What’s the Endgame for US-China?

Analyzing an epic throwdown in Foreign Affairs

and

May 31, 2024

What American policy is most likely to avoid WWIII while ensuring another American century? Foreign Affairs hosted a gripping roundtable from some top former officials on how the US should confront China.

ChinaTalk is reporting on the heavyweights in the ring today:

Former Chair of the House China Committee Mike Gallagher, alongside Trump’s Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger
Rush Doshi, a China scholar who served for the past three years in Biden’s NSC
Jessica Chen Weiss, a Cornell professor who spent a year at the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, and James Steinberg, the dean of SAIS and former Deputy Secretary of State in Hillary Clinton’s day
Paul Heer, a long-time CIA officer who was the head East Asia analyst in the IC from 2007-2015

Throwing it back to Lincoln and Douglas!

To recap, Gallagher and Pottinger’s “No Substitute for Victory” argument made waves last month for the loudest articulation yet in “respectable circles” that the US should make “victory” its lodestar. They defined this as something that looked to many a lot like regime change:

The [Biden] administration has strengthened US alliances in Asia, restricted Chinese access to critical US technologies, and endorsed the bipartisan mood for competition. Yet the administration is squandering these early gains by falling into a familiar trap: prioritizing a short-term thaw with China’s leaders at the expense of a long-term victory over their malevolent strategy. The Biden team’s policy of “managing competition” with Beijing risks emphasizing processes over outcomes, bilateral stability at the expense of global security, and diplomatic initiatives that aim for cooperation but generate only complacency.
The United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it. Beijing is pursuing a raft of global initiatives designed to disintegrate the West and usher in an antidemocratic order. It is underwriting expansionist dictatorships in Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. It has more than doubled its nuclear arsenal since 2020 and is building up its conventional forces faster than any country has since World War II. These actions show that China isn’t aiming for a stalemate. Neither should America.
What would winning look like? China’s communist rulers would give up trying to prevail in a hot or cold conflict with the United States and its friends. And the Chinese people — from ruling elites to everyday citizens — would find inspiration to explore new models of development and governance that don’t rely on repression at home and compulsive hostility abroad.

First up: Rush Doshi. He recently wrapped up a few years as Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan in the Biden administration. In his view, Gallagher and Pottinger are anchoring far too much on the Cold War, and going aggressive right now make conflict a lot more likely. As Doshi put it,

In “No Substitute for Victory,” Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher raise important concerns about the Biden administration’s China policy. But their analysis misses the mark. Their review of key episodes in the administration’s China policy is inaccurate, and they propose steps that the administration is already taking. But above all, they make a bad bet: they contend that the United States should forget about managing competition, embrace confrontation without limits, and then wait for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to collapse. This approach risks runaway escalation and could force a moment of reckoning before the United States has taken the very steps the authors recommend to strengthen its defense industrial base and improve its competitive position. Such a strategy would also mean losing support from US allies and partners, who would see it as irresponsible.

In other words, an explicitly aggressive US policy could shorten timelines in Beijing for dramatic action. So if the US believes, in the long term, that the cards are stacked in its favor, it shouldn’t raise the stakes to increase near-term variance.

But the administration does not share the authors’ assumption that the contest with China can end as decisively and neatly as the Cold War did. Although Pottinger and Gallagher are careful not to call for forceful regime change, they define victory as “a China that is able to chart its own course free from communist dictatorship.” A China that resembles Taiwan politically is “the only workable destination,” they write.
But betting on a great power’s collapse or liberalization is unwise. Despite its challenges, China is the first US competitor in a century to surpass 60 percent of US GDP. The country boasts considerably greater industrial and technological strength than the Soviet Union did and is deeply enmeshed in the global economy. It cannot be wished away.
Ironically, the authors resurrect the end goal of the engagement era: a more liberal China. They hope that this time, a vague toughness will succeed where commercial and people-to-people ties fell short. But if engagement risked complacency, their approach risks escalation. An explicit policy of seeking the end of CCP rule would turn the US-Chinese rivalry into an existential one for China’s leadership. If Beijing concluded that the United States sought total victory, it would have little reason to exercise restraint.
American objectives do not require China’s political transformation, and there is no guarantee that the end of communist rule would produce a more restrained China. The end of communist Russia, after all, eventually gave way to Putin’s Russia.

