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NO SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY

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NO SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY


AMERICA’S COMPETITION WITH CHINA MUST BE WON, NOT MANAGED


BY MATT POTTINGER AND MIKE GALLAGHER

May/June 2024Published on April 10, 2024
Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden meeting in Woodside,
California, November 2023
Kevin Lamarque / Reuters
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Amid a presidency beset by failures of deterrence—in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and
the Middle East—the Biden administration’s China policy has stood out as a
relative bright spot. The administration has strengthened U.S. alliances in
Asia, restricted Chinese access to critical U.S. 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.


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In addition to having greater clarity about its end goal, the United States
needs to accept that achieving it will require greater friction in U.S.-Chinese
relations. Washington will need to adopt rhetoric and policies that may feel
uncomfortably confrontational but in fact are necessary to reestablish
boundaries that Beijing and its acolytes are violating. That means imposing
costs on Chinese leader Xi Jinping for his policy of fostering global chaos. It
means speaking with candor about the ways China is hurting U.S. interests. It
means rapidly increasing U.S. defense capabilities to achieve unmistakable
qualitative advantages over Beijing. It means severing China’s access to Western
technology and frustrating Xi’s efforts to convert his country’s wealth into
military power. And it means pursuing intensive diplomacy with Beijing only from
a position of American strength, as perceived by both Washington and Beijing.

No country should relish waging another cold war. Yet a cold war is already
being waged against the United States by China’s leaders. Rather than denying
the existence of this struggle, Washington should own it and win it. Lukewarm
statements that pretend as if there is no cold war perversely court a hot war;
they signal complacency to the American people and conciliation to Chinese
leaders. Like the original Cold War, the new cold war will not be won through
half measures or timid rhetoric. Victory requires openly admitting that a
totalitarian regime that commits genocide, fuels conflict, and threatens war
will never be a reliable partner. Like the discredited détente policies that
Washington adopted in the 1970s to deal with the Soviet Union, the current
approach will yield little cooperation from Chinese leaders while fortifying
their conviction that they can destabilize the world with impunity.


BIDEN’S NEW BASELINE

The administration’s China policy initially showed promise. President Joe Biden
maintained the tariffs that President Donald Trump had imposed on Chinese
exports in response to the rampant theft of U.S. intellectual property. He
renewed, with some adjustments, the executive orders Trump had issued to
restrict investment in certain companies affiliated with the Chinese military
and to block the import of Chinese technologies deemed a national security
threat. In a particularly important step, in October 2022, Biden significantly
expanded the Trump administration’s controls on the export of high-end
semiconductors and the equipment used to make them, slowing Beijing’s plans to
dominate the manufacturing of advanced microchips. Across Asia, Biden’s
diplomats pulled longtime allies and newer partners closer together. They
organized the first summits of the Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue,
bringing together the leaders of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States,
and convened high-profile trilateral summits with the leaders of Japan and South
Korea. Biden also unveiled AUKUS, a defense pact among Australia, the United
Kingdom, and the United States.



As it turned out, however, aggression would come from the opposite direction, in
Europe. Less than three weeks before invading Ukraine, Russian President
Vladimir Putin had signed a “no limits” security pact with Xi in Beijing. In a
prudent step after the invasion, Biden drew a redline by warning Xi in a video
call that the U.S. government would impose sweeping sanctions if China provided
“material support” to Moscow. Xi nonetheless found plenty of ways to support the
Russian war machine, sending semiconductors, unarmed drones, gunpowder, and
other wares. China also supplied Moscow with badly needed money in exchange for
major shipments of Russian oil. Chinese officials, according to the U.S. State
Department, even spent more money on pro-Russian propaganda worldwide than
Russia itself was spending.

Beijing was also coordinating more closely with Iran and North Korea, even as
those regimes sent weapons to help Moscow wage war in Europe. Yet Washington was
pursuing siloed policies—simultaneously resisting Russia, appeasing Iran,
containing North Korea, and pursuing a mix of rivalry and engagement with
China—that added up to something manifestly incoherent. Indeed, the situation
that Xi had forecast at the start of the Biden administration was becoming a
reality: “The most important characteristic of the world is, in a word, ‘chaos,’
and this trend appears likely to continue,” Xi told a seminar of high-level
Communist Party officials in January 2021. Xi made clear that this was a useful
development for China. “The times and trends are on our side,” he said, adding,
“Overall, the opportunities outweigh the challenges.” By March 2023, Xi had
revealed that he saw himself not just as a beneficiary of worldwide turmoil but
also as one of its architects. “Right now, there are changes, the likes of which
we haven’t seen for 100 years,” he said to Putin on camera while wrapping up a
visit to the Kremlin. “And we are the ones driving these changes together.”

