As the Trump administration gets underway, key aspects of how it will approach China remain unclear. It’s especially uncertain what consensus will emerge among Trump’s team on the nature and scope of the threat that China poses. During his confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio asserted that the People’s Republic of China is “the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.” Along similar lines, Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz has stated that “we are, I believe, in a cold war” with China because its goal is “replacing the American Dream and American leadership around the world with the Chinese Dream and Chinese leadership.”
Does Trump himself share this view of the China threat? He rarely, if ever, talks about it in such strategic or ideological terms. His approach is often described as more “transactional,” focused on the opportunities provided by the relationship he has (or thinks he has) with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Contrary to the prevailing view of Xi as a brutal dictator—and the view among many in GOP circles that diplomatic engagement with Beijing is futile or dangerous—Trump said publicly last month that “I like President Xi very much. I’ve always liked him. We always had a very good relationship.” And “it is my expectation that we will solve many problems together.” Whether Trump’s approach will be consistent with the principles of his national security team—or the interests of the United States—remains to be seen. The meager results of his personal diplomacy during his first term with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, not to mention Xi himself, should be examined for clues and lessons.
In the meantime, Trump’s advisers should also reexamine Rubio’s and Waltz’s views of Beijing’s strategic intentions. They would benefit greatly from a new book by Brookings Institution Fellow Melanie Sisson entitled The United States, China, and the Competition for Control. In this slim volume (less than 100 pages of text before the endnotes), Sisson persuasively refutes the notion that China is seeking to supplant the United States as the global hegemon.
Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi told Rubio in their first phone conversation that “we have no intention of overtaking or replacing anyone.” This was readily dismissed as typical Chinese disingenuousness. However, those who claim that China seeks world domination never seem to confront the logic of the argument. Do the math. How would Chinese global hegemony come about, and how would it operate? Is it possible that Beijing has the resources to make it happen and that the competing resources and resistance of the rest of the world could not prevent it? What reason do Chinese leaders have to believe that they could achieve and sustain it?
They are amply familiar with the reasons why many historical bids by other great powers for regional or global hegemony failed or did not survive. That is why Beijing is focused instead on maximizing China’s wealth, power, and influence in a multipolar world. Chinese leaders almost certainly see this as a more viable and pragmatic approach than launching a winner-take-all contest with the United States. This is especially so given the advantages and opportunities Beijing can derive from China’s growing relative power, the receptivity of much of the Global South, and the emerging limits on U.S. power and influence.
This is the “competition for control” that Sisson addresses in her book. It is not a zero-sum contest because China’s goal is not to usurp the U.S. role and unilaterally set the rules of international behavior but instead to increase its role relative to that of the United States in setting the rules. One of the central points here is that Chinese and U.S. interests are competitive but not irreconcilable. As Sisson observes, the widespread view that China’s vision for world order is “definitionally antithetical to the United States” is a “conviction [that] has preceded the evidence.”
Sisson acknowledges the literature supporting the argument that Beijing is “seeking actively to displace, and ultimately, to replace the United States as the world’s most influential, indeed the world’s dominant, actor” and intends to do so by “establishing an illiberal hegemony first regionally, and then globally.” In particular, she cites The Strategy of Denial by Elbridge Colby (nominated to be Trump’s Undersecretary of Defense for Policy; The World According to China by Elizabeth Economy (who worked in Biden’s Commerce Department); and The Long Game by Rush Doshi (who worked in Biden’s National Security Council). However, like some other analysts, Sisson asserts that key elements of the argument are based heavily on selective and debatable interpretations of Chinese policy statements and documents.
The core challenge to the United States is not that Beijing seeks to remake the international order in the image of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) system but simply that it wants the existing order to legitimize the CCP system and let it participate in writing the rules. This is disconcerting to the United States because of the CCP’s effectiveness and the external leverage this has given China.
As Sisson observes, what Washington is really confronting is “China’s success in demonstrating that its illiberal political system is socially stable, economically productive, and militarily capable” and that this in itself “will make it harder for the United States to pursue its goals and interests.” This has fueled “anxiety that a world in which Beijing is allowed to exercise international leadership to any greater extent than it does already will be a world hostile to liberal principles and menacing to the United States.” And this, in turn, has been the impetus for the inflated notion that China seeks to undermine the world order in ways that are fundamentally incompatible with U.S. interests.
This exaggerated threat perception serves several purposes. Pointing to an existential threat from China allows Washington to divert attention from the self-inflicted vulnerabilities that have undercut U.S. competitiveness. It also deflects the hard policy choices that might be required for constructive engagement with Beijing. Why consider compromises with China if the CCP isn’t interested in peaceful coexistence and is instead determined to impose its will on the United States and the rest of the world? Finally, as Sisson notes with concern, the narrative of China’s pursuit of global hegemony is being used as the basis for a confrontational and exclusively competitive approach to Beijing that is probably increasing both costs and risks for the United States.
To support the alternative notion that constructive engagement with China is both possible and necessary, Sisson briefly traces the history of Washington’s and Beijing’s respective approaches to the post-1945 international order. On the U.S. side, she notes that much of what Washington associates with that order today “are not products of its founders’ design but of American power” and its embrace of liberalism.