Doshi is no shrinking violet. He authored The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order — a masterful deep-dive into CCP documents in which he concludes that the Party is far more globally ambitious than was consensus at the time. It’s striking, then, that he thinks there are chits to be gained from slowing America’s roll.

But Doshi’s point, though, begs the question: if “playing to win” would only increase the risk of conflict, why even bother with managing the conflict? Doshi thinks that “efforts to manage competition make the United States more competitive” — in particular, these efforts “show the American public and US allies and partners that the United States is a responsible actor and that they can confidently buy into Washington’s strategy.”

For what it’s worth, I’m of two minds on the “American public” angle: on the one hand, it’s easier to mobilize Americans for strategic competition if politicians are more explicit about what the stakes are and what we’re fighting for. But on the other hand, that tack may have real downsides in the managing Beijing psyche department.

For instance, rhetoric like this is the sort of thing that really gets people motivated:

From Dmitri Alperovich’s new book. Here’s the video of the speech.

For one example of just how much this sort of talk galvanized Americans, see this comment from the show I did with John Gans about the NSC: “The number of people who were inspired to change their lives by the words of one politician in 1961 is shockingly high. So many people of a certain age were like, ‘Well, I listened to John Kennedy, and I had to go work for the government.’”

But at the same time, JFK’s rhetoric and aggressive posture after a more back-footed Eisenhower led to some extremely dangerous times, helping push Nikita Khrushchev into a corner where he felt that he had to move missiles to Cuba.

Anyways, back to our essay battle. Doshi then gets into “tactical reassurance”:

Managing the competition is unlikely to achieve the kind of strategic reassurance with China that resolves fundamental disagreements. But Washington should have greater confidence in what can be called “tactical reassurance” that addresses specific issues. Better communication about what Washington is doing — and not doing — on issues ranging from technology to Taiwan can discourage dangerously fatalistic thinking from a paranoid great power whose dark view of the United States could get even darker. Making clear that Washington’s goals are not limitless but tied to specific interests reduces the risk of runaway escalation. That requires face-to-face meetings so that misperceptions can be ironed out quickly, competitive steps by the United States can be explained directly, and both sides can find off-ramps. Far from capitulation, this is basic diplomacy. It complements intense competition by making it less risky and more sustainable. Pottinger and Gallagher argue that any such efforts should be taken from a strong US position and should be a process, not an end goal. They are right. But that, in fact, describes the very approach that the Biden administration is taking.

There won’t be much value in “tactical reassurance”-type conversations if one side is talking up regime change. I think back to Eri Hotta’s excellent book, Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, in which she describes the dark spiral Tokyo fell into pre-Pearl Harbor. Better US-Japan communication from 1937 up until 1941 may have helped stave off that disaster.

Ronald Reagan managed to simultaneously openly discuss regime change and pursue diplomacy — but that approach took us also to the brink of nuclear war in 1983 (Able Archer is worth the terrifying Wikipedia rabbit hole). Further, Reagan’s approach required Mikhail Gorbachev — who was strangely okay with unwinding a lot of the USSR — as a willing partner. And Xi is no Gorbachev. After all, Xi famously said, “Finally, all it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party, and a great Party was gone. … In the end nobody was a real man. Nobody came out to resist.”

But which US policy is most likely to lay the foundation for China’s post-Xi ruler to be more amenable to questioning some of today’s CCP shibboleths? What policy gets us closer to a Chinese leader who maybe doesn’t think everything Gorbachev tried was so terrible? I would love to see more writing on that, as the US-China endgame will be playing out far past Xi.

Next into the ring: Jessica Chen Weiss and James Steinberg.

They’re really having none of Gallagher and Pottinger’s “victory” push:

The Chinese government does not share the United States’ commitment to liberal democracy, is at odds with many of the United States’ key international partners, and pursues economic policies that harm American workers and companies. Meeting that challenge requires a nuanced understanding of the forces driving China’s external policies and a clear-eyed view of the sources of US strength. The path forward suggested by Pottinger and Gallagher reflects neither. Instead, they offer an illusory appeal to victory, one that will harm the cause of freedom in China, damage Washington’s relations with key US allies, and risk a dangerous confrontation reminiscent of the worst days of the Cold War — a Cold War they enthusiastically embrace. …
The authors say they are not calling for “forcible regime change, subversion, or war,” because they know that such extreme efforts carry intolerable risks. But their proposed tactics, if taken up by Washington, would ensure the most undesirable outcome: a Chinese leadership unwilling to cooperate on shared concerns but domestically strengthened by appeals to nationalist sentiments in the face of a hostile adversary. Worse yet, the aggressive policies the authors prescribe would alienate important US partners that have no interest in an “us versus them” approach.

