Ravi Agrawal
There’s a rare bipartisan consensus in Washington that China’s rise must be countered in the strongest way possible. Democrats and Republicans seemingly compete over who can be tougher on Beijing.
The problem with the tone of the current debate, according to Cornell University professor and former State Department advisor Jessica Chen Weiss, is that policymakers are locked in an escalatory spiral. Anyone who seeks to diverge from the consensus is accused of having sympathy for the other side.
Weiss, a China specialist, worked on the State Department’s policy planning staff in 2021 and 2022. Since then, she has widely published her concerns, been cited in Foreign Policy articles, and been the subject of a New Yorker profile. Are her warnings valid? Is she accurately assessing the nature of China’s challenge? And if she is, how should policymakers adapt?
To find out, I interviewed Weiss on FP Live. Subscribers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript.
Foreign Policy: Let’s start with the obvious: What exactly worries you about America’s China policy?
Jessica Chen Weiss: The concern is that there are really two muscles here. One is the one that wants to outcompete and beat China, and then there is the one that asks “What do we stand for? What are we trying to achieve?” In my view, the former is really dominating our efforts and crowding out an affirmative, inclusive vision of the future that we’re trying to create.
I want to give the Biden administration credit for its China strategy, in which the first two pillars—invest at home, and align with our allies and partners—are essential components of success.
Compete, which represents the third pillar, really needs more work or it’s going to continue to veer toward conflict and will continue to place strain on the international order. Ultimately, it could potentially erode U.S. leadership. It’s good that the Biden administration is no longer trying to transform China, as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has written. That’s impractical and likely counterproductive.
Competition as a framework is silent on what it is that we are competing for and what is in and out of bounds as we try to compete. It means we’re frequently reactive. It means we’re frequently having trouble prioritizing which of the many things that one could react to is a real threat and needs to be addressed. It means that if you want to accomplish anything, whether you’re a politician or a bureaucrat, you tend to frame it in terms of countering or competing with China, and that creates incentives to just get even more hawkish rather than carefully assessing the shape of the challenge and the costs and benefits of different policy responses.
FP: How did we get here? I ask this because China’s rise isn’t exactly new.
JCW: It really began under the Obama administration as China became much more aggressive abroad and repressive at home, and that occasioned the beginnings of this rebalance in U.S. foreign policy, more towards deterrence and, remaining engaged, but nonetheless increasingly hedging against a more aggressive China.
It was really under the Trump administration that the U.S. assessment became especially extreme with words like the United States feeling that it was being “raped” by China and that [the] two were in an existential struggle. That really changed the terms of the conversation and made it very difficult in the context of our polarized politics.“The current escalation, this tit-for-tat spiral that we’re in, serves nobody.”
When the Biden administration came into office, they had very little space to undo some of the more counterproductive measures that the Trump administration had put in place, because that would potentially open them up to being seen as unnecessarily soft on China and make it harder to do things like get key nominees confirmed.
FP: One could argue that the Biden administration has deployed more sober rhetoric than the previous administration, but the policies from both were certainly designed to hurt. Which of the two matter more, policy or rhetoric?
JCW: Both contribute and matter a lot because the rhetoric is oftentimes what the other side uses to point to as evidence of a much more hostile intent, even if the actions may or may not keep pace with those threats.
The behavior is ultimately what I think both sides look to, to see whether the threats, but also the assurances of the other side, are credible. Both sides in this atmosphere of intense distrust look toward the preparations that each side is taking, whether that is to stand on principle or to prepare for a potential conflict and sees that as evidence and its determination to use those capabilities for ill.
FP: Which U.S. policies specifically are counterproductive?
JCW: The tariffs are one such example, hurting American consumers and businesses as much as they are helping. They don’t seem to be moving the needle in terms of China’s economic practices that we continue to find objectionable.
Another area where I’m very concerned are the efforts to protect research security and look at all potential students and scholars as potential spies. That was the language of the previous administration, even though the policies were a little bit more targeted to screen for potential ties to entities that had affiliation with the Chinese military. The Biden administration has changed that language.
However, in talking with Chinese American or American scholars of Chinese origin or descent today, they feel that the climate is worse, that the Biden administration is just as determined, if not more, to prosecute. That’s creating a broader chilling effect here, and we are not seizing the opportunity to reverse some of the damage, to attract and retain talent from around the world.
FP: I’d like you to address a general critique of the argument you’ve been making. Several scholars say that there simply isn’t a basis for the cooperation you advocate for, because there’s no evidence that Beijing wants to reciprocate.
JCW: I have two ways of responding to that. The first is that we have to try, because the alternative is to take an increasingly fatalistic attitude toward the possibility of a crisis or conflict that would devastate the global economy, possibly lead to the deaths of many on the island of Taiwan, and tens of thousands of casualties on both sides.