If ever the time was ripe to call out Beijing for fomenting chaos and to start
systematically imposing costs on the country in response, it was early 2023.
Biden, inexplicably, was doing the opposite. On February 1, residents of Montana
spotted a massive, white sphere drifting eastward. The administration was
already tracking the Chinese spy balloon but had been planning to let it pass
overhead without notifying the public. Under political pressure, Biden ordered
the balloon shot down once it reached the Atlantic Ocean, and Secretary of State
Antony Blinken postponed a scheduled trip to Beijing to protest the intrusion.
Press reports suggested the administration had kept quiet about the balloon in
order to gather intelligence about it. But a troubling pattern of downplaying
affronts by Beijing would persist in other contexts.



> Lukewarm statements that pretend as if there is no cold war perversely court a
> hot war.

In June 2023, leaks to the press revealed that Beijing, in a remarkable echo of
the Cold War, was planning to build a joint military training base in Cuba and
had already developed a signals intelligence facility there targeting the United
States. After a National Security Council spokesperson called reports about the
spy facility inaccurate, a White House official speaking anonymously to the
press minimized them by suggesting that Chinese spying from Cuba was “not a new
development.” The administration also greeted with a shrug new evidence
suggesting that COVID-19 may have initially spread after it accidentally leaked
from a Chinese laboratory. If the virus, which has led to the deaths of an
estimated 27 million people worldwide, turns out to have been artificially
enhanced before it escaped, the revelation would mark a turning point in human
history on par with the advent of nuclear weapons—a situation that already cries
out for U.S. leadership to govern dangerous biological research worldwide.

In the spring of 2023, as Beijing’s actions grew bolder, Biden initiated what
the White House termed an “all hands on deck” diplomatic campaign—not to impose
costs on Beijing but to flatter it by dispatching five cabinet-level U.S.
officials to China from May to August. Blinken’s June meeting with Xi symbolized
the dynamic. Whereas Xi had sat amiably alongside the billionaire Bill Gates
just days earlier, the U.S. secretary of state was seated off to the side as Xi
held forth from the head of a table at the Great Hall of the People. For the
first time in years, Xi appeared to have successfully positioned the United
States as supplicant in the bilateral relationship.



What did the United States get in return for all this diplomacy? In the Biden
administration’s tally, the benefits included a promise by Beijing to resume
military-to-military talks (which Beijing had unilaterally suspended), a new
dialogue on the responsible use of artificial intelligence (technology that
Beijing is already weaponizing against the American people by spreading fake
images and other propaganda on social media), and tentative cooperation to stem
the flood of precursor chemicals fueling the fentanyl crisis in the United
States (chemicals that are supplied mainly by Chinese companies).

Any doubts that Xi saw the American posture as one of weakness were dispelled
after Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel. Beijing exploited the attack by
serving up endless anti-Israeli and anti-American propaganda through TikTok,
whose algorithms are subject to control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Chinese diplomats, like Russian ones, met with Hamas’s leaders and provided
diplomatic cover for the terrorist group, vetoing UN Security Council
resolutions that would have condemned Hamas. And there is little sign Beijing
has done anything, despite Washington’s requests, to help rein in attacks
carried out by the Houthis on commercial vessels and U.S. warships in the Red
Sea—attacks conducted by the Yemeni rebel group using Iranian missiles,
including ones with technology pioneered by China. (Chinese ships,
unsurprisingly, are usually granted free passage through the kill zone.)

Whether Xi is acting opportunistically or according to a grand design—or, almost
certainly, both—it is clear he sees advantage in stoking crises that he hopes
will exhaust the United States and its allies. In a sobering Oval Office address
in mid-October, Biden seemed to grasp the severity of the situation. “We’re
facing an inflection point in history—one of those moments where the decisions
we make today are going to determine the future for decades to come,” he said.
Yet bizarrely—indeed, provocatively—he made no mention of China, the chief
sponsor of the aggressors he did call out in the speech: Iran, North Korea, and
Russia. Through omission, Biden gave Beijing a pass.


