Ali Wyne
Pursuant to its more confrontational approach, the Trump administration imposed steep tariffs on Chinese exports and, having concluded that Beijing’s technological progress posed a particularly pressing threat to U.S. national security, took a number of steps to thwart the expansion of Chinese telecommunications giants, particularly Huawei. While those measures did set back the company’s global ambitions and limit China’s ability to import the semiconductor chips that are increasingly essential to contemporary innovation, Trump’s broader effort to slow Beijing’s resurgence did not succeed. Indeed, China is now more deeply embedded in the global economy than it was before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the World Bank’s forecasts, China’s economy, which was already equivalent to 71 percent of America’s in 2020, will grow by 7.9 percent this year, following 2 percent growth last year; the U.S. economy, by contrast, is expected to grow by 3.5 percent in 2021, having contracted by 3.6 percent last year. Beijing’s exports reached a record $2.6 trillion last year, and its trade surplus was its largest since 2015. Finally, The Wall Street Journal reports that foreign direct investment into China grew by 4 percent in 2020, “contrary to earlier expectations that foreign businesses would seek to reduce their heavy reliance on the country as a key part of their supply chains.”
The Trump administration placed a greater emphasis on slowing China down than on reinvigorating U.S. competitiveness, and it overestimated the extent to which it could unilaterally decouple the two countries’ economies. Its “America First” foreign policy, meanwhile, caught in its crosshairs many of America’s longstanding allies and partners. Despite growing apprehensions about China’s resurgence, they are wary of supporting an ideological campaign against the Chinese Communist Party, and they either do not wish or cannot afford to disentangle their economies significantly from China’s.
While the Trump administration rightly spotlighted China as America’s foremost external challenger, its record suggests at least three reasons why the Biden administration should avoid pursuing a defensive, China-centric foreign policy.
First, such an approach would cede the strategic initiative to Beijing, putting Washington in the position of reacting to China’s decisions, rather than taking actions based on independent calculations of its national interests.
Second, to the extent that it conveys U.S. anxiety, it could induce further overreach on the part of China’s leadership at a fraught moment: security tensions are growing in the Indo-Pacific, and China is attempting to entrench two parallel, reinforcing narratives—that of its own inexorable resurgence and that of terminal American decline. Chinese President Xi Jinping believes that “time and the situation are in [China’s] favor,” as he put in recent remarks, and he may hazard that Beijing can discount deteriorating ties with Washington and other major powers so long as it occupies a sufficiently central role in the global economy. Demonstrating the prematurity of such suppositions will be essential to dissuading both Chinese actions born of hubris and U.S. actions born of alarm.
A durable cohabitation between the United States and China will require each to accept the reality of the other’s resilience. Instead of signaling insecurity by undertaking to contest Beijing’s maneuvers on a reciprocal basis, Washington should invest anew in its unique competitive strengths, thereby projecting confidence in its ability to recalibrate effectively and sustainably.
Third, a China-centric foreign policy could isolate the United States. There is good reason to believe that Washington will be able to mobilize small, issue-specific groupings in competing with Beijing, whether to develop alternative sources of 5G equipment, increase the number of redundancies within supply chains for vital commodities, or enhance freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific.
Biden has an opportunity to advance a confident vision of America’s role in the world—in which competition with China is an important element, but not the overarching determinant.
A unified, Cold War-style coalition to counterbalance China, though, is unlikely to emerge. That Brussels recently concluded an investment treaty with Beijing and continues to stress the importance of “strategic autonomy” suggests the difficulties that will arise in forging a consistent trans-Atlantic approach to China. Meanwhile, the finalization this past November of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership will increase China’s trade and investment integration with its neighbors.
Where the Trump administration pursued a largely reactive approach to China’s rise, the Biden administration should embed U.S. policy toward China within an affirmative, three-part framework.
First, and most crucially, the United States should work to restore the legitimacy of its governance model, demonstrating that its political system is capable not only of mitigating crises such as a fast-spreading pandemic, but also of adapting itself to address longer-term socio-economic challenges such as income inequality and racial injustice. In explaining why the United States ultimately prevailed in the Cold War, the historian John Gaddis recently argued that it “can be no stronger in the world than it is at home.”
Second, the United States should recommit to and reimagine its alliances and partnerships. In Europe, that effort means expanding the remit of the trans-Atlantic project beyond longstanding concerns about burden-sharing and Russian revanchism. In the Indo-Pacific, it means demonstrating America’s economic resilience and affirming—in deed, not only in word—that Washington will not allow developments in other theaters to undercut its overarching strategic focus on the region.
Crucially, the effort to cultivate what the Biden administration calls a “secure and prosperous Indo-Pacific” need not exclude China. Indeed, the Trump administration unnerved many allies and partners in the region by making the counterbalancing of Chinese influence an explicit organizing principle of its policy. As Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong wrote in Foreign Affairs this past July, Asian countries “fervently hope not to be forced to choose between the United States and China.”
Third, the United States should strive to reclaim its role as a catalyst of collective action. While the health and economic devastation wrought by COVID-19 has understandably revived discussions over the resilience of globalization, transnational challenges such as pandemic disease and global warming are only poised to intensify. In addressing them, the United States should draw not only on the federal government, but also, as New America’s Anne-Marie Slaughter and Heather Hurlburt have argued, on America’s vast ecosystem of subnational actors.
In his address at this year’s World Economic Forum, Xi stated that “[n]o global problem can be solved by any one country alone. There must be global action, global response, and global cooperation.” The irony of his remarks lies in a disconnect: while China is more deeply integrated into the global economy, it is more diplomatically isolated among advanced industrial democracies on account of its deepening authoritarianism at home and its continued practice of “Wolf Warrior” assertiveness abroad. Oxford University’s Rana Mitter observes that China’s authoritarian turn is “stoking hostility abroad and raising barriers between China and the world it strives to remake.” So long as the economic heft China wields lags the strategic trust it engenders, Beijing will find it difficult to galvanize the cooperation Xi called for in his speech.
Of course, Washington will not be automatically entrusted to serve as a galvanizer; its mismanagement of the pandemic has undermined its reputation for administrative competence, and the Trump administration’s record has cast doubt on America’s commitment to multilateral cooperation and international institutions. But the United States does have a foundation on which it can begin to build back trust. It has an extensive diplomatic network that it can harness, albeit one in great need of repair. And it has a longstanding record of mobilizing coalitions to address transnational challenges, as seen with its response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
The management of China’s resurgence is America’s foremost foreign policy imperative. But while Beijing is a formidable, multifaceted competitor, it is not so overwhelming a challenger that it should dictate U.S. foreign policy; in contributing to its own diplomatic encirclement, China is hindering the pursuit of whatever long-term aspirations it may harbor. In addition, Washington can significantly enhance its strategic competitiveness independent of what Beijing does; as Secretary of State Tony Blinken explained in a recent interview with NPR, the steps the United States might take to that end are “within our control. These are things we can do. These are decisions we can make. And if we do them, that sets the foundation for engaging China...from a position of strength, not weakness.”
The Biden administration, then, has a compelling opportunity to advance a confident, forward-looking vision of America’s role in the world—one in which strategic competition with China is an important element, but not the overarching determinant.
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