Michael Sobolik
On May 26, 2022, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the Biden administration’s long-awaited China strategy. “Under President Xi,” Blinken asserted, “the ruling Chinese Communist Party has become more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad.” He went on to name the CCP’s offenses: mass exportation of digital surveillance technology, violating international waters in the South China Sea, exploiting American companies, and oppressing its own people. The secretary was equally clear about the entity with the most to lose from the CCP’s actions: —the international order: “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.”
It is an odd thing for the chief diplomat of a sovereign nation-state to elevate the health of global institutions above the interests of his or her own government. Blinken couched his remarks not in terms of the United States’ history as a great power, nor its ideological heritage from the eighteenth century, but in relation to the establishment of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Throughout his remarks, Blinken’s references to the international order outnumbered his mentions of U.S. vital interests. The subtext was unmistakable: the Biden administration’s top priority in its relationship with Beijing is perpetuating the liberal international order. Secretary Blinken is far from alone. President Biden insisted in his remarks at the United Nations in 2021, “All the major powers of the world have a duty, in my view, to carefully manage their relationships so they do not tip from responsible competition to conflict.”
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