THAT ’70S SHOW

The current moment bears an uncanny resemblance to the 1970s. The Soviet Union
was undermining U.S. interests across the world, offering no warning of its ally
Egypt’s 1973 surprise attack on Israel; aiding communists in Angola, Portugal,
and Vietnam; and rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal and investing heavily in
its conventional military. These were the bitter fruits of détente—a set of
policies pioneered by President Richard Nixon and his top foreign policy
adviser, Henry Kissinger, who stayed on and continued the approach under
President Gerald Ford. By using pressure and inducement, as well as downplaying
ideological differences, the United States tried to lure the Russians into a
stable equilibrium of global power. Under détente, Washington slashed defense
spending and soft-pedaled Moscow’s human rights affronts. The working assumption
was that the Soviet Union’s appetite for destabilizing actions abroad would
somehow be self-limiting.

But the Russians had their own ideas about the utility of détente. As the
historian John Lewis Gaddis observed, the Soviets “might have viewed détente as
their own instrument for inducing complacency in the West while they finished
assembling the ultimate means of applying pressure—their emergence as a
full-scale military rival of the United States.” Nixon and Kissinger thought
détente would secure Soviet help in managing crises around the world and, as
Gaddis put it, “enmesh the U.S.S.R. in a network of economic relationships that
would make it difficult, if not impossible, for the Russians to take actions in
the future detrimental to Western interests.” But the policy failed to achieve
its goals.

President Jimmy Carter came into office in 1977 intending to keep détente in
place, but the policy didn’t work for him either. His attempt to “de-link”
Soviet actions that hurt U.S. interests from Soviet cooperation on arms control
ultimately yielded setbacks in both categories. The Soviets became more
aggressive globally, and a wary U.S. Congress, having lost faith in Moscow’s
sincerity, declined to ratify SALT II, the arms control treaty that Carter’s
team had painstakingly negotiated. Meanwhile, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s
national security adviser, had grown increasingly skeptical of détente.
Brzezinski felt that a turning point had come in 1978, after the Soviets
sponsored thousands of Cuban soldiers to wage violent revolution in the Horn of
Africa, supporting Ethiopia in its war with Somalia. The Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan the following year was “the final nail in the coffin” for arms
control talks, Brzezinski wrote in his journal—and for the broader policy of
détente.

By the time President Ronald Reagan entered the White House, in 1981, Nixon and
Kissinger’s invention was on its last legs. “Détente’s been a one-way street
that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its aims,” Reagan stated flatly in his
first press conference as president, effectively burying the concept.

Reagan sought to win, not merely manage, the Cold War. In a sharp departure from
his immediate predecessors, he spoke candidly about the nature of the Soviet
threat, recognizing that autocrats often bully democracies into silence by
depicting honesty as a form of aggression. In 1987, when Reagan was preparing to
give a speech within sight of the Berlin Wall, some of his aides begged him to
remove a phrase they found gratuitously provocative. Wisely, he overruled them
and delivered the most iconic line of his presidency: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down
this wall.”


THE SMOKELESS WAR

Washington must adopt a similar attitude today and try harder to disseminate
truthful information within China itself and to make it possible for Chinese
citizens to communicate securely with one another. Tearing down—or at least
blowing holes in—the “Great Firewall” of China must become as central to
Washington’s approach today as removing the Berlin Wall was for Reagan’s.



Beijing is waging a bitter information war against the United States—which is
losing, despite its natural advantages. Xi and his inner circle see themselves
as fighting an existential ideological campaign against the West, as Xi’s words
from an official publication in 2014 make clear:

> The battle for “mind control” happens on a smokeless battlefield. It happens
> inside the domain of ideology. Whoever controls this battlefield can win
> hearts. They will have the initiative throughout the competition and combat. .
> . . When it comes to combat in the ideology domain, we don’t have any room for
> compromise or retreat. We must achieve total victory.

