Against China, the United States Must Play to Win
By Matthew Kroenig, and Dan Negrea
Foreign Policy Magazine
Washington’s competition with Beijing should not be about managing threats—but weakening and ultimately defeating the Chinese Communist Party regime.
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.