"We have to recognize that America faces an existential struggle between democracy and autocracy. Beijing and Moscow seek to change the international order by exploiting vulnerable nations through coercive economic and military pressure," Reed said during a committee hearing. "America must offer an alternative to this kind of foreign policy."
Reed also warned that the world had shifted from a bilateral rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War to "entering an era of trilateral nuclear competition" given China’s "growing nuclear arsenal."
He said that strategic competition in the long term was not only a matter of military or economic power, but of "ideas."