Many of us in the states have a deeply-engrained sense that only our side is capable of doing anything "good," and that anything "the enemy" does is just a clever ruse, a cynical exploitation, or a propaganda stunt to lower our guard.
We can see this most evidently in our attitude towards BRI. China has been successfully coupling itself to smaller economies, providing infrastructure and capital for lesser-developed nations, and broadly enhancing its global prestige in the process. Instead of acknowledging this fact and coming up with a better alternative for these nations, we decried it as "debt trap diplomacy" and "neocolonialism," making CN out to be an untrustworthy, predatory entity.
Another example is MIC2025, we took it as a "threat to global trade!" and painted it as an aggressive, dishonest attempt to "dominate" the world market, fuel neo-imperialist/expansionist military ambitions, and subvert the US industrial supply chain. Of course, we ignored that such an initiative is the obvious, sensible direction for a developing nation that is integrating itself into high-value-added industry and trade; and forgot that we had done quite literally the exact same thing (if not worse) for most of the cold war.
Much of this zeitgeist is a product of Cold War era cultural Oikophilia, wherein everything Freedom and Liberty and Democracy and Human Rights and blah blah blah was ascribed to the West and considered the ultimate "good" in the world; whereas The Enemy™ was painted as the antithesis to those concepts, and thus always should be seen as the ultimate "bad." When you think about it like that, especially when you consider that the fundamental framework for our "system of morality" is derived from religious iconography of a similar style (God == ultimate "good" & Devil == ultimate "bad" - and any "good" done by the Devil is always actually "bad" no matter how it may look at first), then our aversion towards acknowledging good deeds by The Enemy™ is a little more comprehensible.
In my opinion, CN deserves to be proud of what they've accomplished; so it's incredibly frustrating watching us seethe and whine instead of just trying to do better. We didn't win the Space Race by kneecapping the Soviet space program, we won it by building our own.
