Upsetting the China Consensus

Three new types of policy advocates are disrupting “great-power competition” in their own ways, but not getting beyond it.

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For a decade now, Washington has existed in a yellow-peril fever dream, externalizing onto China seemingly all of America’s problems.

Much like the Global War on Terror that preceded it, Washington established “great-power competition”—a euphemism for inter-imperial rivalry—as a defining frame, an unquestionable fixture, for every conversation about not just foreign policy but economic statecraft too. Most of what became Bidenomics was a deliberate attempt to wager the fate of the US economy on prevailing in a self-imposed confrontation with the only other government that stood a chance of challenging US dominance (China).

In practice, great-power competition has amounted to a more farcical reprise of militant Cold War liberalism. Farcical not only because the US state today is a pale facsimile of the “progressive managerial state” of the Cold War, but also because China never posed an existential threat to either the United States or its economic system; only to US global primacy, which has been dying of natural causes anyway.¹

The lanyard class that manages foreign policy—the class from whence I came—views American power as an unqualified public good. In earlier times, that seemed plausible enough if you didn’t think too hard about it. But as circumstances (and distributions of global power) changed, the proposition became more suspect. Now, it’s a sick joke.

But suddenly there are three groups challenging the previous Washington consensus about great-power competition with China: the progressives; the “America-First” wonks; and the defensive realists, who’ve finally found their voices. I’m not sure there’s enough in common here to form a coalition, but I do expect that we’re going to see Sino-US rivalry start to look different than it has the past decade, in ways that I speculate about below. Indeed, changes to the character—but not the nature—of rivalry are already happening.

The Progressives

I wrote The Rivalry Peril with Mike Brenes to confront the folly of assuming a natural, permanent rivalry with China. That book is probably the definitive “progressive” China policy book. We don’t describe it as such, of course, but the main power-political constituency in Washington that has connected with it has been the progressive foreign policy crowd. In one sense that’s great, but the reality is that the progressives are not only a minority bloc; their analysis requires more change than DC’s corrupt politics will allow.

Nevertheless, last week, a number of antiwar organizations in DC signed an open letter to Trump ahead of US negotiations with China in Kuala Lumpur. The core of it, which echoes arguments we made in The Rivalry Peril, urges:

President Trump to reduce military tensions with China by reversing the US’s shift away from the policy of strategic ambiguity concerning Taiwan and reaffirming the “One China” policy as he engages with Beijing in trade negotiations.

This rather modest demand is an appeal to return to the status quo that prevailed between China and the US prior to “great-power competition” in 2015. It’s based on an underlying assessment that China does not seek global hegemony and that the Sino-US relationship is a security dilemma—something I’ve argued many times, most thoroughly in The Rivalry Peril.

The progressive analysis (security dilemma) and corresponding demand (maintain strategic ambiguity) is also the position of the Center for International Policy, which is the home of progressive foreign policy in Washington.

Progressive engagement on the China issue has been consistent but not necessarily consensus. Friend of the pod Stephen Wertheim, for example, echoed similar sentiments as other progressives just this week, but as a statement this is not exactly the same thing as the open letter:

Washington [should] not support Taiwan’s independence or rule out peaceful unification with the mainland, and in return, Beijing will avoid the use of force and ease military intimidation of Taiwan.

I don’t want to exaggerate the differences within the left, but how to deal with the Taiwan issue remains the “Sinatra test” of progressive foreign policy (if you can make it work there you can make it work anywhere).

America-First Wonks

Some—not all—national conservatives in the Trump administration take the view that Taiwan is not worth a war with China. Michael Anton has made this case in great detail. JD Vance has intimated it on multiple occasions. Others within MAGA think a fight over Taiwan is only worthwhile so long as global semiconductor manufacturing remains concentrated in Taiwan (which US foreign policy is trying relocate so that Taiwan’s fate further delinks from America’s).

As far as I can tell, all of these America-First policy aficionados agree with my fundamental assessment of the balance of power across the Taiwan Strait from years ago, which hasn’t changed:

when was the last time we could claim to assert air superiority around Taiwan?…I don’t see how we can establish sea control or sea denial while bracketing off both nuclear escalation and air superiority, and air superiority is something we gave up when we decided the scenario should be inside the ring range of China’s integrated air defenses (and Taiwan contingencies will always be inside Chinese IAD range). All of that is a detailed way of saying that the most dramatic shift in the balance of power in specifically the Taiwan Strait happened some time ago.

