Biden’s National Security Strategy Is Undone by Fantasy

Nadia Schadlow

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The Biden administration’s National Security Strategy, released last week, deserves credit for correctly identifying China as the U.S.’s most “consequential geopolitical challenge.” But by calling climate the “existential” threat to the U.S. and encouraging cooperation with Beijing on the issue, the strategy document creates a dangerous contradiction. The focus on climate will make it harder to meet the threat from China and diminish the chances that the U.S. will succeed in sustainably reducing carbon emissions.

China has benefited from the openness of the international economy even as Beijing “frequently uses its economic power to coerce countries” while limiting access to its own markets, the strategy points out. The document reaffirms the link between economic strength and national security, recognizing that the U.S. needs to produce goods, tie trade policies to the well-being of the American people, and retain its competitive edge across key technologies. It also affirms that a successful U.S. approach to China will require the help of allies and partners, since the U.S. and its allies make up about 65% of global gross domestic product.

But the document also offers aspirational language about how the U.S. and China must “coexist peacefully and share in and contribute to human progress together.” The problem is, the two countries view human progress and the political and economic underpinnings of that progress differently.

For the U.S., progress is rooted in individual liberty, democratic governance and the rule of law. It is hard to reconcile how this squares with China’s intent, which even the Biden document describes as a desire to “reshape the international order” to advance its authoritarian objectives.

The document wants to portray the U.S. as reasonable but in the process it fails to describe the world as it is. A rosy perspective is baked into the language, along with hopes that the U.S. can work with China on nearly everything: “climate, pandemic threats, nonproliferation, countering illicit and illegal narcotics, the global food crisis, and macroeconomic issues.” Contrast these lofty ambitions with China’s construction of coal plants, refusal to allow investigations into the origin of Covid, aiding and abetting of North Korea’s nuclear program, and inaction on transnational criminal organizations that traffic fentanyl into the U.S. Through major energy purchases China continues to support Russia’s war in Ukraine, which is leading to a global food crisis.

Despite these realities, the document pleads that no country “should withhold progress on existential transnational issues like the climate crisis because of bilateral differences.” American interests thus get reduced to tactical inconveniences.

Competition with China over technology appears in the Biden document only as an afterthought. The strategy fails to call for selective disentanglement or decoupling from China, even as it alludes to China’s determination to separate key parts of its economy from ours while fostering dependencies that give Beijing coercive power. Unless these imperatives are called out directly, it will be hard—if not impossible—to build the domestic political coalitions to take tough decisions.

The strategy is right that the next 10 years will be decisive, noting that we are at an “inflection point” when the choices made will set America on a course that “determines our competitive position long into the future.” Precisely because “our window of opportunity may be closing,” we need to be more realistic.

Even as the Ukraine crisis has demonstrated the devastating consequences of phasing out natural gas, oil and nuclear power when wind and solar can’t replace them, the strategy seems blind to reality. It insists on a “transition away from fossil fuels,” not acknowledging that natural gas itself is a transition fuel and that the U.S. has the capability to produce and export more of it.

The Biden strategy will create dependencies on China analogous to the coercive power that Russia recently held over Germany’s energy supply. And this applies to global development too, since it stresses zero-carbon climate policies that harm poor countries. As Senegal’s energy minister remarked last year, imposing restrictions on lending for oil and gas development is like “removing the ladder and asking us to jump or fly.”

At the just-concluded Chinese Communist Party Congress, Xi Jinping has shown determination to drive what he sees as an “irreversible historical process” in which China becomes the “new choice” for humanity. Now isn’t the time to be ambivalent in that competition.