As the 2024 U.S. presidential election approaches, questions are growing about what the U.S. objectives are with regard to strategic competition with China. While the Biden administration has said it seeks to “responsibly manage competition” with China, some leading Republicans have criticized this approach and called for “winning” as an overriding goal. But the triumphalists have not clearly stated what winning means.
Washington’s goal in any confrontation with China should be precisely to win, and winning means reaching a point where Beijing is neither willing nor able to harm vital U.S. interests. In other words, Washington should seek to subjugate or neutralize the Chinese threat.
Clearly, it makes no sense to aim simply to “manage the competition.” In other competitions, such as the 100-meter sprint, the objective is not to manage, but to win. Moreover, setting a goal to manage the competition simply raises the question, “manage for what?” Like all historical rivalries, the rivalry between Washington and Beijing will eventually come to an end. (After all, Athens and Sparta no longer compete.) So what is the end state that Washington desires?
To understand success, let’s first examine its opposite. Intelligence analysts assess threats by examining an adversary’s capabilities and intent, and the problem today is that China has both the ability and the intent to actively and systematically harm U.S. vital interests through means including military coercion against U.S. allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific (including routine military intimidation and threats of aggression against Taiwan), diminishing U.S. prosperity through illicit trade practices, and corroding U.S. democracy, including by targeting voters with artificial intelligence-enabled disinformation campaigns.
More fundamentally, China seeks to replace the U.S.-led international system with a new Beijing-centered world order that favors autocracy and the imperial ambitions of President Xi Jinping. This is China’s theory of victory, which, if realized, would severely undermine the well-being of all people in the United States and the broader free world.
Thus, U.S. victory in a new Cold War with China would mean eliminating China’s most serious threats to U.S. core interests. Absent a major war, there are three paths to victory.
First, the United States could aim over a period of several years to thoroughly outcompete China in every dimension of economic, technological, ideological, diplomatic, and military power, thereby denying Beijing the ability to inflict significant damage on vital U.S. interests.
This will require strengthening U.S. economic and technological leadership and further de-risking the Chinese economy. Indeed, America’s relative economic dominance is already growing, and the U.S. is on track to account for 26 percent of global GDP this year, its largest share in the past two decades. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping may continue to undermine China’s successful growth model, reasserting the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) control over China’s once-vibrant private sector and endangering China’s international trade and investment with his assertive foreign policy. For example, foreign direct investment into China recently hit a 30-year low.
These trends could be accelerated by Trump-era pro-growth policies such as tax cuts, deregulation, and the liberalization of the U.S. energy industry. Washington and its allies should also accelerate efforts to combat China’s unfair trade practices, using a wide range of tools including higher tariffs, export controls, and investment reviews.
Washington could further shift the balance of power in its favor by continuing to broaden and deepen the global alliance system in the Indo-Pacific, including new arrangements such as AUKUS (Australia, Britain, United States) and NATO-IP4, which brings together NATO and its four Indo-Pacific partners (Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand). Washington also needs to form counter-coalitions with other groups of nations, such as the European Union, which increasingly view Beijing as a “systemic rival.”
The United States can build a military with the clear capability to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, restore stability in the Taiwan Strait, and protect the U.S. mainland with a stronger strategic deterrent and missile defense system. Republican Senator Roger Wicker was right in late May when he called for a “generational investment” in the military to increase U.S. defense spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product.
As the United States and its allies grow stronger and counter China, the balance of power will tilt in America’s favor, diminishing China’s ability to threaten the United States even if Beijing’s leadership maintains an adversarial stance. After all, many autocracies, such as Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba, are hostile to the United States but lack the capacity to harm vital U.S. interests.
Nuclear-armed rogue states like Russia and North Korea pose a military threat, but unlike the Soviet Union during the Cold War or China today, they lack the capacity to threaten U.S. vital interests broadly and systematically or to compete for regional or global dominance. A future similar situation with China would signal the end of the current era of strategic competition.