Moreover, Washington largely adopted the view that both its security and that of the international order itself require other countries to subscribe to its values—even though it has been inconsistent with the post-war order’s founding principles of free trade and multilateralism. Sisson’s summary assessment is that the United States, notwithstanding its central role in establishing that order, has “vacillated between full-throated endorsement of its principles and its institutions, equivocation about America’s willingness to assume the obligations and duties of its membership in them and loud objections to the notion of being constrained by their rules.”
For its part, China was represented at the establishment of the post-war order by the Nationalist (KMT) Government, which later fled to Taiwan in 1949. However, CCP leaders eventually endorsed that order because they believed it could provide both internal stability and protection against “disruptive external agents and influences” and challenges to China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. After the Cold War, however, Beijing remained somewhat uncomfortable with the U.S. approach to multilateralism, which the Chinese predictably interpreted as aimed at perpetuating American hegemony. China’s own approach has thus been aimed at pursuing a range of policies that are “consistent with a state responding to an environment in which it recognizes threats to its interests at the same time that it sees opportunities to advance them.”
On balance, Sisson asserts that China, “far from opting out or of seeking to obstruct or overturn the post-war order’s institutions,” has “integrated itself into them and, from there, worked within their procedures to gain and exercise influence.” Although openly critical of some of the rules, Beijing’s emphasis has been on advocating reform from within the system and “strengthening its bargaining position” in the process. It is certainly true that China—like the United States—engages in “diplomatic dissembling, economic and military coercion, and selective interpretations of history to pursue its interests.” But Sisson concludes that “what China has said, and done, over time and into the present day suggests that China is more in support of than opposed to” the founding principles and institutions of the post-war order.
Notwithstanding this historical balance sheet, Sisson reiterates that many in Washington have “adopted a narrative about U.S.-China competition that is as insistent about America’s attachment to the post-war order as it is about China’s intent to supplant it with a less legitimate and more dangerous one.”
What is obscured in this narrative is the difference between an existential threat and a geostrategic challenge. Sisson acknowledges that “China’s growing power makes it possible to imagine an international order…that privileges America’s liberal preferences less and China’s illiberal preferences more.” But this is not (or at least need not be) a winner-take-all contest. Neither side’s preferences would necessarily negate or exclude the other’s. Also, efforts by China to alter the balance of preferences “do not themselves constitute a major break with the principles and institutions of the post-war order and should not be the basis for extrapolation about China’s ambitions to create a new one.”
So what is to be done? One of Sisson’s most compelling observations is that the U.S. narrative “makes order the object of great power conflict, not the means of managing it. It is a dangerous inversion, one that converts negotiating the rules of international affairs into a competition to set them.” The bottom line is that Washington needs to recognize that it cannot unilaterally set the terms of either the U.S.-China relationship or the international order.
Instead, the United States simply needs to get down to the business of working out those terms through sustained strategic engagement with Beijing. Contrary to the presumption of irreconcilable differences, Sisson notes that there is common ground from which to work. Although both sides seek to maximize their relative wealth, power, and influence, both also “profess ongoing attachment” to many common principles and objectives, including “a desire to maintain a global economy that runs on rules that facilitate the worldwide movement of goods, money, ideas, and people.”
Washington’s goal should thus be to “capitalize on China’s attachment to the current order” and meet Beijing on that playing field rather than assume that China is trying to destroy or monopolize it. The United States should be “pragmatically engaging China within the institutional structures of the post-war order” in an effort to maximize the extent to which that order serves or at least is conducive to U.S. interests and values. Beijing is already invested in maximizing the extent to which it is conducive to Chinese interests and values. “Negotiating the rules of international affairs” will inevitably be a contentious and prolonged process, and neither side will be able to get everything it wants. However, the challenge of working out a mutually acceptable version of world order must be preferable to the dangers of concluding prematurely that none is possible.
Within that framework, Sisson adds that the United States also “will need to accept that it is unlikely to persuade Beijing to negotiate, compromise, or cooperate in the ways and places Washington would like” if, at the same time, the United States is clearly implementing policies that challenge core Chinese security interests and seek to “constrain China’s role in the international community and global economy.” Washington has the power to influence Chinese behavior, but only if it pursues dialogue with Beijing that is genuinely aimed at mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence. To Sisson, “it is worrisome that the U.S. national security community seems ever less inclined to find ways to do so and ever more inclined instead toward categorical narratives and combative policies.”
In a Chinese echo of Sisson’s perspective, Wang Jisi—arguably the dean of China’s “America-watchers”—recently emphasized the need for Beijing and Washington to overcome strategic distrust in favor of “strategic consensus” on key global and bilateral issues. He observed that while the United States suspects that China’s goal is to overthrow the world order, Beijing suspects that Washington’s goal is to overthrow the Chinese political system. Neither side believes the other’s denials. “Only when both sides abandon the zero-sum thinking of competition,” Wang said, “will China-U.S. relations see a brighter future.” Wang and Sisson show that there are strategic thinkers on both sides who have identified a path forward. It remains to be seen whether Washington and Beijing are willing and prepared to follow it.
Paul Heer is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018).
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