President Joe Biden’s administration said Wednesday it will win China as the United States’ sole global rival, although it is also working to contain a “dangerous” Russia.

“The post-Cold War era is over, and the competition is on between the great powers to shape what comes next,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said in a speech at Georgetown University to address the national present security strategy.

The strategy said the 2020s would be a “defining decade for America and the world” — to reduce conflict, promote democracy over authoritarianism, and confront the key shared threat of climate change.

“We will prioritize maintaining an enduring competitive advantage over the PRC while curtailing a still deeply dangerous Russia,” the strategy said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia “poses an imminent threat to the free and open international system and today recklessly disregards the fundamental laws of the international order, as his brutal war of aggression against Ukraine has shown,” the strategy added.

China, on the other hand, “is the only competitor that both intends to transform the international order and increasingly has the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological might to advance that goal.”

The strategy’s release was delayed by the Ukraine war as Biden spent most of this year rallying anti-Russia allies and bringing billions of dollars in weapons to Kyiv, but it remains broadly consistent with preliminary guidance released shortly after his assumption of office in January 2021.

“I don’t think the war in Ukraine fundamentally changed Joe Biden’s approach to foreign policy, which predates his presidency,” Sullivan previously told reporters.

“But I believe it encapsulates in vivid color the key elements of our approach – the emphasis on allies, the importance of strengthening the hand of the democratic world and standing up for our fellow democracies and for democratic values,” he said.

The strategy said the United States is ready to also work with competitors on common interests amid the Biden team’s talks with top carbon emitter China over climate change, which it describes as “the existential challenge of our time.”

But the White House stressed the risks from China, warning that its rapid advances in technology are aimed at shaping the world order in support of “its own authoritarian model.”

Despite Beijing’s repeated denials that it seeks hegemony, the strategy said China “has ambitions to create an enlarged sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and to become the world’s leading power,” using the US’s preferred term for the broader Asian region .

The White House also linked a burgeoning China to Biden’s vow to prioritize the US middle class, saying Beijing is trying to keep the world dependent on its economy while restricting access to its own billion-dollar market.

The strategy called for big domestic investments two months after Biden signed a $52 billion package to improve US semiconductor-building capacity, but also said the United States was trying to “peacefully” agree with China coexist and manage the competition “responsibly”.

“We don’t seek to see the competition devolve into confrontation or a new cold war, and we don’t engage in each country simply as a proxy battlefield,” Sullivan said.

The strategy release comes as Biden promises a reassessment of ties with a longtime US ally, Saudi Arabia, which was looking to cut oil production – benefiting energy exporter Russia and potentially raising gas prices for American consumers weeks before the congressional election.

Amid reconciliation between Israel and the Arab Gulf states, the strategy called for a “more integrated Middle East” that would reduce the long-term “resource needs” of the United States, which has provided security to oil-producing nations for decades.

The strategy also recognized the need to address democratic shortcomings at home, where former President Donald Trump refused to concede defeat in the 2020 election and his supporters led a deadly attack on the US Capitol.

“We have not always lived up to our ideals and in recent years our democracy has been challenged from within. But we have never strayed from our ideals.”