Against China, the United States Must Play to Win

Washington’s competition with Beijing should not be about managing threats—but weakening and ultimately defeating the Chinese Communist Party regime.

By , a columnist at Foreign Policy and vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, and , senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center.

June 24, 2024 – Foreign Policy Magazine

As the 2024 U.S. presidential election approaches, many are asking what the United States’ goal is when it comes to strategic competition with China. The Biden administration has said that it aims to “responsibly manage the competition” with China, but some prominent Republicans have criticized this approach and have called for “victory” as the superior objective. Proponents of victory, however, have not clearly spelled out what winning means.

Washington’s goal in its contest with China should indeed be victory, and winning means getting to a point where the Chinese government no longer has the will or the ability to harm vital U.S. interests. In other words, Washington should aim for the capitulation or incapacitation of the Chinese threat.

Clearly, aiming to merely “manage the competition” does not make sense. In any other competition, such as the 100-meter dash, the purpose is not just to manage, but to win. Moreover, setting a goal of managing a competition simply raises the question: manage to what end? Like every historical rivalry, the contest between Washington and Beijing will eventually conclude. (After all, Athens and Sparta no longer compete.) So what is Washington’s desired end state?

To understand success, let us first examine its opposite. Intelligence analysts assess threats by examining an adversary’s capability and intent, and the problem today is that China has both the capability and intent to actively and systematically harm the United States’ vital interests. Methods include military coercion against U.S. allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, including daily military intimidation of, and threats to invade, Taiwan; reducing American prosperity through illegal trading practices; and corroding U.S. democracy—for example, by targeting voters with artificial intelligence-enabled disinformation operations.

More fundamentally, China seeks to displace the U.S.-led international system with a new global order centered in Beijing that is more conducive to autocracy and President Xi Jinping’s imperial ambitions. This is China’s theory of victory, and its realization would severely undermine the well-being of all people in the United States and the broader free world.

A U.S. victory in the new cold war with China, therefore, would mean eliminating the most serious Chinese threats to core U.S. interests. Absent a major war, there are three possible pathways to victory.

First, the United States could, over the course of years, aim to so thoroughly outcompete China across all dimensions of economic, technological, ideological, diplomatic, and military power that Beijing loses the capability to meaningfully harm U.S. vital interests.

This would require strengthening U.S. economic and technological leadership and increasing de-risking from the Chinese economy. Indeed, the United States’ relative economic advantage is already growing as it moves this year to claim 26 percent of global GDP, its largest share in two decades. Meanwhile, Xi may continue to kill off China’s successful growth model as he reasserts Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control over China’s once-vibrant private sector and jeopardizes China’s international trade and investment through his aggressive foreign policy. Foreign direct investment in China, for example, recently hit a 30-year low.

These trends could be accelerated by a return to Trump-era pro-growth policies of reducing taxes and regulation, as well as unleashing the U.S. energy industry. Washington and its allies should also accelerate efforts to combat China’s unfair trading practices, using a broad range of tools, including higher tariffs, export controls, and investment screening.

Washington could further shift the balance of power in its favor by continuing to expand and deepen its global alliance system in the Indo-Pacific, including with new arrangements such as AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and NATO-IP4, which brings together NATO with four Indo-Pacific partners, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. Washington should also form counterbalancing coalitions with other country groupings, such as the European Union, that increasingly see Beijing as a “systemic rival.”

The United States could build a military with the clear ability both to deny a Chinese invasion of Taiwan,restoring stability to the Taiwan Strait, and to protect the U.S. homeland with a stronger strategic deterrent and missile defense system. Republican Sen. Roger Wicker was correct in late May when he called for a “generational investment” in the military to raise U.S. defense spending to 5 percent of the nation’s GDP.

As the United States and its allies strengthen themselves and counter China, the balance of power could shift in the former’s favor, and China’s capability to threaten the United States would be diminished, even if Beijing’s leadership remains antagonistic. After all, many autocracies—such as Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba—are hostile to the United States but lack the capability to harm its vital national interests.

Nuclear-armed rogue states, such as Russia and North Korea, pose a military threat, but unlike the Soviet Union during the Cold War or China today, they lack the ability to systematically threaten a broad range of vital U.S. interests or vie for regional or global dominance. Arriving at a similar place with China in the future would signal the end of the current era of strategic competition.