The second is that, yes, it’s hard to find evidence on the Chinese side to reciprocate, but you might also from Beijing’s perspective look at the United States and say they see very little evidence that there’s anybody in the United States that’s interested in allowing China to become a respected equal on the world stage. This is a problem that requires thoughtful people to test the proposition of a more potentially moderate foreign policy on the part of Beijing. This is not about accommodating China. This is about finding ways reciprocally to reduce tensions in ways that wouldn’t require either side to fundamentally make concessions or even relinquish competition for decades to come. But the current trajectory that we are collectively on serves nobody’s interest. It is only raising the temperature and bringing forward a potentially avoidable crisis.
FP: Do the Chinese have a nuanced understanding of the shifts in American policy you’ve been describing from the Obama presidency through the Trump years and now to the Biden administration?
JCW: It’s something that they do track. There’s a tendency to privilege the most extreme voices on both sides. They tend to underweight those who take a more moderate, less zero-sum approach.
There is widespread recognition in China that domestic politics in the United States is leading to an increased tendency to stand tough against Beijing, and part of that then also leads to unconditional support for Taiwan. That’s one of the more dangerous dynamics that we are seeing today.
Part of the challenge here is creating an environment in which debate on both sides doesn’t come at the cost of perceived resolve, and once the relationship becomes increasingly adversarial, I think you’re going to continue to see that dynamic. For example, Representative Mike Gallagher at the opening hearing of the select committee hearing last week described this as an existential struggle on the seas, and that the [Chinese Communist Party (CCP)] posed a threat to life as we know it in the 21st century. But he also said that the CCP is counting on its friends in the United States to push back against their efforts. That is creating a framework in which anybody who wants to engage in a more rational, measured debate over China’s intentions and U.S. policy responses, is likely to be smeared or marginalized as somebody who is sympathetic to the CCP.
FP: Let’s flip the headline question we began with. Is China too consumed by competition with the United States?
JCW: I think it is. It is also one of the problems of the dynamic that we’ve described, where each side is increasingly engaged in going around the world, thwarting each other.
The burden is on decision-makers on both sides of the Pacific to put forward a more fulsome vision of an inclusive order where the two sides could agree to not necessarily always be engaged in trying to counter or undermine the other.
FP: Are there areas where Beijing perceives threats from the United States that may actually not be that scary?
JCW: The Chinese Communist Party believes that the United States is both intent on containing China—using Taiwan to that effect—and undermining the CCP. But the Biden administration is not intent on undermining the CCP or necessarily using Taiwan to that end. There are people who are quite outspoken here in the United States, some of whom, not too long ago, held power, in the Trump administration. It’s not paranoia, but we have to look at the balance of voices and what is the current constellation.
Right now, we do have a window of opportunity with the leadership in the United States and the Biden administration wanting competition without conflict and where you have in the Chinese leadership, at least currently with acute domestic problems, a genuine interest in stabilizing the relationship.“The current trajectory that we are collectively on serves nobody’s interest. It is only raising the temperature and bringing forward a potentially avoidable crisis.”
The current escalation, this tit-for-tat spiral that we’re in, serves nobody. The challenge here, on both sides, is breaking out of the mindset that deterrence is just about threats and threatening punishment. It’s not just about capabilities and hitting each other as hard as they can. It’s also about making those punishments conditional, which implies an assurance that if Washington doesn’t escalate or if Beijing doesn’t escalate, that both sides can expect a better outcome. And right now, that effort to invest in the credibility of threat is coming at the expense of the credibility of those assurances, and that is feeding this cycle. And that’s on Beijing as much as it is on Washington to make those kind of choices clear.
FP: What do other large countries like India or Indonesia or Nigeria think about the U.S.-China relationship right now?
JCW: Other countries around the world have been pretty clear in saying that they don’t want to choose between the United States and China, and they worry about a future in which the United States and China are simply measuring success in terms of defeating or getting the best of the other. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve suggested that the lodestar for U.S. policy has to be what we want rather than what we fear.
None of our allies and partners, let alone the rest of the world, want to see this relationship continue to spiral. Ultimately, if the Unites States is to forge a broader coalition, we need to ultimately make clear what it is that we are standing for because prioritizing competition and maintaining, as Jake Sullivan said, an absolute rather than a relative lead over China, will introduce more friction between the United States and its allies and partners and the rest of the world.
This framing of global politics as being a struggle between autocracies and democracies makes it harder to build this more inclusive coalition, including one that tackles challenges that exist inside of autocracies. Governance is something that all leaders can want, regardless of the regime type in which they happen to lead. That framing also makes it harder to prevent competition from becoming more conflictual, pushing China and Russia closer together, for example, rather than encouraging limits to their cooperation.
