Pottinger and Gallagher Reply
Rush Doshi’s critique of our article warrants special attention because Doshi is qualified to serve as a reliable surrogate for the Biden administration on China, given his recent role at the White House, and because his general assessment of the threat posed by the CCP—and his belief that Washington must take proactive steps to frustrate Xi’s ambitions—has much in common with our own take.
Still, there remain essential differences between his views and ours about all that Washington should be doing to address the threat, which has quickly metastasized from a “pacing challenge,” as the Biden team politely calls it, into something much scarier, as the CCP is now underwriting proxy wars in multiple theaters in order to undermine the security and credibility of United States and its partners. In short, global events driven by Xi and his “axis of chaos”—Russia, Iran (and its terrorist proxies), North Korea, and Venezuela—are simply overwhelming Biden’s China policy. As the Biden team frets about admitting that the United States is now in a cold war, Beijing is leading it into the foothills of a hot one.
The New Cold War
Before addressing some key differences with Doshi, let us look at the other critiques. Jessica Chen Weiss and James Steinberg argue against waging a cold war with Beijing because cold wars are dangerous. We don’t deny they are dangerous. The problem is that the United States is already in one—not because Americans desired or started it, but because Xi is laser-focused on prevailing in a global struggle in which “capitalism will inevitably perish and socialism will inevitably triumph,” as he put it in a quintessential secret speech shortly after rising to power. Xi’s internal speeches, edicts, and actions show that he is pursuing global, not just regional, initiatives to discredit and dissolve Western alliances, co-opting international bodies to advance illiberal and autocratic aims, and even undermining the centuries-old Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states. These policies first took shape during the Obama administration, when Washington was at pains to engage and reassure Beijing.
In another statement, Xi said, “Our struggle and contest with Western countries is irreconcilable, so it will inevitably be long, complicated, and sometimes even very sharp.” Xi has clearly driven the contest into just such a “sharp” phase. In April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that China is “overwhelmingly the number one supplier” of Russia’s war machine and that “Russia would struggle to sustain its assault on Ukraine without China’s support.” Beijing is following a similar playbook in the Middle East, making itself the primary consumer of sanctioned Iranian oil and providing strong diplomatic and propaganda support for Iran and some of its terrorist proxies in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 rampage in southern Israel.
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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?
Victims or Perpetrators?
The critique of our article by Paul Heer, who once served as the U.S. 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.)
Dismissing the goals, resourcefulness, and initiative of dictators is all too common in Washington. Even by that low standard, Heer’s optimistic assessment reads like something that might have been written about China a quarter century ago. It would have been wrong back then, too, but it would have been easier to excuse, given Beijing’s disciplined policy of strategic deception at the time.
Heer even suggests that the CCP may have been provoked into an existential ideological campaign, partly in response to American officials (singling out the two of us in particular) who have laid out the stakes of the competition in such stark terms. Heer ignores what Doshi rightly identified in his book as “the persistence of China’s existential threat perception even as the United States pursued a largely benign and welcoming policy toward China under the policy of engagement.” We recommend Heer focus more on what Xi says when he isn’t addressing a Western audience.
Weakness Is Provocative
Doshi’s own critique of our article, by contrast, is as striking for its areas of agreement with our point of view as it is for its differences. Unlike the other responses, Doshi’s acknowledges Beijing’s formidable ambitions and capabilities and how threatening they are to U.S. interests (as does the Biden administration’s written strategies). It also defends the growing list of steps the Biden administration has taken to strengthen Pacific alliances and restrict Beijing’s access to U.S. markets and technology. As Doshi rightly notes, “U.S. policy toward China will need bipartisan foundations to succeed.”
Our disagreements, however, are also significant. For starters, Doshi suggests that the differences between the Soviet Union yesterday and China today are so great as to render our proposed cold war strategy moot. In fact, the Soviet and Chinese systems are far more alike than not, and so are the American strategies required to outcompete them. Even the two economies are more alike than many remember. China has the world’s second-largest GDP today—and so did the Soviet Union for most of the Cold War. In the 1970s, by the CIA’s estimate, the Soviet economy reached 57 percent of U.S. GNP—a share that is not far from the 65 percent of U.S. GDP that the Chinese economy is estimated to amount to today. The Chinese economy, like the Soviet economy, is almost certainly smaller than estimated, and it is going through a crisis reminiscent of the Soviet economic travails that became obvious by the early 1980s. We are the first to admit that reducing the West’s economic dependence on China will be much tougher than reducing its dependence on the Soviet Union was, given Beijing’s technological prowess. By the same token, the costs of failing to disentangle would also be far greater.
Another blind spot is Doshi’s failure to address the cascading collapse of the ability of the United States and its allies to deter their enemies over the past three years—in Afghanistan, in Ukraine, and in the Middle East—and what it says about the shortcomings of the administration’s foreign policy in general, including toward China. In March 2022, Biden drew a redline for Xi, warning him not to provide “material support” for Putin’s war in Europe. And yet Xi went on to do just that, with only token pushback from Washington—a failure that will probably embolden Beijing to undertake far more dangerous steps, including with regard to Taiwan.
The facts call into serious question Doshi’s claim that the Biden administration’s “intensified diplomacy” with Beijing has helped “mitigate the risk of escalatory spirals.” By our reckoning, there is a lot of spiraling going on—in Europe, in the Middle East, in the South China Sea—and Beijing is at the center of it. Had the Biden administration adopted at the outset a stronger and more resolute policy toward U.S. adversaries—including, crucially, a major increase in defense spending—it may well have prevented the darkening geopolitical landscape that developed over the past three years. The Biden administration, inexplicably and inexcusably, is, in inflation-adjusted terms, cutting U.S. defense spending, even as it has initiated trillions of dollars in new spending on pandemic relief and progressive domestic priorities and is attempting to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more on college debt relief.
The Sources of Chinese Conduct
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).
Washington shouldn’t be afraid to pursue peaceful victory in this competition. Beijing isn’t afraid of pursuing victory by any means necessary. In a major address in 2020 about China’s 1950 decision to fight the United States on the Korean Peninsula, Xi said, “War must be fought to deter aggression, force must be met with force, and victory is the best way to win peace and respect.” As we wrote in our original article: “China isn’t aiming for a stalemate. Neither should America.”
This excerpt was written as a response to a critique by Rush Doshi, Jessica Chen Weiss, James B. Steinberg, and Paul Heer of Mike Gallagher and Matt Pottinger’s article