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.

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.

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.

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.........

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