For Xi, the Internet is the “main battlefield” of this smokeless war. In 2020,
the scholar Yuan Peng, writing before he resurfaced under a new name as a vice
minister of China’s premier spy agency, also recognized the power of controlling
speech online: “In the Internet era . . . what is truth and what is a lie is
already unimportant; what’s important is who controls discourse power.” Xi has
poured billions of dollars into building and harnessing what he calls “external
discourse mechanisms,” and other Chinese leaders have specifically highlighted
short-video platforms such as TikTok as the “megaphones” of discourse power.
They aren’t afraid to use those megaphones. According to a February 2024 report
from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, TikTok accounts run by
Chinese propaganda outfits “reportedly targeted candidates from both political
parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022.”

As the CCP seeks to set the terms of global discourse, what it wants more than
anything from the United States and the rest of the West is silence—silence
about China’s human rights abuses, silence about its aggression toward Taiwan,
and silence about the West’s own deeply held beliefs, which contrast
irreconcilably with the party’s. It is no surprise, then, that so much of the
CCP’s strategy on the smokeless battlefield is about drowning out speech it
doesn’t like—both inside and outside China. It is American silence—not
candor—that is truly provocative, for it signals to the CCP that China is
advancing and the United States is retreating.


REARM, REDUCE, RECRUIT

What U.S. officials need first is clarity about the contest with China. They
have to recognize that rising tensions are inevitable in the short run if the
United States is to deter war and win the contest in the long run. Once they
have faced these facts, they need to put in place a better policy: one that
rearms the U.S. military, reduces China’s economic leverage, and recruits a
broader coalition to confront China.

Xi is preparing his country for a war over Taiwan. On its current trajectory,
the United States risks failing to deter that war, one that could kill tens of
thousands of U.S. service members, inflict trillions of dollars in economic
damage, and bring about the end of the global order as we know it. The only path
to avoid this future is for Washington to immediately build and surge enough
hard power to deny Xi a successful invasion of Taiwan. Yet the Biden
administration’s latest budget request sheds badly needed combat power,
proposing the retirement of ten ships and 250 aircraft and a drop in the
production goal for Virginia-class submarines from two per year to just one. It
replenishes only half the $1 billion that Congress authorized for the president
to furnish military aid to Taiwan. And in its 2023 supplemental request, the
White House asked for just over $5 billion in weapons and industrial base
spending earmarked for the Indo-Pacific—barely five percent of the entire
supplemental request. Looking at the budget trend line, one would think it was
1994, not 2024.

The Biden administration should immediately change course, reversing what are,
in inflation-adjusted terms, cuts to defense spending. Instead of spending about
three percent of GDP on defense, Washington should spend four or even five
percent, a level that would still be at the low end of Cold War spending. For
near-term deterrence in the Taiwan Strait, it should spend an additional $20
billion per year for the next five years, the rough amount needed to surge and
disperse sufficient combat power in Asia. Ideally, this money would be held in a
dedicated “deterrence fund” overseen by the secretary of defense, who would
award resources to projects that best align with the defense of Taiwan.

The deterrence fund should headline a generational effort directed by the
president to restore U.S. primacy in Asia. The priority should be to maximize
existing production lines and build new production capacity for critical
munitions for Asia, such as antiship and antiaircraft missiles that can destroy
enemy targets at great distances. The Pentagon should also draw on the
deterrence fund to adapt existing military systems or even civilian technology
such as commercially available drones that could be useful for defending Taiwan.
Complementing its Replicator Initiative, which tasks the services to field
thousands of low-cost drones to turn the Taiwan Strait into what some have
called “a boiling moat,” the Pentagon should quickly embrace other creative
solutions. It could, for example, disperse missile launchers concealed in
commercial container boxes or field the Powered Joint Direct Attack Munition, a
low-cost kit that turns standard 500-pound bombs into precision-guided cruise
missiles.



> What China wants more than anything from the United States and the rest of the
> West is silence.

For U.S. forces to actually deter China, they need to be able to move within
striking range. Given the maritime geography of the Indo-Pacific and the threat
that China’s vast missile arsenal poses to U.S. bases, the State Department will
need to expand hosting and access agreements with allies and partners to extend
the U.S. military’s footprint in the region. The Pentagon, meanwhile, will need
to harden U.S. military installations across the region and pre-position
critical supplies such as fuel, ammunition, and equipment throughout the
Pacific.