They make a similar point to Doshi: a “regime change,” “victory” framing will lead only to more paranoid thinking in Beijing and actually harm the Chinese people:

Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s tightening grip at home and China’s economic and military coercion abroad are cause for deep concern. Openly adopting a confrontational Cold War posture toward Beijing would only reinforce the Chinese leadership’s embrace of tough, authoritarian policies designed to show resolve and insulate China from US pressure. When China’s efforts undermine the interests of the United States and its partners, Washington must take firm, measured steps to meet those specific challenges. But US policymakers should keep in mind that China’s aggressive tactics are self-undermining, dimming China’s economic vitality and damaging its international appeal. Washington needs to play a long game, one that favors its natural strengths.

That said, most experts believe that talking more about Xinjiang actually led the CCP to ease up a bit on controls. Weiss and Steinberg go further, arguing that Americans don’t think China is an enemy, and that the US should appear as the responsible engager.

Last up (before Gallagher and Pottinger respond!): Paul Heer, a long-time CIA officer who recently wrote a good book on George Kennan, Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia.

Heer doesn’t buy the notion that China has any strategic ambitions that the US should consider existential:

Pottinger and Gallagher offer the wrong diagnosis of the challenge that China poses to the United States and thus the wrong prescriptions for dealing with that challenge. The diagnosis is wrong because it greatly overstates the nature of China’s strategy and the scope of its ambitions. The authors assert that “Beijing is pursuing a raft of global initiatives designed to disintegrate the West and usher in an antidemocratic order.” Beijing is indeed pursuing a raft of global initiatives to maximize China’s power, influence, and wealth relative to the United States — and is doing so ruthlessly and relentlessly. But its goals fall well short of hastening the disintegration of the West or establishing an antidemocratic order. CCP leaders are focused on winning hearts and minds in a multipolar world, especially outside the West, and they recognize that trying to establish Chinese global hegemony and impose their own system on the rest of the world would be counterproductive to that goal. They also recognize that it would be destabilizing, prohibitively expensive, and probably unachievable and unsustainable.

It’s pretty remarkable that Heer — the top Asia analyst in the intelligence community from 2007 to 2015 — has such a counter-consensus opinion on what makes the CCP tick. Gallagher and Pottinger’s critique also finds his minority view remarkable:

The critique of our article by Paul Heer, who once served as the US intelligence community’s top Asia analyst, is the true outlier in this debate. Whereas Weiss and Steinberg acknowledge (albeit with conspicuous understatement) that Beijing “is at odds with many of the United States’ key international partners” and “pursues economic policies that harm American workers and companies,” Heer sees an altogether different regime. In his telling, Beijing is “focused on winning hearts and minds in a multipolar world” and seeking to “maximize China’s power, influence, and wealth relative to the United States” — although he grants that Beijing is doing this “ruthlessly and relentlessly.”
Heer portrays Xi, and even Putin, as mainly reactive players — victims of changes thrust upon them by unnamed “historical forces and players.” He depicts Xi almost as an amiable doofus: someone “interested in constructive engagement and peaceful coexistence with the United States” but who is misquoted, misunderstood, or incapable of expressing himself accurately. (Heer suggests that Xi’s comment to Putin in March 2023 that the two leaders were driving changes unseen in a century was a mistranslation. We checked the recording and confirmed that the original Mandarin aligns with the meaning that we and many others — including the aide translating Xi’s words to Russian in the moment — first ascribed to Xi’s remark.)

Later, Heer argues that American politicians won’t be able to get funding for real competition passed through Congress, nor will they be able to win anyone else over to the “regime-change/democracy vs. autocracy” framework. “It is also worth noting, Heer says, “that [Gallagher and Pottinger’s] strategy aspires to ‘restore US primacy in Asia,’ an improbably ambitious aim. Moreover, many US allies and partners are unlikely to adopt the goal of regime change in China that is inherent in Pottinger and Gallagher’s argument.”

But I don’t buy that. Congress just passed supplemental aid to Taiwan, and the EU and Japan are hardening fast. If you think Chinese power is cresting today, why not just wait it out rhetorically — ie., don’t say “regime change” — to turn down the heat, and then watch as US national power compounds over time while China gets stuck in the middle-income trap or suffers a demographic disaster?

