In recent years, American officials have spoken publicly at great length about competition with China. In February, U.S. President Joe Biden declared in his State of the Union speech that the United States seeks “competition, not conflict” with China. But despite all the speeches, press conferences, and panel discussions, policymakers have not directly answered an essential question: What is the outcome they seek in this competition? When pressed, they often highlight the result the United States hopes to avoid: a new cold war or, even worse, a hot one. Privately, they add that the goal is to tilt the global balance of power toward the United States and its partners as much as possible.
The absence of a compelling vision of success for the United States’ strategy with China is dangerous. First, if the American people do not know the purpose of their country’s strategy, they will be less likely to support U.S. policy or make sacrifices in service of it. The absence of a vision also creates a vacuum in which American demagogues can frame the competition in ethnic terms, sowing the seeds of xenophobia and racism and tearing at the country’s social fabric. Likewise, framing the contest in existential terms pushes the United States to pursue policies that seek China’s collapse, while airbrushing the danger and self-harm that such a strategy would invite.
The absence of a clear goal also risks squandering the United States’ greatest advantage in a long-term competition with China: the cohesion of its global network of allies and partners. Governments aligned with Washington will hedge when they do not know the desired destination of U.S. strategy. They will not want to get trapped in a confrontation with China only to see the United States abruptly shift course and leave their countries exposed to Beijing’s retaliation.
To overcome this limitation, Washington needs to set an objective on China that would enjoy durable domestic support and be compatible with foreign partners’ priorities, allowing them to anticipate the direction of U.S. policy and its guiding logic. And despite U.S. leaders’ seeming inability or unwillingness to articulate it, the right objective is relatively easy to explain: Washington should aim to preserve a functioning international system that supports U.S. security and prosperity—and that includes China rather than isolates it. Meanwhile, the United States should maintain a strong military to deter China from using force against the United States or its security partners and seek to sustain an overall edge over China in technological innovation, particularly in fields with national security implications.
This strategy departs from the Cold War goal of aiming to isolate the Soviet Union and compel its collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Today, Washington’s goal should be to keep China entangled in a global system that regulates interstate behavior and pushes Beijing to conclude that the best path to the realization of its national ambitions would be to operate within existing rules and norms.
Preserving a functioning global system that includes China will not be simple or straightforward. Washington has grown increasingly ambivalent in recent years about upholding the existing system, which it played an outsize role in designing. It cannot credibly keep China inside the tent if it is uncomfortable being there, as well. On trade, global health, climate change, and arms control, the United States has shown diminishing tolerance for accepting the requirements and limitations imposed by the current order. China will also seek to leverage its growing strength to revise elements of the existing system that it finds threatening to its illiberal form of governance. Beijing is determined to block intrusions on what it defines as its internal affairs. It wants to degrade the agenda-setting power of advanced democracies and take the lead in setting international standards. China is also working to make the world more economically dependent on Chinese goods and services and to shift the balance of military power in its favor.
American policymakers will face hard choices on whether to support adjustments that could help the existing system survive. If China ultimately balks at remaining in the system and instead invests its resources in mobilizing an anti-West bloc to oppose the international system, the United States will want the rest of the world to see Beijing as the culprit for the system’s fragmentation. For all its imperfections, the existing international system has contributed to preventing major-power conflict and enabled millions of people around the world to rise out of poverty in the decades since World War II. If China decides to chip away at that, it should pay a reputational price.
This strategy does not take for granted that China will emerge as a responsible stakeholder or that the U.S.-Chinese relationship will be anything other than intensely competitive. There is no reason for hope that further economic development will build pressure in China for political reform. This approach takes China for what it is: an aggressive, repressive, and selectively revisionist actor on the world stage. But following this path would take advantage of China’s craving for recognition as a major power that deserves a say in global affairs. The idea is to sharpen the choice for Beijing: China can enjoy broad acceptance of its continuing rise if it invests in preserving and adapting the existing system, or it can exit the order and prompt its fragmentation. Under the latter scenario, China could become the leader of a loosely organized and overmatched bloc of developing countries facing off against a more ideologically aligned grouping anchored by developed democracies.
