Were it not for the US warship and Chinese fighter jets in the Taiwan Strait last week, the announcement of the Strategic Competition Act of 2021 might have made more of a splash. Before Beijing’s crushing of Hong Kong’s political opposition , the revelation of Uygur internment camps and the massing of Chinese vessels around Whitsun Reef to suspiciously wait out bad weather for weeks, any one section of the nearly 300-page omnibus of anti-China resolutions would have generated a wave of analysis. The daily drama leaves little time to dissect a document distilling what the US legislative branch will expect of the White House in terms of US-China relations for many administrations into the future. But for those hoping for a more pragmatic approach to China by Washington, the legislation hammered out jointly by the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (read: very likely to pass) is worth a look. The Obama administration spent too much time watching developments like the build-up of Chinese military installations in the South China Sea and accepting formal dialogue with Beijing as a substitute for actual movement towards greater economic reciprocity. The Trump years gave us a cacophony of mixed messaging, with the president praising Xi Jinping while his top diplomat Mike Pompeo turned the State Department into a factory of anti-China hyperbole, excoriating anyone who ever had the temerity to do business with the world’s second-largest economy. With the Menendez-Risch bill, we might finally be entering a Goldilocks period for Washington’s China policy. Compared to other bills aiming to counter China, it is heavier on strategic reviews and mandates for better military and economic relations with countries throughout the Indo-Pacific. Let’s call it the “pivot to Asia” that Barack Obama aimed for but never realised. Thankfully, it’s shorter on unsupported conclusions and overwrought warnings. On Xinjiang, for example, we get the standard calls for sanctions, but without any mention of genocide . We’re all better off without that allegation until we have evidence to support it. The unequivocality with which the Biden administration has echoed Pompeo’s determination that the Chinese government is engaged in a systematic extermination of Uygurs is an unfortunate consequence of domestic politics. The force of Pompeo’s genocide narrative was such that President Joe Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken had no choice but to agree . Otherwise, they would have given the Republicans enough ammunition to cripple the administration just as it needed to get on with the business of repairing the damage Trump did to US alliances. This is not to suggest that the US or any other country should ease up on Beijing when it comes to Xinjiang. We may not have evidence of genocide, but we can say with certainty that up to a million or more Uygurs and other Muslim minorities are caught up in a re-education drive against their will. We cannot ignore the accounts of rape and abuse within this gulag. Reports of forced sterilisation are practically validated by the Chinese government itself in the form of a since-deleted tweet by its US diplomatic mission that its drive to eradicate extremism in Xinjiang means that Uygur women are “ no longer baby-making machines ” Sanctions , Olympic boycott calls , demands for greater international access to suspected detention facilities all make sense in this context. But an operation in Xinjiang similar to what the Nazis did in World War II would justify some kind of intervention, a scenario tantamount to war. Without evidence, no one should contemplate such an effort. Politically driven misapprehension of the conditions in China is as threatening to American interests as whatever aggressive moves the People’s Liberation Army may take. Western boycott of 2022 Beijing Olympics would only prove US weakness Pompeo spent three years pushing the myth that most Chinese long for the US government to topple the Chinese Communist Party. Anyone with any understanding of the political chaos and poverty that the Chinese endured for most of the 20th century would know otherwise. We no longer hear that claim under Biden and Blinken. Hopefully, they’ll get clearer intelligence on Xinjiang before reaffirming that China is engaged in a final solution for the Uygurs. Robert Delaney is the Post’s North America bureau chief