has been a muse for many analysts to reflect on a likely cold war between the world's two leading economies, who also happen to be the biggest greenhouse gas producers.

"Whether a literal war results or not, one thing should be clear enough: if the two greatest carbon emitters can't figure out how to cooperate instead of picking endless fights with each other, the human future is likely to prove grim and dim indeed," said Tom Engelhardt, an author and a fellow at Type Media Center, a nonprofit in New York.

While "containing" China is the foreign policy focus of the moment in the US, "this is the very time when what truly needs to be contained is the overheating of this planet", he wrote in "We Don't Have Time to Waste on Cold Wars", published in The Nation magazine last week.