Acknowledging these facts means accepting that war is unwinnable. And while the sanest of us would conclude that an unwinnable war ought not be fought, for others it’s the excuse to arms-race or escalate a strategy of containment and counter-influence on “the grand chessboard.” That divide exists within the Trump administration too.

MAGA is decidedly hawkish on (and frequently racist toward) China, and there is a cross-section of right-wing elites—who sometimes identify as “prioritizers”—who believe war-prepping for the big one against China is the most important task of US foreign policy. Believing war inevitable, they’re not particularly concerned about the possibility that optimizing for war could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Elbridge Colby, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, has been the avatar for this point of view. There are also bonafide far-right accelerationists in the America-First orbit who seek a full economic decoupling from China.

It would be wrong to say the America-First wonks do not want war with China; they don’t want war on behalf of Taiwan. And that makes war just about anywhere else fair game.

Defensive Realists

When I went around DC last year for talks and meetings on China, I was dismayed by the ambient hawkishness of even many of the self-described progressives. But I also connected with a few people you might call “defensive realists,” including Mike Mazarr, an old friend and the lead author of a new RAND Corporation report on China that’s been making waves called Stabilizing the U.S.-China Rivalry. That report crystallizes many things I heard repeatedly behind closed doors but that the Biden administration largely refused:

• China has limited aims (i.e., there is almost no evidence to suggest it seeks global hegemony);

• Sino-US relations were on an unstable trajectory;

• Decoupling and economic containment were both undesirable;

• War with China over specifically Taiwan would be catastrophic and might not be winnable without nuclear escalation;

• Both sides needed to show greater restraint, and acknowledge mutual vulnerability of each others’ nuclear arsenals;

• The US should re-commit to the “One China” policy in word and deed; and

• A new modus vivendi was needed that would allow the US to ensure that great-power competition stayed within “guardrails.”

The policy world is quietly filled with people who accept most of these propositions, but they’re outnumbered by—and receive less attention than—the various other types of hawks. Defensive realists are ideological rationalists committed to preserving and prudently using American power, which they tend to view as a public good no matter what ills it might commit at any given time or place.

In the hype of anti-China fever, this kind of person has had to be careful about how they expressed their skepticism toward official US China policy for fear of accusations that they were a “Beijing Puppet” or worse. If you measure the defensive realist against the status quo, they seem sane and reasonable.

But, just taking the RAND report as an example, you have 115 pages of heavily footnoted, thoughtful analysis about Sino-US relations and no theory of China. It mostly rules out the idea that China seeks global primacy, but doesn’t defend a claim about what China does seek. It doesn’t question the paradigm of “great-power competition,” and instead wants to make it more sustainable and less prone to World War III; a contradiction. It acknowledges that China and the US may well be in a security dilemma—a situation where both sides make defensive security decisions that ironically undermine the security of each—yet it does not evaluate the possibility that Chinese behavior has taken place in the context of US hegemony and therefore might have been shaped by what the US does.

As much as defensive realists value prudence in statecraft, they really have no framework to ensure prudence beyond accepting mutual vulnerability and rational deterrence,² which is just not good enough in the age of MAGA and crisis capitalism. So a lot of what they advocate reduces to risk-averse improvisation in policy. You could certainly do worse, but it’s not exactly world-changing stuff. The title of the RAND report actually conveys everything this ilk is about—stabilizing US rivalry with China, not transcending it in the foreseeable future.

Changing the Character of Great-Power Rivalry

Three very different points of view on China, all converging in favor of some form of strategic detente, a degree of military restraint, and a policy of strategic ambiguity in relation to Taiwan. That’s very different than the misleading narratives floating around that Trump is “losing to China” or even “abandoning great-power competition” altogether.

Why did rare-earth elements and critical minerals become a fixation of first the national security state and then Wall Street? Fear that China would exploit its near-monopoly position in vital inputs to the US economy.

What is the primary justification for reshoring supply chains and restoring manufacturing in America? A desire to reduce reliance on China, coupled with a (losing) nationalist theory of outcompeting China.

Why does the Trump administration think it needs to assert a Monroe Doctrine 2.0 over Latin America? Misplaced fear of Chinese encroachment. The MAGA obsession with the Panama Canal was entirely about the illusion that China could seize control of it. The US has also just imposed visa restrictions on any Central American citizens with ties to the CCP. Worse, the Trump administration views China as the root cause of its war on fentanyl, which makes its illegal bombings in the Caribbean and potential overthrow of Venezuela’s president merely a proxy war within an inter-imperial rivalry with…China. Even the New York Times is describing the reality of Trump foreign policy in terms that I commonly use:

In keeping with Mr. Trump’s imperial approach to the Western Hemisphere, Mr. Rubio wants to roll back Latin America’s growing economic ties with China.