FP: When you look at how U.S. politicians have been talking about Taiwan, and the broader U.S. policy on Taiwan, what’s your sense of what’s going wrong?
JCW: My sense here is that things are going wrong in part because there’s been this premium placed on symbolism over substance and the belief that to deter Beijing from attacking Taiwan is not only to marshal the capabilities, but also to talk tough.
The challenge here is that deterrence requires more than just threats. It requires credible assurances that we remain committed in the United States to maintaining the status quo. And that, of course, if China escalates it would pay significant costs. But also that if they don’t escalate, they don’t need to fear that the United States is headed inexorably toward recognizing Taiwan as an independent state.
What’s really crucial to recognize is that it’s not just military factors that are going to shape [Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s calculus. Despite being an authoritarian leader, Xi also faces potentially acute pressure domestically from other elites in the Politburo, but also online and in the public potentially to take decisive measures where the CCP is perceived to be on the cusp of “losing” Taiwan from their perspective. It’s critical that we deter, rather than provoke Beijing over Taiwan if we want to maintain the peace and stability that has served us all, and not least the people of Taiwan, for decades.
FP: How best should Washington deter Beijing? How do you raise the costs in a way that doesn’t lead us to war over Taiwan?
JCW: Across the spectrum there are a lot of different things that we are and should continue doing. One of those is increasing the resilience of the U.S. military posture in the region, in coordination with allies and partners. It’s about increasing Taiwan’s resilience to economic coercion, including deepening economic as well as cultural ties to Taiwan, so that they don’t feel like there is no choice here, that that they have international support, but that we also be very clear that there are limits and that the United States would remain willing to accept any outcome that is peacefully arrived at without coercion, because it’s that prospect for some eventual evolution that could lead you to something that Beijing could call a reunification. That pathway has to exist, otherwise there’s nothing left in Beijing’s mind other than the military option, and that’s what we want to prevent.
As Ryan Hass and Jude Blanchette have argued, the best solution is no solution. We need to kick the can down the road, and that means threading the needle between things that substantively and meaningfully enhance the resilience of Taiwan’s defense and its economy. But it also means avoiding things like high profile visits that really make the island no safer today than it was before. If anything, the opposite: Polling shows the majority of residents in Taiwan think [then-U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy] Pelosi’s visit brought more costs to Taiwan’s security than it brought benefits.
FP: But what you’re suggesting and proposing here would delay, not prevent, a potential war over Taiwan.
JCW: If you delay something in perpetuity, you’ve effectively prevented it.
FP: If you could advise policymakers watching this discussion on how to adapt U.S. policy towards China, what would you tell them?
JCW: I would suggest that we need to stand up a much more robust mechanism for evaluating the costs to Americans of many of the policies ostensibly designed to protect the United States. And oftentimes it’s phrased as, “We can run faster.” But increasingly, I think we’re trying to slow Beijing down.
My big concern is that efforts that we were taking to slow Beijing down are slowing ourselves down in the process. To me, the most urgent things that we need to do is to ensure that the United States remains committed to being a more inclusive democracy where diverse voices are heard and respected rather than a place in which we are increasingly so afraid that we hunker down, we squash dissenting views as unpatriotic or disloyal, and we become a shell of ourselves or repeat some of the abuses of the past.
Every time there has been an effort to compete with or counter an enemy that has been seen as existential, we’ve ended up undertaking policies here at home—from the internment of Japanese Americans to the hate crimes against Muslim and Sikh Americans—that have ended up doing more to undermine democracy than the adversary in the first place. So that is the most important thing that we could do, separate from the importance of continuing to assess very carefully the extent of China’s intentions, its capabilities, and the best U.S. policy response.
FP: You know, Jessica, since you’ve left government, you’ve become a sort of rallying figure for the argument that you’re making—basically a call for a more nuanced and moderate debate on China policy. Are you finding that people in power in America and elsewhere are responding to what you’re saying?
JCW: So many people have come forward. I’ve heard individually from people inside and outside the administration that they appreciate this call to think about what it is that we’re competing for. Where is this all going? And if we don’t like where this trajectory is pointing, what might we do today to imagine and work toward a different future?
And so I think that there really is appetite for this discussion. I hope that collectively we can come together across partisan party lines to identify what is the future that we want to be leading rather than solely thinking about trying to outcompete China. The frank reality is that we are among each other’s largest trading partners, and we’re not going to be able to meet our own objectives in the areas of decarbonization or the green energy transition without continuing to utilize some degree of inputs from China and Chinese companies. We’re just too integrated to be completely pulled apart. And so this idea that we are just going to defeat the other doesn’t really square with the reality that we exist in.
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