In this engaging book, Van Johnson of Victoria University in New Zealand and Michael Brenes of Yale compare the current rivalry between the US and China to earlier ones, especially the one between the US and the USSR during the Cold War. Rivalries like that, they argue, are not only dangerous and unproductive, but distract participants from dealing with problems that really matter such as climate change, economic and racial inequality, and the development of democracy. In the process, they argue (albeit less fully than one might hope) that the ‘China threat’ has been greatly inflated. However, a better comparison, unmentioned in the book, may be with the one between the US and Japan that smoked through the 1980a and early 1990s. The American rivalry with the USSR was primarily ideological it could be argued, while the ones with Japan and China are more similar to each other in that they are primarily economic and have been crucially impelled by the fact that Japan-bashing and China-bashing sold well politically. Indeed, they quote a prominent Republican who said in 2021 that for his party to win the White House in 2024 it would ‘need to preserve a tough-on-China message’. The book was in press during that election campaign which turned out to be notable for the rarity with which China came up. This was perhaps because China-bashing was not selling well as its economy seemed to have become less threatening as Japan’s had in the 1990s. The rivalry peril may thus be fading – unless Donald Trump manages to revitalize it.