LIFE AFTER XI
The speed of China’s rise has been alarming to many Americans. In the post–World War II era, no country has gotten as close to rivaling the United States’ comprehensive national power and influence as China has. Alongside its rapid economic growth, China has embarked on a massive military buildup, intensified its intimidation of Taiwan, asserted control over Hong Kong, expanded military outposts in the South China Sea, drawn blood at the border with India, and launched a campaign of brutal repression against ethnic minorities and dissidents in China.
To some observers, the Xi era represents a return of the authentic China, whereas the post-1979 era of “reform and opening” under the Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping was an aberration. In this telling, China was briefly a collective leadership one-party state led by the CCP but has now reverted to its natural state of one-man rule as Xi has embraced his new title as the “core” of the party-state, a status the party endorsed in October 2022. According to this logic, there is no longer any check on Xi’s instincts, however reckless they may be.
It is true that Xi is impatient, ideological, and aggressive. But he is also mortal. Xi is now 70 years old, and it is impossible to predict whether his reign will extend for another five years or 15. But it will end. The United States needs a strategy that is capable of both contending with the present and looking beyond Xi to prepare for a future in which China will confront mounting structural constraints.
A Chinese flag in Beijing, July 2021
Tingshu Wang / Reuters
If history is any guide, there is a strong possibility that the pendulum of Chinese politics will swing when Xi leaves the scene. In 1976, the death of the longtime CCP leader Mao Zedong ushered in an unceremonious end to his Cultural Revolution, which had wreaked chaos on the Chinese people in service of consolidating Mao’s control of the country. In the years that followed, the party reinstated cadres that Mao had expelled, including Deng, who along with younger leaders, pivoted away from Mao’s ideological rigidity and concentration of power. A similar erasure of Deng’s legacy has unfolded in recent years as Xi has discarded the pragmatism, orderly transfers of power, division of authority between the CCP and the government, and modest foreign policy that were hallmarks of the Deng era.
The more that Xi’s inveterate Leninist instincts and lust for control hobble China’s economic and technological ambitions, the more likely China’s leaders will be to take a hard look at the country’s direction when Xi is gone. When that day comes, China’s leaders will need to decide whether they can better reach their goals by integrating into the global economy or by turning toward self-reliance and limited partnership with developing countries. Of course, a future Chinese leader may adopt Xi’s tendencies. But China’s political trajectory has not, and likely will not, travel a straight line for long.
China’s path after Xi also depends on other trends. The economist Derek Scissors has forecasted that China’s economy will grow briskly in the 2020s but slow down in the 2030s as it experiences the effects of an aging population, growing debt, and self-imposed constraints on private-sector innovation through government-directed allocation of capital, talent, and technology. He expects the gap between U.S. and Chinese GDP, which currently stands at $7 trillion, to narrow to $4 trillion by 2030 but then begin to widen again by midcentury. In other words, Beijing is neither on the cusp of peaking nor on a road to hegemony. It will be an enduring but constrained competitor to the United States.
INSIDE THE TENT
The American leaders who developed an international system out of the ashes of World War II were not driven by benevolence; they were guided by an aggressive pursuit of national interests. The victors of World War II appointed themselves permanent members of the UN Security Council, cementing their influence over future interstate disputes. Washington also secured buy-in for a proscription against the use of force to alter international boundaries, helping lock in place a status quo that has benefited the United States.
To this day, the United States sits at the center of many of the international institutions that govern the global commons, mediate disputes, and facilitate free trade. The United States’ positioning has allowed it to field the most powerful military in the history of the world and to amass roughly 25 percent of global GDP with only around four percent of the world’s population. Washington must hold on to the outsize benefits it derives from this system and keep China entangled in it.
Isolating China might feel satisfying, but as history shows, it would not serve U.S. interests. From the late 1940s through the 1970s, China was cast out of the U.S.-led system. During that period, Chinese leaders became embittered, unconstrained, and eager to foment revolution. Beijing aspired to bring down the system, including by arming Washington’s adversaries. China was poor then, so its interventions had limited effects. Today, however, U.S. rivals such as Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela could benefit from less restrained Chinese support in ways that would seriously harm U.S. national security.
Even short of arming hostile states, Beijing could withdraw contributions to Western-led institutions and invest significantly in organizations that could rival and ultimately replace today’s system. It could leverage its national resources to seek broad international backing for making the BRICS group, encompassing Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the premier global agenda setter, displacing the G-7 and the G-20. Although China secured support for expanding the membership of BRICS at the group’s annual summit in August, it remains to be seen whether adding more members will add substance to what has thus far been a largely symbolic forum. Beijing could also redirect support for global development efforts to its preferred institutions, such as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, and withdraw support for the World Bank.
