US' dangerously dreaming of new 'Cold War'

US policy toward China appears to be in the hands of deranged sleep walkers. Believing they are living in days of an imagined glorious past, they are instead, wrecking their own country's future.

The US media and policymaking circles are full of comparisons and debates between the needless confrontations Washington is manufacturing with Beijing and the long US confrontation with the Soviet Union through the four and a half decades of the Cold War.

However, nothing is more dangerous and self-destructive than to fall in love with a historical memory and then to try and blindly apply it in the very different circumstances of a very different age.