Starkly divergent views of the US under Donald Trump and Xi Jinping’s China came into focus in Washington on Tuesday, when a lawmaker said Beijing was part of an “axis of evil” and a Chinese academic suggested Trump was trying to carve up the world to the detriment of America’s allies. Delivering a keynote address at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, US congressman Rob Wittman, vice-chair of the influential House Armed Services Committee, said the American belief in the rule of law was among principles that the US has “in common with other nations around the world”. “There’s a big contrast between the United States and our allies and China, Russia, North Korea and Iran,” the Virginia Republican said. “That is a building axis of evil. The same thing is emerging today, as we saw in 1938 and we ought to be very, very mindful of that.” Wittman, who also serves as chairman of the House subcommittee on tactical air and land forces, called for cooperation with allies in a range of military fronts, including shipbuilding and critical minerals supply, to match the defence industrial base that China has built up under Xi. In particular, he lauded the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – a strategic group made up of the US, India, Japan and Australia, better known as the Quad – and the Aukus alliance comprising the US, Britain and Australia, which was established by Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, amid growing Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific region. Wittman’s usage of the term “axis of evil” echoed testimony before the House Armed Services Committee last year by retired Admiral John Aquilino, then the commander of US forces in the Indo-Pacific, underscoring the degree to which Washington’s military establishment sees Beijing as a grave threat to US interests. The phrase was first used by former US president George W. Bush to link Iraq under Saddam Hussein to Iran and North Korea, invoking the Axis powers of imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy of the early 20th century. Speaking in a debate panel after Wittman’s remarks, Da Wei of Tsinghua University in Beijing, called Wittman out for his reference to 1938 and used another World War II analogy to describe some of Trump’s most jarring foreign policy threats, including annexation of the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland. “So when President Trump made the announcement after inauguration about Panama, about Greenland … friends asked me, ‘so now Russia is taking Ukraine, US is taking Greenland and mainland China may take Taiwan. So are you going to have a Yalta Agreement?’,” Da said. Beijing sees Taiwan as part of China to be reunited by force if necessary. Most countries, including the US, do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state, but Washington is opposed to any attempt to take the self-governed island by force and is committed to supplying it with weapons. “You can say this is a joke, but I mean, there are some fundamental changes happening within the US’ alliance relations,” Da added. The Yalta Conference of 1945 brought Soviet leader Josef Stalin, US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill together in the Black Sea resort of Yalta, where the leaders agreed to divide Europe into spheres of influence for the victorious allies, but also laid the groundwork for the Cold War. “The US is still the most powerful country in the world and in the foreseeable future, but … I don’t think the US wants to lead now,” Da said. “President Trump is just a symptom of this fundamental change among the people” of the US who “want to shift back from the universalism to nationalism”. The Tsinghua specialist on US-China relations debated with Rick Waters of the Eurasia Group’s China practice, who said the Trump administration’s differences with Biden on Sino-American policy was more a matter of tactics than of overall goals. “From a strategic lens, I would be very surprised if in four years we would see anything other than further consolidation of the Quad and its diversification, which has already been occurring in security realms such as maritime domain awareness,” said Waters, who served as US deputy assistant secretary of state for China and Taiwan under Biden. “I think Aukus will continue to develop, and it will become intertwined with the debates we heard about this morning over the urgent need to build out the defence industrial base in this country,” he added.