A senior White House official insisted in a briefing with reporters that there was a striking amount of convergence among G7 attendees, as the other powers moved closer to the U.S. agenda than they had been willing to under Trump. And unlike in 2018, when leaders could not agree on how to confront the thorny issue of China, this year’s final communiqué did explicitly mention the country on everybody’s mind. While this reveals the strength of Biden’s diplomatic approach over Trump’s, would China have been one of the summit’s dilemmas without the four years of chaos under the old regime? As Thomas Wright wrote in The Atlantic, just two years ago the current U.S. president was arguing that America did not need to worry about China. “Come on, man,” Biden had declared. “They’re not competition for us.” Britain’s leader was of a similar view not so long ago as well. “Let me assert this as powerfully as I can,” Johnson wrote in 2005: “We do not need to fear the Chinese.” He added: “The Chinese have neither the ability nor the inclination to dominate the world. They merely want to trade freely, and they should be encouraged.” Johnson, whose views were in line with much of the British establishment’s at the time, argued that Beijing’s integration into the world economy was an “unalloyed good” and that Britain and other countries should not respond with such “chicken-hearted paranoia.”