AEI (American Enterprise Institute) The Necessity of a Phased China Strategy By Zack Cooper Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute - October 07, 2024

 AEI (American Enterprise Institute)

The Necessity of a Phased China Strategy

By Zack Cooper

Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

October 07, 2024

The United States needs a China strategy that maintains security in the short term and presents a vision of success in the long term. Recent U.S. approaches have focused on either the former or the latter, without a clear strategy for integrating them together. This essay suggests a different framework—a phased strategy that overlays objectives with distinct timeframes. 

A phased approach of this sort is the only option around which policymakers can build a lasting and bipartisan consensus.15

Extreme End States

The wide range of views on China within the United States makes characterizing the overall debate difficult. Yet the extreme positions on the United States’ China strategy are relatively clear: coevolution or regime change.16 Neither is likely to attract sufficient support, for reasons explained below.

For many years, a cadre of U.S. experts promoted a strategy aimed at making China more like the United States and bringing it more fully into the international order. The end state envisioned by advocates of this approach was to make China a “responsible stakeholder” in the existing order rather than a threat to that system.17 Henry Kissinger labeled this “co-evolution” and explained it as an effort in which “both countries pursue their domestic imperatives, cooperating where possible, and adjust their relations to minimize conflict. Neither side endorses all the aims of the other or presumes a total identity of interests, but both sides seek to identify and develop complementary interests.”18 This approach enjoyed broad bipartisan support for several decades.

Yet, over the last 15 years—and especially since Xi Jinping took over as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2012—it became clear that China was not converging with the United States. As a result, Beijing is unlikely to become a responsible stakeholder in the existing system anytime soon, if at all. Xi has sketched out a vision of China as a challenger to the United States, rather than a partner. Although Beijing’s vision of an alternative order has not come into focus—at least not yet—Chinese leaders proposed elements of an alternative system in the 20th Party Congress in 2022, as well as through the Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative, and Global Civilization Initiative.19

As it has become increasingly clear that China will not follow the path that some in the United States have hoped, experts from both parties have suggested that Washington should take a different approach to Beijing. Some have called for the “end of engagement,” while others have called for an era of “strategic competition.”20 Few observers, however, have laid out a clear alternative end state to U.S-China coevolution.

A small group of academics and China experts favor a turn toward a policy of accommodation in order to ensure that China’s rise does not lead to conflict. Charlie Glaser, for example, has suggested that an alteration of U.S. policy on Taiwan might be sufficient to satisfy Beijing.21 Others have urged the United States and its allies and partners to give China more breathing room in the Western Pacific, which could help “meet China halfway.”22 This, however, appears unlikely to succeed given that Obama-era engagement efforts largely came to naught. Perhaps more importantly, there is little political support for these efforts in Washington today.

The alternative end state favored in some more hawkish circles is to actively undermine the CCP and accelerate processes that could bring down the regime.23 But it remains unclear whether the United States has enough influence within China to genuinely threaten the CCP’s hold on power. 

More importantly, even if this was possible, doing so might not be in the United States’ interest, given the possibility that U.S.-instigated regime change could backfireand lead to even more confrontation. Moreover, it remains unclear whether a post-CCP government in China would be more cooperative with the United States.

So, although there are some who would advocate for end states of either coevolution or regime change, the bulk of observers in Washington find these alternatives unappealing and desire a third way. This is precisely what the Biden administration has attempted to offer.

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Unsatisfying Steady States

Recognizing that neither of these end states has robust political support in the United States, the Biden administration and many Democrats have jettisoned discussion of end states altogether. 

Instead, they have embraced an approach focused on establishing a stable “steady state” with China. Shortly before returning to government, current deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell advocated turning “from end states to steady states across military, economic, political, and global governance domains to find a form of evolving and complex co-existence.”24

The Biden team has asserted that the best way to shape regional dynamics is by deepening Asian alliances and partnerships—its strategy therefore has revolved less around China’s future than around that of the United States and its friends. The thinking is that Washington has less ability to influence Beijing’s actions than commonly perceived, so U.S. policymakers should focus on things they can control. With this in mind, the Biden team put forward a three-part China strategy, which it calls “invest, align, compete.”25 The core idea is that investing in the United States and aligning with allies and partners will put the United States in a better position to compete with China.

