EXCLUSIVE — Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) is pushing for Congress to use a decades-old strategy from the Cold War that was used against the former Soviet Union to tackle one of America’s biggest modern-day threats: China.

The senator has asked the leaders of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee, which he sits on, to conduct annual unclassified reports and hold hearings about the Chinese economy and economic policy decisions, a tactic the panel used with the Soviet economy before its downfall in the early 1990s.