Donald Trump doesn’t have much interest in numbers and the real world, but that is where the rest of us live so it is worth checking in periodically. Trump and many others — including many Democrats — are anxious to see the United States as engaged in a Cold War-type competition with China.

I have argued that this is a foolish way to shape foreign policy. The first Cold War was not a lot of fun. We threw a lot of money in the toilet building weapons, most of which were thankfully never used. But we did have hot wars in Korea and Vietnam, as well as a large number of interventions in various countries around the world. And we did have a number of flashpoints, most notably the Cuban missile crisis, where a wrong step could have........

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