Editor’s Note: WPR editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein is filling in today for Stewart Patrick, who will be back next week.
U.S. President Joe Biden will hold a video summit Monday with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, their first face-to-face encounter since Biden took office in January. The meeting, which is reportedly the culmination of background exploratory talks over the past month, follows several high-profile encounters between top-level officials that veered toward the explosive. Sparks flew in Anchorage, Alaska, when both sides’ senior diplomats met for the first time in March. More recently, Wendy Sherman, deputy secretary of state, faced an acrimonious reception in Tianjin when she visited in July.
The leaders’ summit suggests that both sides might be ready to lower the temperature a bit, even if only to find a more productive modus operandi for managing relations. It takes place after five years of heightened tensions and rivalry between the world’s leading power and nearest peer competitor, in which relations have grown volatile and envenomed, with attitudes hardening on both sides. The emerging hawkish consensus in the U.S., mirrored by China’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy, has led observers in the U.S. and around the world to begin speaking of a new Cold War, with implications for the global economy and the stability of the world order.
For all the attention the summit and its outcomes will attract, however, one meeting alone will not be enough to set rules of the road for managing the two sides’ differences, let alone resolve them. The challenge to the U.S. represented by China’s arrival as a global economic and political power, as well as its rapidly advancing military capabilities, will be an enduring one that will require an all-of-society effort to meet.
To mobilize that effort, U.S. policymakers must effectively communicate to the U.S. public what that challenge consists of and what meeting it will entail. So far, however, they have failed to coherently formulate that message and effectively transmit it. Biden should take advantage of today’s summit to address the nation and remedy that failure. Here are five key components of what such a speech would include.
How we got here. The easy answer is that U.S. policymakers took a gamble 20 years ago by paving the way for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization and the global free trade regime, in the hopes that a wealthier China would be a more responsible China. That bet clearly hasn’t paid off geopolitically for Washington. China has grown wealthier, expanding its economic footprint—and, with it, Beijing’s political influence—around the world. But under Xi, the Communist Party has reasserted its control over all aspects of China’s economy and society, cracking down on domestic dissent, while growing more assertive and vocal about its ambitions for a global role commensurate to its power.
But it would be a mistake to pin all the blame for the United States’ relative decline on the WTO decision or on China’s leadership. Over the same period, the U.S. allowed the fruits of its tremendous growth in productivity to concentrate at the top of an increasingly unequal wealth pyramid, rather than reinvesting them into a repurposed workforce and domestic infrastructure. Nor did it help that, in that same period, the U.S. squandered trillions of dollars in two war efforts and failed state-building projects, while allowing its casino-like, deregulated financial system to cause a global meltdown.
A similar error consists of dismissing the impact of China’s rise as uniquely negative. To begin with, it has pulled hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens out of poverty, while also fueling infrastructure development and growth-driven poverty reduction across the Global South. Moreover, its role in the global supply chain helped drive an unprecedented transformation of U.S. living standards and lifestyle, sometimes for the worse, but often for the better and in ways that now would be unimaginable to forego.
Where we are. Very clearly, U.S. relative power is declining, even as that of China is rising. That is exacerbated by the erosion of the United States’ domestic cohesion and productive base, both of which are in urgent need of renewal. But here, too, it is important not to draw distorted and overly pessimistic conclusions. It is revealing that for the first time since its polling of the U.S. public began, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that most Americans believe China is stronger militarily than the U.S., a perception that is so far from the objective reality that it can only be the product of a collective pessimism.
Perhaps most worrying about the emerging hawkish consensus in Washington is the distorted portrayals of what the U.S. public can expect as a result of the U.S.-China rivalry.
The truth is that despite China’s rapid advances along all the scales of national power, it remains far behind the U.S. on all the most important metrics. And in trying to close the gap in coming years, it faces considerable and daunting challenges, including unfavorable demographics, a growth model in need of rebalancing, and the social and environmental fallout from its rapid industrialization. Nor is there yet any certainty over China’s ultimate objectives—whether it seeks to expand its influence in the existing world order, replace the U.S. as the leader of that order, or establish its own global order with Beijing at its head. Finally, China does not enjoy many of the intangible benefits the U.S. does, including its thick web of alliances and partnerships, and the trust it enjoys as a stakeholder in the global order.
What to expect. Perhaps most worrying about the emerging hawkish consensus in Washington is the distorted portrayals of what the U.S. public can expect as a result of the U.S.-China rivalry. Often, this is reduced to talk of decoupling and a new Cold War, and fear-mongering over the potential for a coming hot war with China, in particular over Taiwan. In reality, the two sides’ economies are so interwoven throughout the long tail of the global supply chain that decoupling would be difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish.
Far more likely is a period of contested rules and norms, local and piecemeal firewalls to information connectivity, and efforts to secure supply chains for strategic sectors. All of that will make for a complex operating environment for investment, supply chains, online and device-located apps, and cultural and educational exchange. But instead of a lengthy Cold War with a binary, zero-sum outcome, we are more likely to see a resting state of durable coexistence and prickly competition, but no definitive moment of victory.
What to worry about. In many ways, however, the current situation makes for a volatile and dangerous period, where both sides may see closing windows of opportunity to achieve their own objectives and forestall the other’s. For both sides, then, the biggest concern will be to manage their rivalry responsibly, in order to keep periods of tension and the occasional confrontation from escalating or sparking a conflagration. Beyond that, the U.S. should certainly worry about the emergence of a world order in which Washington no longer necessarily sets the rules. A global landscape dominated politically and economically by China would, by definition, be less malleable and more refractive to U.S. power and influence. It would also, in all likelihood, be a world with less freedom and democracy.
That said, the U.S. must avoid the urge to reduce its foreign policy to single-mindedly competing with China or to define its national interests exclusively through the prism of that competition. Similarly, it must take care to compete to the United States’ strengths, rather than seeking to match China in areas where it doesn’t enjoy a competitive advantage. Finally, the United States’ open society and political system provide China with greater ability to influence its domestic politics than the U.S. enjoys in China. Making sure the U.S. doesn’t overcompensate by ceding to the temptation of closure must be a high priority.
Why we have reason to feel confident. As much as Biden should clearly lay out the nature of the challenge that China represents, he must also underscore the reasons Americans have for optimism. Primary among them are the enduring strength and dynamism of the U.S. economy and society, both of which have historically proven resilient and able to bounce back from periods of stagnation and internal division. The United States’ geographic location—an island in strategic terms, surrounded by close partners to the north and south, and oceans to the east and west—as well as its global network of alliances are also two strengths that China pointedly lacks. Finally, for all Washington’s fiscal mismanagement and overuse of financial sanctions, neither the yuan nor any other currency poses a viable challenge to the U.S. dollar as the world’s global reserve currency. For as long as the dollar enjoys that status, it will continue to underwrite outsized U.S. power and influence.
The competition with China represents the first serious geopolitical challenge to the U.S. of the post-unipolar era. As such, Americans must in many ways relearn the dynamics of long-term strategic competition. Like that of the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union, competition with China will include ups and downs, successes and failures. But unlike the Cold War, it is unlikely to end with one side or the other victorious. So far, the U.S. public has not been prepared for what lies ahead. Biden should take advantage of his summit with Xi to rectify that.
Judah Grunstein is the editor-in-chief of World Politics Review. You can follow him on Twitter at @Judah_Grunstein.