be contained and beaten" among the two major political parties in Congress, the general public and even the business sector. It has been argued however that employing the Cold War playbook for the seemingly destined-to-fail Soviet Union, a state-run and largely closed economy will not work in the case of China because of its sheer size, growing wealth and vibrant economy. To halt development progress, particularly the Made in China 2025 plan, the US has responded by making it harder for Chinese tech companies from obtaining US technologies by investing in or acquiring US tech companies, and even attempting to stifle specific companies, namely Huawei, ZTE and ByteDance, from doing business domestically and abroad allegedly due to unspecified or speculative national security risks. With senior Trump administration officials such as John Bolton, Peter Navarro and Robert Lighthizer demanding any comprehensive trade deal feature "structural changes" which would essentially entail China surrendering its sovereignty over its economic system and planning (its Made in China 2025 industrial plan) and permanently ceding technology leadership to the US-an untenable situation to the Chinese- some see trade tensions continuing long into the future. In the face of the US tariffs in the trade war and the sanctions on Russia following the annexation of Crimea, China and Russia have cultivated closer economic ties as well as security and defense cooperation to offset the losses. Belt and Road Initiative Another high-profile debate among some people in the United States and China on the international stage is the observation about China's growing geopolitical footprint in "soft power diplomacy" and international development finance. Particularly, this surrounds China's Belt and Road Initiative (formerly "One Belt, One Road"), which has been labeled as "aggressive" and "debt trap diplomacy", with the latter referring to the sale of an interest in a 99-year lease by Sri Lanka in the Port of Hambantota to a Chinese state-owned company after Sri Lanka had trouble on a loan to develop the port. Some commentators say that China is utilizing and selling the expertise it has gained in poverty alleviation and infrastructure building used in its own modernization experience to other developing countries. A study conducted by the Rhodium Group found only one case of asset seizure, the oft-cited Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka, saying that China is more likely to restructure or write-off the debt. Strategic alliances US–Japan–Australia Then-U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice visited Australia