But the United States could keep the Chinese military contained and still lose
the new cold war if China held the West hostage economically. Beijing is bent on
weaponizing its stranglehold over global supply chains and its dominance of
critical emerging technologies. To reduce Chinese leverage and ensure that the
United States, not China, develops the key technologies of the future,
Washington needs to reset the terms of the bilateral economic relationship. It
should start by repealing China’s permanent normal trade relations status, which
provides China access to U.S. markets on generous terms, and moving China to a
new tariff column that features gradually increasing rates on products critical
to U.S. national security and economic competitiveness. The revenue raised from
increased tariffs could be spent on offsetting the costs that U.S. exporters
will incur as a result of China’s inevitable retaliatory measures and on
bolstering U.S. supply chains for strategically important products.

Washington must also halt the flow of American money and technology to Chinese
companies that support Beijing’s military buildup and high-tech surveillance
system. The Biden administration’s August 2023 executive order restricting a
subset of outbound investment to China was an important step in the right
direction, but it doesn’t go far enough. Washington must expand investment
restrictions to include critical and emerging technologies such as hypersonics,
space systems, and new biotechnologies. It must also put an end to U.S.
financial firms’ disturbing practice of offering publicly traded financial
products, such as exchange-traded funds and mutual funds, that invest in Chinese
companies that are on U.S. government blacklists. Using the current export
controls on advanced semiconductors as a model, the Department of Commerce
should reduce the flow of critical technology to China by introducing similar
export bans on other key areas of U.S. innovation, such as quantum computing and
biotechnology.



The Chinese spy balloon falling into the ocean near Surfside Beach, South
Carolina, February 2023
Randall Hill / Reuters

As China doubles down on economic self-reliance and phases out imports of
industrial goods from the West, the United States needs to recruit a coalition
of friendly partners to deepen mutual trade. Washington should strike a
bilateral trade agreement with the United Kingdom. It should upgrade its
bilateral trade agreement with Japan and establish a new one with Taiwan,
agreements that could be joined by other eligible economies in the region. It
should forge an Indo-Pacific digital trade agreement that would facilitate the
free flow of data between like-minded economies, using as a baseline the high
standards set by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

To overhaul its dilapidated defense industrial base, the United States should
turbocharge innovation in the defense industry by recruiting talented workers
from allied countries. Every year, the U.S. government authorizes roughly 10,000
visas through the EB-5 program, which allows immigrants to obtain a green card
if they invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in American businesses. The
program is rife with fraud and has deviated far from its intended purpose as a
job-creation program, becoming mostly a method for millionaires from China and
other places to become permanent residents. These visas should be repurposed as
work authorizations for citizens of partner countries who hold advanced degrees
in fields critical to defense.

The U.S. government also needs to recruit the next generation of cold warriors
to apply their talents to the contest with China. It should start by reversing
the crisis in military recruitment—not by lowering standards, promising easy
pay, or infusing the force with diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology but by
unapologetically touting the virtues of an elite, colorblind, all-volunteer
force and challenging young Americans to step up. The intelligence community
also needs to recruit experts in emerging technology, finance, and open-source
research and make it easier to temporarily leave the private sector for a stint
in government. National security agencies need to cultivate deep expertise in
Asia and in the history and ideology of the CCP. The curricula of the service
academies and war colleges, as well as ongoing professional military education,
should reflect this shift.

Finally, U.S. officials need to recruit everyday Americans to contribute to the
fight. For all the differences between the Soviet Union yesterday and China
today, U.S. policymakers’ squeamishness about the term “cold war” causes them to
overlook the way it can mobilize society. A cold war offers a relatable
framework that Americans can use to guide their own decisions—such as a
company’s choice whether to set up a sensitive research and development center
in China or an individual’s choice whether to download TikTok. Too often,
however, elected officials on the left and the right give the impression that
the competition with China is so narrow in scope that Americans can take such
steps without worry. The contest with Beijing, they would have people believe,
shouldn’t much concern ordinary citizens but will be handled through surgically
precise White House policies and congressional legislation.


