When the Communists were sworn enemies of Capitalism, the Reds were vilified and feared because they represented a danger, not to our country, but to our economic system and leadership. Once they became Capitalists too, they suddenly became all right, they were business competitors, not national enemies. Capitalists do not fear their business rivals, they can always work out some kind of accommodation with "competitors". Price fixing is much more profitable than price war, for everybody concerned. Crony Capitalism is, after all, the only kind there is. The real enemies, the real danger, the real competition comes from the workers and the customers. Those are the ones you can't afford to ignore, the ones you have to make sure are kept in their place..

Like feudal lords, there are always occasional conflicts and skirmishes amongst the nobility, but real war (and cooperation among the aristocracy) came when the peasants revolted, or some upstart decided he wanted to be King.
That's when you got Magna Carta, The British and American Revolutions, and Fort Sumter.

When the Chinese turned capitalist, and when the Russians followed soon after and the Soviet empire fell, our leadership started seeing them as business competitors, and tried to work out deals with them to divvy up the markets.

Unfortunately, they never got the memo. They still see the world as competing nation-states, not megacorporations crafting "deals", and the fact that they are now capitalist too does not change their competitive relationship with us.

When I was in high school I used to outrage my friends by telling them; "You think the Soviets and Red Chinese are a big problem now, you haven't seen anything yet. Wait till they give up on Communism and become Capitalist. We're going to have our hands full."

I used to say that half-jokingly. I can see now I had really stumbled on to something.