On top of all these ways in which the anti-China fetish animates US statecraft, there’s the biggest question of all: What remains the primary basis of the trillion-dollar war machine? The answer: Planning for war with China. Most of the high-technology spending in the military budget has but one purpose, and that’s fighting China, the only other high-tech adversary. A nuclear triad is not needed for Latin America but it is for China. The Space Force conceives of China as its primary adversary. The sixth-generation fighter program has no role other than war-fighting scenarios in East Asia…against China. And the justification for Trump’s “golden dome” and “golden fleet” projects is explicitly named as being about China.

You can look at all of that and conclude Trump is not going about great-power competition very intelligently. But you cannot say that he’s abandoned the primary raison d’être of the US national security state since 2015. China is everywhere in the Washington imagination, and the assumption of long-term competition is etched in national-security granite. The sources of rivalry are structural.

What has changed, and what I think elicits misreadings of Trump on China, is what you might call the line of inter-imperial competition.

All three categories of China-policy critic above see Taiwan as a more or less indefensible line of conflict.³ And the America-Firsters, who, let’s face it, matter most for the time being, aim to retrench US military power back to the second- or third-island chain (Oceania), as well as the Western Hemisphere.

In their view, the US should still be committed to military primacy, but the standard for measuring it is not Taiwan but rather their new geographic configuration. In mainstream media, this is all being explained as if the Trump administration wants the US national security state to prioritize the Western Hemisphere and “defend the Homeland.” But that’s euphemistic language for imperialist domination of Latin America, paired with a war on both immigrants and political opposition within the US.

While this all has terrible implications for Pacific-Island nations and Latin Americans, there’s a wager in it. If the US can concentrate its domination in a space that excludes Taiwan and possibly East Asia, then China might be open to a classic sphere of influence arrangement that would buy a stabilizing modus vivendi between the great powers. And if China refuses, which at this point I wouldn’t blame them, then America can fall back on a more defensible version of primacy.

Divesting of the Taiwan scenario would facilitate all of this, but there’s a farce in it much bigger than the farce of great-power competition the past decade. For one thing, nobody—not even China—challenges America’s hemispheric dominance. It’s neither contested nor foreseeably contestable.

But the greater trouble that everyone fails to see is that there has never been and never will be a durable “imperialist peace,” even in the best case scenario. Great-power competition is inter-imperial rivalry, and that rivalry is, I say again, structural. Coming to a peaceable understanding about Taiwan is necessary to stave off the most immediate source of World War III. But it is not enough. Shifting the line of conflict substitutes the East Asian powder keg for a Pacific-Island powder keg. As long as the capitalist world-system has declining growth prospects, and as long as the US refuses to relinquish its formal sphere of influence in the Pacific Islands, the main site of inter-imperial conflict simply moves but does not disappear.

This may seem a strange way to end this essay, but I read an interview recently with Thomas Meaney, one of the sharpest, if mercurial, public intellectuals of our era. He sized up the problem of our conjuncture in a manner very similar to what I’m trying to convey. Asked how he diagnoses the ills of our time, he replied:

China has never presented the ideological challenge that the Soviet Union did…It has often been suggested that the more effective challenges to neoliberal/neoconservative hegemony have come from the political right, in the form of nationalism, skepticism of forever wars, and flirtations with industrial policy. But those elements have so far turned out to be only extensions of neoliberal hegemony and for the most part remain fully compatible with it, even if they were to go beyond the level of rhetoric. The supposed dissenters on the right in fact contribute to the sense that there is a vibrant, ideologically diverse right-wing public sphere that poses a threat to the established order, when all of this is quite comfortably happening within the bounds of the old.

MAGA is not proposing to transcend the pain and power imbalances of the previous established order; they are in fact heightening both. On the matter of China, they are changing the character of inter-imperial rivalry, not the nature of it, nor the fact of it.

1. The idea that you could strike a new New Deal in the 2020s ignores the political forces that aligned to make the first one possible. And the idea that you were going to re-up the “arsenal of democracy” without unleashing all the horrors that accompany a program of militarism was just as wildly ahistorical.

2. No policy would be more important—and require more dramatic changes—than accepting mutual vulnerability with China. It’s a demand progressives should be making, and it’s kind of wild that it’s the defensive realists who were the first (other than me) to broach it.

3. By indefensible I don’t necessarily mean that we should not assist Taiwan in its bid for security. But one of the worst ways to do that is planning for World War III.

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