A second path to victory could come about through a change in Chinese intent. In other words, the United States could compete in order to persuade China’s leaders to change their minds. Xi’s views are set, but a future generation of Chinese leadership might conclude that challenging the United States and its allies proved too difficult and costly and decide that Beijing would be better off following a more cooperative path.

This second pathway to victory could be facilitated by the first. As China’s leaders come to understand that their aggressive approach is failing, they will be more likely to decide that a new direction is needed.

Some may argue that this outcome is unlikely because Xi and the CCP are dead set on supplanting the United States. But so too were Soviet leaders dead set on burying the West, only to fail. Similarly, reality could force China’s leadership to search for a Plan B when Plan A fails.

Neither of these outcomes requires regime change in China. The United States can win the new cold war, therefore, even if Beijing continues to fly a communist banner.

A third possible pathway to U.S. victory does end in regime change, but, perhaps surprisingly, this outcome should be viewed primarily through the lens of power politics, not ideology. Regime change can help the United States not because it would necessarily bring democracy and human rights to the Chinese people (although that would be desirable), but because, like in the first two scenarios, it would undermine Beijing’s capacity and intent to threaten the United States.

Autocratic regimes are brittle, and they often disintegrate, especially at times of leadership transition. Like most dictators, Xi believes the greatest threats to his rule are internal, not external. If you do not believe us, just follow the money. China spends more on internal policing than on its military. (U.S. spending runs 2:1 in the other direction).

The collapse of the CCP would likely lead to a period of domestic instability and a decreased will to systematically challenge the U.S.-led order. A new Chinese government would be weakened and inward-looking as it sought to consolidate power. And a new Chinese government, whether a new variety of autocracy or—less likely but possible—a fledgling democracy would almost certainly act less aggressively than Xi’s CCP.

China could even break up into several states as its multinational empire crumbles. Restive regions tired of Beijing’s harsh rule, such as Tibet and Xinjiang, could declare independence. China’s long history is pockmarked by civil wars and revolutions, with the last one ending a mere 75 years ago.

To be sure, a rump, nationalistic China armed with nuclear weapons could still be problematic in many ways, but an enfeebled country chastened by defeat in strategic competition is more likely to be cooperative or quiescent for a period of time, and it certainly would no longer possess the ability to systematically threaten U.S. vital interests or otherwise qualify as a strategic competitor.

These three scenarios are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they are mutually reinforcing. The first Cold War ended in a combination of these outcomes. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union had been bested by the West in a half-century rivalry. Mikhail Gorbachev was brought to power with the goal of reforming the Soviet system and reducing tensions with the West. The process resulted in uprisings and ultimately the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

Some object that the United States never really won the Cold War because Russia has subsequently reemerged as a threat under President Vladimir Putin, but this is a mistaken view. Washington’s Cold War victory brought the world a 25-year respite from great-power rivalry, and Russia today is much less powerful—and therefore less threatening—than the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Similarly today, a quarter-century break from strategic competition followed by the possible reemergence of challenges from a diminished China would certainly be much more desirable than an unrelenting U.S.-China great-power confrontation, teetering on the brink of major power war, forever.

Any good strategy starts with a clear goal in mind, and these three visions of victory should inspire and inform U.S. strategy. The United States and its allies should work to strengthen themselves as well as counter and weaken China (including by working to loosen the CCP’s grip on power) while simultaneously engaging in tough-minded diplomacy to show China’s leaders that there is a better way forward if they are willing to end their hostile policies.

Some will argue that a tougher approach that threatens the CCP will only cause Beijing to become even more hostile, but in fact, China’s current aggression has been enabled by an inconsistent Western approach that has failed to impose adequate costs on Beijing for its malign behavior. A more resolute policy of confrontation is necessary now to bring about a less threatening China in the future.

Others might worry that the defeat of China’s anti-American policies would harm the well-being of the Chinese people, and of China’s partners around the world, especially in the global south. But on the contrary, these populations would be among the biggest beneficiaries of a new China that is less repressive at home and more cooperative abroad.

It is hard to achieve success if you cannot envision it. With these visions of victory clearly in mind, the United States and its allies should finally set out to win, not just manage, the new cold war.

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