To reduce the risks of these outcomes, the United States will need to accept several uncomfortable truths. The first is that many people in poorer countries and non-Western countries see the current “rules-based order” as a predominantly white, Western system that is insufficiently attentive to their priorities and concerns. Leaders in some of those countries want to alter a system that they see as privileging a status quo that disadvantages them, and they view China as a champion of their cause. They see hypocrisy when Washington protests Russia’s invasion of Ukraine despite the many military interventions carried out by the United States—in Haiti, Iraq, Panama, and the Balkans—without UN Security Council authorization. Even as American officials reject the suggestion of equivalence between their actions and those of Russia, they should recognize the frustration of people and governments buffeted by crises not of their making, such as rising temperatures, global pandemics, food and energy insecurity, and economic instability.
Institutions and conventions will also need to adapt to power shifts within the international system. The Security Council will have to adjust to the redistribution of power since the end of World War II by giving permanent seats to Brazil, Germany, India, and Japan, the countries of the G-4 and the main aspirants to permanent council membership, which each exercise regional leadership and global influence. Washington should push for their admittance and force China to either go along or issue a public veto. At the same time, the United States should not continue blocking China from exercising a voting share in institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that reflects its economic weight.
The balkanization of the postwar international system that would result from China’s exit would damage the United States’ long-term interests. There is no Western solution to climate change or pandemic prevention, for example. Those are global challenges that require the mobilization of global resources. Additionally, a breakdown in the trading system would leave all countries poorer, including the United States. A green energy transition would take longer and cost more if the United States and China were unable to coordinate. A bifurcation of global information systems into Western and Chinese blocs would hamper innovation and economic growth. Even as the United States works to safeguard Americans’ data, it must avoid preventing its companies from competing in the growing number of markets where Chinese technologies have made inroads.
Senior officials from China, Japan, and South Korea meeting in Incheon, South Korea, May 2023
Kim Hong-Ji / Reuters
For some, shaking up the existing international system is a risk worth taking, even if it winds up splintering the structure in place. In a speech earlier this year, the U.S. national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, asserted that the existing neoliberal economic order had failed American workers, fraying “the socioeconomic foundations on which any strong and resilient democracy rests.” Therefore, Sullivan argued, the United States must break with decades of international economic orthodoxy to ensure that the country can rebuild its manufacturing base, develop more resilient supply chains, and limit China’s ability to hold American security at risk.
Sullivan’s solution to the United States’ domestic challenges is misguided. In the aggregate, the United States has grown dramatically wealthier and more powerful through internationalized trade, but the rewards have been unevenly distributed in American society. Many countries in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere have recognized that free trade is not free and have developed social safety nets to help their workers handle the disruptions of globalization. The United States has performed poorly in this regard—a deficiency that is a symptom of its domestic politics rather than of the perils of globalized trade.
It would be a mistake for the United States to disavow the global trade architecture that it played a leading role in constructing. Doing so would break faith with the partners that bought into the doctrine of trade liberalization. This, in turn, would diminish Washington’s ability to set the agenda for the global economy. Today, many countries around the world are lowering barriers to trade, but the United States is raising them. If Washington continues down this path, it will hurt its own long-term competitiveness.
INTERNATIONAL ORDER 2.0
Rather than relying on past policy experiments in protectionism and industrial policy, American policymakers need innovative ways to make today’s global system better serve U.S. interests, address the concerns of U.S. partners, and incentivize China to stay on board. The best leaders have willing partners, not ones who must be coerced into compliance. The stronger the support the United States can attract for its vision, the costlier and riskier it will be for China to break away and fragment the system. Many of the United States’ partners understand the challenges China poses, but they also must contend with more immediate problems, such as mitigating the effects of climate change, providing adequate food for their populations, creating opportunities for economic development, and enhancing health security. Unless the United States can elicit contributions from China and other capable powers for addressing these challenges, it will bear the blame for failing to lead.
American policymakers therefore have the difficult task of convincing China to invest in multilateral solutions, even though Beijing often prefers to deliver assistance bilaterally so it can enjoy undiluted appreciation from recipient countries for its contributions. One way the United States can do this is by encouraging emerging powers and regional organizations to take the lead on collective responses to some global problems. It would be far easier to imagine the United States and China both supporting an African Union–led project to expand access to technology training, for example, than it would be to envision either of them supporting such a project led by the other.