The second path to victory could come from a change in Chinese intentions. In other words, the United States could compete to convince China’s leaders to change their minds. Xi Jinping’s views are set, but a future Chinese leadership may conclude that challenging the United States and its allies is too difficult and costly, and Beijing would be better off pursuing a more cooperative path.
This second path to victory may be facilitated by the first: As China’s leaders come to understand that their aggressive approach is failing, they will likely decide that a new direction is needed.
Some may argue that this outcome is unlikely because Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party are fixated on replacing the United States. But just as the Soviet leaders were fixated on burying the West, and ultimately failed, reality may force the Chinese leadership to consider a Plan B if Plan A fails.
Neither outcome requires regime change in China, and so the United States could win a new Cold War even if Beijing continues to fly the Communist flag.
The third possibility for a U.S. victory ends in regime change, but, as surprising as it may be, this outcome must be viewed primarily in terms of power politics, not ideology: Regime change benefits the United States not necessarily because it would bring democracy and human rights to the Chinese people (though that would be desirable), but because, like the first two scenarios, it would weaken Beijing’s ability and intent to threaten the United States.
Autocracies are fragile and often collapse, especially when there is a change in leadership. Like most autocrats, Xi believes the greatest threat to his rule is internal, not external. If you don’t believe me, just follow the money: China spends more on domestic security than it does on its military (the U.S. spends 2:1 in the opposite direction).
The collapse of the Chinese Communist Party would likely lead to domestic instability and a reduced willingness to systematically challenge the U.S.-led order. China’s new government would be weaker and more inward-looking in its efforts to consolidate its power. And any new Chinese government, whether a new type of dictatorship or, more unlikely but possible, an emerging democracy, would almost certainly behave in a less aggressive way than President Xi Jinping’s Communist Party.
China could also break up into multiple states as its multinational empire collapses. Unsettled regions like Tibet and Xinjiang, fed up with Beijing’s harsh rule, could declare independence. China’s long history is marked by civil wars and revolutions, with its last one ending just 75 years ago.
To be sure, a nuclear-armed, remaining nationalistic China may still be problematic in many ways, but a nation chastened and weakened by losses in strategic competition is likely to cooperate or remain passive for a period of time and will certainly no longer be capable of systematically threatening U.S. vital interests or qualify as a strategic competitor.
These three scenarios are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are mutually reinforcing. The First Cold War ended with some combination of these outcomes. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union had been outmaneuvered by the West in a half-century-long competition. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power with the goal of reforming the Soviet system and easing tensions with the West. This process led to uprisings and ultimately to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
Some counter that the United States did not actually win the Cold War because Russia subsequently reemerged as a threat under President Vladimir Putin, but this is a mistaken view: Washington’s Cold War victory gave the world a 25-year respite from great power competition, and Russia today is much weaker and therefore less of a threat than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.
Similarly, today, after a quarter-century break from strategic competition and the possibility of a re-emerging challenge from a weakened China is arguably far preferable to an eternity of relentless great power rivalry between the United States and China, teetering on the brink of great power war.
A good strategy starts with a clear goal in mindAnd it is this vision of three wins that inspires and informs U.S. strategy: The United States and its allies should strengthen themselves and seek to counter and weaken China (including by working to loosen the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power), while at the same time engaging in tough diplomacy to show China’s leaders that there is a better way forward if they are willing to end their hostile policies.
While some would argue that a more hardline approach to threatening the Chinese Communist Party will only antagonize Beijing, in reality China’s current aggression has been made possible by an inconsistent Western approach that has failed to impose appropriate costs on Beijing’s malign behavior. A more assertive, confrontational policy is needed now to achieve a less threatening China in the future.
Some may worry that the defeat of China’s anti-American policies would undermine the well-being of the Chinese people and especially China’s partners in the Global South. Conversely, these same peoples would be the greatest beneficiaries of a new China that is less repressive at home and more cooperative abroad.
Success is difficult to achieve if it cannot be envisioned, and the United States and its allies must keep this vision of victory clearly in mind as they set out ultimately to not only manage but win the new Cold War.