CHINA AS A NORMAL COUNTRY

It is a peculiar feature of U.S. foreign policy today that the elephant in the
room—the end state Washington desires in its competition with Beijing—is such a
taboo subject that administrations come and go without ever articulating a clear
goal for how the competition ends. The Biden administration offers up managing
competition as a goal, but that is not a goal; it is a method, and a
counterproductive one at that. Washington is allowing the aim of its China
policy to become process: meetings that should be instruments through which the
United States advances its interests become core objectives in and of
themselves.

Washington should not fear the end state desired by a growing number of Chinese:
a China that is able to chart its own course free from communist dictatorship.
Xi’s draconian rule has persuaded even many CCP members that the system that
produced China’s recent precipitous decline in prosperity, status, and
individual happiness is one that deserves reexamination. The system that
produced an all-encompassing surveillance state, forced-labor colonies, and the
genocide of minority groups inside its borders is one that likewise desecrates
Chinese philosophy and religion—the fountainheads from which a better model will
eventually spring.



Generations of American leaders understood that it would have been unacceptable
for the Cold War to end through war or U.S. capitulation. If the 1970s taught
Washington anything, it is that trying to achieve a stable and durable balance
of power—a détente—with a powerful and ambitious Leninist dictatorship is also
doomed to backfire on the United States. The best strategy, which found its
ultimate synthesis in the Reagan years, was to convince the Soviets that they
were on a path to lose, which in turn fueled doubts about their whole system.



> Washington is allowing the aim of its China policy to become process.

The U.S. victory wasn’t Reagan’s alone, of course. It was built on strategies
forged by presidents of both parties and manifested in documents such as NSC-68,
the 1950 Truman administration policy paper that argued that the United States’
“policy and actions must be such as to foster a fundamental change in the nature
of the Soviet system.” One can draw a straight line from that document to
National Security Decision Directive 75, the 1983 Reagan administration order
that called for “internal pressure on the USSR to weaken the sources of Soviet
imperialism.” In some ways, it was the détente years, not the Reagan years, that
were an aberration in Cold War strategy.

Ironically, Reagan would end up pursuing a more fulsome and productive
engagement with the Soviets than perhaps any of his predecessors—but only after
he had strengthened Washington’s economic, military, and moral standing relative
to Moscow and only after the Soviet Union produced a leader, Mikhail Gorbachev,
with whom Reagan could make real progress. Reagan understood that sequencing was
everything. He also knew that the confrontational first phase wouldn’t be easy
or comfortable. His first directive on national security strategy, in May 1982,
predicted, “The decade of the eighties will likely pose the greatest challenge
to our survival and well-being since World War II.” It was a tense and
unsettling period, to be sure, during which Reagan called out the Soviet Union
as “the focus of evil in the modern world” and deliberately sought to weaken its
economy and contest its destabilizing activities around the world. Yet it paid
off.

Xi, who has vilified Gorbachev and fashioned his own leadership style after that
of Joseph Stalin, has proved time and again that he is not a leader with whom
Americans can solve problems. He is an agent of chaos. Washington should seek to
weaken the sources of CCP imperialism and hold out for a Chinese leader who
behaves less like an unrelenting foe. This does not mean forcible regime change,
subversion, or war. But it does mean seeking truth from facts, as Chinese
leaders are fond of saying, and understanding that the CCP has no desire to
coexist indefinitely with great powers that promote liberal values and thus
represent a fundamental threat to its rule.

The current mass exodus of Chinese people from their homeland is evidence they
want to live in nations that respect human rights, honor the rule of law, and
offer a wide choice of opportunities. As Taiwan’s example makes plain, China
could be such a place, too. The road to get there might be long. But for the
United States’ own security, as well as the rights and aspirations of all those
in China, it is the only workable destination.


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 * MATT POTTINGER served as U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser from 2019 to
   2021 and as Senior Director for Asia on the National Security Council from
   2017 to 2019. He is a co-author and editor of the forthcoming book The
   Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan.
 * MIKE GALLAGHER served as U.S. Representative from Wisconsin from 2017 to 2024
   and chaired the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
 * More By Matt Pottinger
 * More By Mike Gallagher

More:
United States China Economics Politics & Society Security Defense & Military
U.S. Foreign Policy Biden Administration Reagan Administration U.S.-Chinese
Relations Xi Jinping


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