Washington should also work with Beijing to develop norms of acceptable state behavior in ungoverned and undergoverned spaces. For example, the two countries could agree to refrain from activities in space that create orbital debris. This could lead over time toward norms against the use of kinetic antisatellite weapons in outer space. Both the United States and China would also benefit from establishing limits on the use of AI-enabled autonomous weapons systems in conflicts. Washington and Beijing could each work, for example, toward an understanding that humans must remain in control of all nuclear launch decisions. Similarly, even as each side engages in aggressive cyber-espionage against the other, both would benefit from identifying out-of-bounds targets for cyberattacks. Both countries should agree, for example, that hospitals and critical infrastructure are off-limits.
Washington must also work with partners to fortify other cornerstones of the international system, such as the principle that all states are equal under international law and that arms control supports global stability. These elements of global order have been under duress in recent years, particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s decision to flout a 2016 ruling by the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea that Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea were illegal.
The United States must also make clear that as the world’s sole superpower, it has a vital interest in preserving its security commitments and upholding the freedom of navigation. Those are potentially “go to war” issues, similar to China’s definition of its own “core interests.” To uphold the credibility of that posture, Washington needs to develop a more agile and integrated defense doctrine, invest significantly in long-range missiles and small dispersed weapons systems in East Asia, harden its bases in Asia, and build as broad and capable a coalition as possible to deter China from attacking the United States’ security partners or impeding lawful access to international waters and airspace.
COURSE CORRECTION
Even as it remains firm in upholding its vital interests, Washington needs to give Beijing cause to respond favorably to its efforts to keep China embedded in the international system. U.S. leaders should more openly acknowledge that they would welcome a more prosperous and less belligerent China—one that is responsive to the rights of its citizens and contributes more to addressing global challenges.
This affirmative framing of U.S. policy would signal that the United States is not hostile to China’s rise and would welcome a healthier relationship in the future. Biden should consider delivering a message to the Chinese people akin to the one that his predecessor John F. Kennedy sent to Soviet citizens in a commencement address at American University in 1963. Americans found communism “profoundly repugnant,” Kennedy said, but could still “hail the Russian people for their many achievements—in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.” Kennedy also appealed to the common humanity of the two sides: “Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Taking a similar tone when discussing China today could help prepare the ground for a U.S. strategy that looks beyond Xi and the current tensions with Beijing.
The United States will also need to restore discipline to its approach to Taiwan. Symbolic gestures by members of Congress and undisciplined public ruminations about the timing of possible future conflict by military leaders have unnerved U.S. allies and allowed Beijing to paint the United States as the instigator of escalation, when in fact Beijing’s tightening pressure on Taiwan is the main cause of rising tensions. American leaders should return to encouraging dialogue between China and Taiwan without preconditions and express openness to any peaceful resolution of cross-strait differences that enjoys the support of the Taiwanese people. They should also disavow any suggestions that the United States views Taiwan as a critical node or part of the United States’ defense perimeter. Taiwan is not an object of contestation between the United States and China: it is a society of 23 million people who should retain agency when it comes to their future.
Washington also needs to strengthen the incentives for fence-sitting countries to work with the United States by offering better access to the American market. Trade agreements are effective vehicles for pulling key countries closer and advancing the United States’ vision of rules-based, market-oriented trade. Trade agreements were used to powerful effect during the Cold War but have been largely discarded for domestic political reasons in recent years. Future American presidents will need to restore the strategic rationale for such tools of statecraft if the United States hopes to keep the influence it aspires to on the world stage. This will require enough political courage to make the national security case for drawing partners closer through trade rather than succumbing to populism and protectionism—currently the paths of least political resistance.
Finally, Washington will need to reinvest in multilateralism. Addressing global challenges through institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the G-20, and the UN can be cumbersome and inefficient. Decisions made in such forums occasionally go against U.S. preferences. But that is the price of preserving a global system that lowers barriers to transnational cooperation and sets boundaries for acceptable state behavior. The more the United States withdraws its leadership and its resources from multilateral bodies, the higher the likelihood that the international system will fragment and give way to a “might makes right” world, which would remove restraints on Chinese belligerence and raise the odds of direct military conflict between the United States and China.
