Washington’s Missing China Strategy
Washington’s Missing China Strategy By Richard Fontaine
The Biden administration has repeatedly identified China as the United States’ foremost foreign policy challenge. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has referred to China as the Pentagon’s top priority. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has described China as “the biggest geopolitical test” of the twenty-first century. And President Joe Biden himself has stated that he envisions “extreme competition” between Washington and Beijing. As his administration prepares to issue a raft of strategy documents—including for national security, national defense, and the Indo-Pacific—it is widely expected to single out China for special attention.
To invoke the U.S.-Chinese rivalry as a defining feature of today’s world is now commonplace, and analysts and policymakers across the political spectrum support the United States’ shift away from engagement and toward competition. Jettisoning Washington’s previous strategy of cooperation and integration, premised as it was on the eventual transformation of Chinese behavior, is a rare point of agreement between the Trump and Biden administrations.
That is a welcome shift, given the paucity of positive results yielded by the previous approach. China and the United States are in a largely competitive relationship, and U.S. policy aims to respond to Chinese actions more than to shape them. A strategy grounded in this reality—one that combines a U.S.-led coalition with targeted, issue-specific efforts to contest Chinese assertiveness—is now emerging to protect U.S. interests and values.
There is, however, a glaring omission in the new policy: an objective. Competition is merely a description of U.S.-Chinese relations, not an end in itself. Conspicuously absent from the flurry of recent pron
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