The way I see it, the key question is whether Congress will be spurred to do anything that will meaningfully boost long-term US power — defense reform, immigration reform, S&T investment, industrial policy — if it’s not circling the wagons rhetorically (“China is enemy #1”).

At long last, we get to the Gallagher and Pottinger response. Clearly, adopting a Cold War–inspired policy can mean many different things: the US’s approach to the USSR differed dramatically from Truman through Bush. Doshi and Weiss pull from Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Gallagher and Pottinger look more to Reagan — as they write,

If Washington wants to achieve victory without war in competition with a capable, belligerent Leninist regime, history tells us that it should adapt and apply the best lessons of the Cold War, from the clear-eyed theoretical framing that Kennan provided in the late 1940s to the resolute yet flexible policies that Reagan put into practice in the 1980s — policies that steered the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion that favored free nations.
Nine successive US presidents, from Harry Truman to George H. W. Bush, chose to employ Cold War strategies, albeit with varying approaches. Yet Weiss and Steinberg’s reflexive queasiness about borrowing from a half century of US foreign policy causes them to retreat toward even more dangerous ground: indulging the tired notion, contradicted by years of frustrating experience, that a totalitarian Leninist dictatorship can be enticed to “cooperate on key issues of mutual concern” and make that the basis for a stable relationship. This view echoes the folly of the failed détente policies of the 1970s, when a conciliatory approach toward Moscow invited only greater Soviet aggression — aggression that abated only after the United States adopted a more confrontational approach near the end of the Carter administration and during the Reagan years that followed. The Biden administration is repeating the mistake of the 1970s.
We are reminded of what Doshi wrote in his book, The Long Game: “China has repeatedly reneged on its various tactical concessions or returned accommodation by others with eventual hostility or more expansive claims.” Why, then, do our critics (including Doshi himself) believe China’s recent and minor tactical concessions will follow a different pattern?

My take: I just hope that America’s “tactical concessions” (in the Doshi framing) which don’t impact the balance of military forces and overall national power will delay any conflict until the US and its allies have clear overmatch again. But I could be wrong — maybe they actually embolden Beijing. Indeed, that’s exactly what Pottinger and Gallagher argue: by keeping Beijing uncomfortable on all fronts — economic, technological, and presumably on domestic regime stability as well — the US will actually be making China more docile internationally:

Perhaps our most important disagreement with Doshi concerns his suggestion that imposing greater costs on Beijing and deeper constraints on the Chinese economy would make Beijing more aggressive, rather than less. That view is mistaken. One of the paradoxes of Marxist-Leninist dictatorships is that the more comfortable they are, the more aggressive they become.
It works the other way, too. The historian Richard Pipes, who served on the National Security Council during the Reagan administration and played a key role in fashioning its successful Soviet policy, held as a “central thesis” that “the Soviet regime will become less aggressive only as a result of failures and worries about its ability to govern effectively and not from a sense of enhanced security and confidence.” When he wrote those words, in his 1984 book, Survival Is Not Enough, he was predicting the internal forces that would ultimately unravel the Soviet Communist Party. Weiss and Steinberg even allude to this dynamic, perhaps unwittingly, when they say that China’s current “economic headwinds,” combined with policies the United States is using to widen its economic and technological lead over China, “have created a window” for more stable bilateral relations.
It stands to reason — and Cold War history is replete with examples — that the weaker a communist dictatorship becomes, the more manageable a threat it becomes for Washington. Hence, the United States should first do nothing to strengthen the CCP’s power and confidence, which are sources of its aggression. As we made clear in our article, this isn’t the same as pursuing “regime change.” It is merely realistic and strategic thinking. Our view is the same as Pipes’s: “This is a call not for subverting Communism but for letting Communism subvert itself.” Washington shouldn’t be giving Beijing time — which the Biden administration’s détente-like policy does — to worm its way out of the economic conundrum it created for itself. Chinese leaders have long believed that the United States is trying to suppress Chinese economic growth anyway (even though it did precisely the opposite for more than three decades).

Gallagher and Pottinger seem as though they’re taking some cues from Stephen Kotkin, historian of the USSR, who came on ChinaTalk last year to talk about the upside of flirting with regime change. Some of his best quotes from that excellent episode:

ChinaTalk

What’s the Endgame for US-China?

Analyzing an epic throwdown in Foreign Affairs

Discussion about this post