IF IT AIN’T BROKE
Some critics of this approach will object to it on moral grounds, given the scale of China’s human rights violations, and instead urge Washington to isolate Beijing. But outrage is a weak weapon in diplomacy. And when the United States isolates countries, as it did Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela, they tend to even more flagrantly ignore American complaints about human rights because there is no longer any cost or consequence for doing so. A diplomatic decoupling with China would yield a similar result.
Others will argue that instead of tolerating China, the United States should seek to contain it or even engineer the downfall of the CCP. But any American pursuit of a Chinese collapse would backfire. It would alienate the United States from its partners, virtually none of whom have an interest in pursuing such a course. And it would expose American leaders as being dangerously naive about the limits of their leverage: China is too strong for the United States to invade or effect a regime change, and the opposite is true, as well.
Still others will question whether China would be amenable to such a relationship, given its leaders’ conviction that Washington’s endgame is to destroy Chinese communism. China’s leaders will never publicly embrace any U.S. strategy. They will chafe at Washington’s efforts to preserve its military deterrent and technological edge, and they will seek to undermine liberal features of the existing international system, most notably its privileging of individual liberty above social stability. But several factors could push Beijing toward grudging acceptance. Chinese leaders privately acknowledge that they are not prepared to assume responsibility for developing and leading an alternate international system. Beijing would like to nudge the existing international order so that it is more favorable to Chinese interests. It believes it is entitled to more power than it currently enjoys. These would be adjustments, however, not wholesale revisions. Indeed, what differentiates Beijing and Moscow most is that Moscow is prepared to act as a system-breaking power, whereas Beijing is not—at least so far.
China’s rise since the late 1970s has coincided with its decision to integrate with the world and the institutions underpinning the global order. The country’s substantial economic and social progress over the past four decades would not have been possible if China had persisted in its Mao-era isolation. China’s national development goals in the coming decades likewise depend on remaining networked within an inclusive international system that sustains its access to foreign capital, technology, and markets.
Da Wei, one of China’s leading international relations scholars, has written that a collapse of the international system or its fragmentation would devastate China’s ability to modernize. Many other top Chinese experts with whom I regularly interact consistently underline this point. So, too, does the International Monetary Fund. The IMF has warned that severe fragmentation of the world economy could shave up to seven percent off total global output. Since China is the world’s largest trading power, it would be more exposed than most countries to the fallout under such a scenario.
So even though China’s leaders clearly want more recognition, insulation, and room to maneuver in the current international system, they must contend with the fact that any fracturing into rival blocs led by the United States and China would place Beijing at a deep disadvantage. In such a scenario, the United States presumably would lead an ideologically aligned group of major economies that control many advanced technologies and military capabilities, with China left leading an ideologically diverse grouping of developing countries that lag in military and technological capacity.
To keep China attuned to and sobered by that potential outcome, Washington must sustain and deepen coordination with as broad a coalition of countries as possible, not just advanced democracies in Europe and Asia. The goal is not to isolate or encircle China but to disabuse any notion that Beijing could succeed in forming a cohesive anti-Western coalition that could fulfill China’s development and security requirements. Washington will have the greatest effect along these lines by addressing other countries’ top challenges, not by attempting to organize efforts in opposition to China or Chinese initiatives.
Riding bicycles in Shanghai, June 2022 Aly Song / Reuters
Washington can afford magnanimity. It enjoys a sizable lead over China in national competitiveness. And as the political scientist Stephen Walt has argued, China has no viable path to achieving hegemony. The United States is a source of attraction for other countries when it looks to the future with optimism, manages its own affairs, and acts on its responsibilities as a global leader. These are factors within its power to control, not China’s.
Despite their respective ambivalence about certain features of the current international system, and the intensifying rivalry between them, the United States and China both want to avoid war and maintain stability. They both derive wealth and security from the existing system. And as the world’s two strongest countries, they are better able to contribute to collective problem-solving with existing institutions than they would be without them.
China’s ambitions will pose a sharp challenge to the United States well into the future. The best way for Washington to contend with this challenge is to keep China entangled in the international system while nurturing American alliances and bolstering the U.S. technological edge. If the United States can advance a patient but firm long-term strategy toward this end, it will be well positioned to sustain its leadership, prosperity, and security.
