The “Progressive” Debate on Great-Power Competition
On the surface, Trump’s recent summit with Xi Jinping was inconsequential. But between Trump’s embrace of Xi’s Thucydides’ Trap rhetoric, Xi openly speaking of American decline, and Trump’s suspension of arms sales to Taiwan, the “China question” in US foreign policy suddenly became unsettled in a way that it has not been for at least a decade.
That’s a good thing! We’ve been on an apocalyptic trajectory. But power hates uncertainty, and so do its sycophants.
Given that all things China are very much in flux, I thought this might be a good time to outline the shape of the Democratic Party on China. Not the predictable foreign policy hawks who hocked “great-power competition” for Biden. I also don’t mean the shameless members of Congress who tried—and failed—to scaremonger their way to a Great Society. I mean the parts of the Democratic Party in touch with the pro-peace, antimilitarist base. Those aligned with the surging left populists taking on the oligarchs.
The Rivalry Peril is probably the single most coherent statement of what the populist wing of the Democratic Party thinks/has said about China. And as the progressive wing challenges its own party leadership in an inevitably hostile takeover, the arguments Mike Brenes and I make in that book will probably end up in greater circulation. Some of them already are.
But interest groups and ideologues invested in the status quo will not concede to change without a fight. In fact, I had an experience in Washington during the final year of Biden’s presidency that I’m sharing below because it illuminates the contentious politics around the China question.
I had stopped through DC during a cross-country tour for a different book and ended up speaking at a private dinner of Beltway progressives about China policy at the Tabard Inn. I was there to propose what a good US China policy would look like—some combination of 1) what would reflect the best analysis and 2) what would be responsive to political realities. I tabled how I saw things, and made the case that you can’t separate China from what was to be done in foreign policy generally—China policy should be a synecdoche for how America relates to the world, not an autonomous province in a foreign-policy kingdom.
I was mostly among friends, people with some interest in laying claim to a “progressive” position on China.1 We were under Chatham House rules, so no names, but after some initial friendly banter and good vibes, the discussion incited a lot of disagreement.
So here’s the gist of what I laid out on foreign policy and China, and the debate that ensued.