But the lack of a clear objective with regard to the preferred end state of their China policy has been a recurring problem for advocates of the Biden administration’s approach. Although it is tempting to do away with end states altogether, it is hard to convince the U.S. public to make great sacrifices for a competition with no end. Though Republicans have started making this critique more directly in recent months, political leaders from both sides of the aisle talk explicitly about winning, not just competing.

This is true even of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. In the foreword to his administration’s National Security Strategy, Biden pledged to “win the competition for the 21st century.”26 In his last State of the Union speech, Biden was more explicit, promising to “win the competition for the 21st century against China.”27 Vice President Kamala Harris has made similar remarks, committing in her Democratic National Convention speech that “America, not China, wins the competition.”28 These remarks suggest that political leaders in the United States believe that the U.S. public wants to “win” rather than simply “compete,” regardless of what their advisers put in policymaking documents.

The question that remains is whether the United States can identify an end state with regard to China that can win broad political support. Many Republicans are more willing to tolerate shortterm instability if it puts the United States on a better long-term pathway vis-à-vis China. This case was made by then secretary of state Mike Pompeo when he referenced Richard Nixon in arguing, “we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside of the family of nations. . . . The world cannot be safe until China changes. Thus, our aim—to the extent we can, we must influence events. Our goal should be to induce change.”29

This view has generally been an outlier among Republican policymakers. Although politicians may talk openly about accelerating the downfall of the CCP, few leaders embrace those statements when put into positions of power. Donald Trump’s White House guidance on China strategy was explicit that “United States policies are not premised on an attempt to change the PRC’s domestic governance model.”30 Other Trump administration officials have continued to insist that the Jude Blanchette and Lily McElwee | 13

United States should signal to China that U.S. policy is to maintain the status quo when it comes to the CCP.31

Observers are thus left with three basic options—coevolution, regime change, or sustained competition—none of which alone can win sufficient support across the political spectrum to be sustainable from one administration to the next. The end states of coevolution and regime change are too extreme to attract bipartisan support. Steady-state competition is more palatable, but Republicans find it unsatisfying and even Democratic political leaders say their aim is to win, not just compete. The U.S. strategic community must do better than these three options—and it can.

A Phased Approach

Thankfully, there is a way to combine elements of all three concepts into a coherent strategy—it just requires a phased approach. Phasing would differentiate between short- and long-term objectives, acknowledging that the situation which exists today will not last forever and, therefore, could make more appealing end states possible at a later time.

In the short term, the United States is unlikely to fundamentally alter China’s basic path. U.S. policies can certainly influence China’s decisions on the margins. But at the moment, the best Washington can do is to build strength at home and partnerships abroad in order to demonstrate to Xi that he cannot overturn the existing order through the use or threat of force. In other words, U.S. policies designed to put the United States on a stronger competitive footing should win broad partisan support for the moment. This short-term period is likely to last at least as long as Xi remains in power—possibly the next 10–20 years. Both patience and firmness will be required during this period to avoid a conflict while demonstrating to China that aggression will not pay.32

Yet, in the long term, it is only natural for the U.S. public to expect that a strategy requiring substantial resource expenditures will bring about a more lasting resolution. Xi Jinping’s eventual departure as general secretary could create an opportunity to reset the U.S.-China relationship. 

Optimists will no doubt hold out hope for a new set of leaders in China more open to genuine cooperation with the United States. Pessimists will think this unlikely and instead envision the people of China demanding political reforms from within once Xi is gone. This could even bring about more fundamental changes in China’s domestic governance system.

U.S. policymakers need not make this choice for the Chinese people. It is critical that U.S. experts differentiate between forceful regime change, which is commonly viewed as brought about from outside, and regime failure, which emerges from a government’s own internal breakdowns. U.S. leaders can talk openly about the latter without suggesting that they endorse the former. Indeed, the United States did exactly this in the Cold War and it did not bring about a third world war in the twenty-first century.33 Acknowledging the CCP’s flaws need not be inflammatory, particularly since many Chinese citizens are growing increasingly frustrated with aspects of their own government’s decisionmaking.34

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It should be acknowledged that a phased approach is not an entirely new strategy. The long-term  options presented here might be termed “mellowing or breakup”—indeed, that is what George  Kennan labeled them when discussing just this sort of strategy with respect to the Soviet Union.35

Kennan did not insist that mellowing or breaking up should—or could—happen at the outset of the Cold War. Rather, he acknowledged that the United States would only prevail over the Soviet Union  when the Communist Party’s own flaws manifested. The same is true of the CCP today.