Though Sino-American competition will be full spectrum, military power will underpin each lever of U.S. national power needed to compete along each segment of that spectrum. Absent a credible threat of military force, diplomacy, agreements, and sanctions become impotent to compel our adversaries. U.S. leverage over the Taliban, for instance, departed on the last outbound aircraft carrying American combat troops. If the Chinese Communist Party assesses that America is unable or unwilling to defend its interests with military force, we should similarly expect little from other tools of national power.

The test may come sooner than later, too. Top military brass warn that Chinese preparedness for an assault on Taiwan could require the United States to deter (and maybe fight) with the military it has today, not the one it wants tomorrow. Therefore, future budgets cannot mortgage today’s military readiness for tomorrow’s procurement. A cross-strait contingency would also compel the United States to clarify its longstanding policy of “strategic ambiguity,” a position with which FDR was well-acquainted, owing to congressional, legal, and public constraints on his foreign policy. Among the Americans who did take seriously the Axis threat in the 1930s, they argued U.S. rearmament should fortify their country alone, keeping would-be intruders at bay. Instead, Roosevelt sent abroad the first outputs of America’s revamped war machine. Keeping the Soviet Union and Britain in the fight was not only pivotal to defeating the Axis, but more self-interestedly, would reduce American costs over the war’s course. Roosevelt recognized the only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them well before Churchill uttered the words.

The embargo repeal, destroyer deal, and Lend-Lease—all “methods short of war”—were America’s forward defenses, trading American treasure for European blood. As FDR extended to the Allies the “arsenal of democracy” before Pearl Harbor, so too might America “serve as armorer rather than guarantor” of vulnerable democracies today.

BIDEN’S “AMERICA is Back” tour through Europe in June launched his campaign to rally those allies again. Leveraging the political acumen forged over decades, the president gave a little—submitting America as the “arsenal of vaccines”—and gained a lot of acquiescence from the G7, NATO, and the European Union to name-and-shame Chinese transgressions. In a nod to their respective heroes, Biden and British prime minister Boris Johnson also updated Roosevelt and Churchill’s Atlantic Charter.

The communiqués, for now, are just statements. But rhetoric is where democratic policy begins. Before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt recalled, he deployed his oratorical skill in order to “constantly…keep before the people of the United States the ever-growing [Nazi] menace.” The current menace—atrocities in Xinjiang, suppression in Hong Kong, peril in Taiwan, and coercion elsewhere—should be kept before the people, too.

Exploiting such events, however, will prove more difficult for Biden than it was for Roosevelt. Not only was Roosevelt “perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war,” as he once confessed, but he was easily able to do so to help enter the war, too. These “good cause” lies, as Senator William Fulbright once referred to them, included a grossly distorted telling of a clash between a U.S. destroyer accompanying British aircraft and a German U-boat, fully a week after the incident. Today, the president’s response to (eerily) similar events—such as Russian warships firing at a British destroyer accompanied by U.S. aircraft in June 2021—must contend with commercial satellite imagery, open-source analysis, and the adversary’s propaganda, all disseminated in near real-time through social media. FDR enjoyed a sharp information asymmetry that is flattening today, as Biden discovered when trying to recast the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan as a logistical triumph.

The true power of Rosevelt’s storytelling rested less on his description of events, however, than on his speculation about what they portended. His four defense-oriented fireside chats predating Pearl Harbor were replete with eschatological imaginings read from the “Nazi book of world conquest.” Described ad nauseum as “intimate” chats, they were actually among the president's most vitriolic public remarks. Roosevelt was playing an old game, of course. Leaders have long exploited what Roman philosophers called “metus hostilis,” or fear of the enemy, to cohere their own ilk. FDR unleashed what the Pragmatists of his own era called the “social possibilities of war” by characterizing the war in Manichean terms that pitted democracy versus dictatorship. “There never was,” declared Roosevelt, “and never can be successful compromise between good and evil.”

In this tradition, Biden has instrumentalized fear over Beijing’s intentions and framed competition with China as a “battle between democracies and autocracies.” The more difficult task, however, may be maintaining that distinction. Building in-group cohesion at the expense of the Chinese “other” risks blurring the lines. The animosity toward Japan that Roosevelt helped engender eventually converted America’s West Coast into what historian Clinton Rossiter called a “naked dictatorship” for 117,116 interned Japanese-Americans.

Here Biden should heed Roosevelt’s words over his (mis)deeds. Before ordering the internment, FDR chided employers for firing Asian Americans. Imploring Americans to “[r]emember the Nazi technique” that “pits race against race,” he admonished, “[w]e must not let that happen here.” Reports of recent anti-Asian violence—and the bill Biden signed to combat it—reflect the perils of trading in social identity theory, particularly as tribalizing, race-based identity politics are regaining purchase.

THE CONFLATION of Sino-American competition and Sinophobia partly explains why the bipartisan awakening to China’s challenge has not yet resolved disagreements over the appropriate response. While most Americans see China as a competitor, less than half think “limiting China’s power and influence” should be a top priority, according to a recent Pew Research poll. Moreover, this debate over containment (in all but name) splits neatly along partisan lines: only 36 percent of Democrats but 63 percent of Republicans favor it.

China’s centrality to the global economy ensures containment today will not mirror its Cold War predecessor. Still, Biden would be ill-advised to play offense alone in a protracted security competition. The administration has, in fact, already outlined economic containment measures like “friend-shoring” to reduce democracies’ reliance on China. In Brussels, where Roosevelt once pressured the Nine Powers Conference to support his quarantine, U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken likewise proposed barring China from “open and secure [trade] spaces.”

Roosevelt lost his bid for containment by quarantine. If Biden wants better success, he should broaden his foreign-policy coalition, both domestically and abroad, like FDR did following his ill-received quarantine speech.

Even though Roosevelt enjoyed an electoral mandate and comfortable congressional majority, both of which Biden lacks today, none of Roosevelt’s defense initiatives—from the embargo repeal and lend-lease to conscription—were one-party policies. They were not bipartisan because they were popular; a single vote saved the draft in August 1941. They were bipartisan by necessity: the president’s party alone could not supply enough votes. The greatest champions of FDR’s New Deal were also his foreign policy’s staunchest critics. 

Likewise, progressive members of Biden’s party are enthusiastic about his domestic agenda but remain skeptical about great-power competition. Roosevelt solved this numbers problem by stretching his foreign-policy coalition across the aisle. He appointed prominent Republicans to run the war and navy departments and made his 1940 Republican challenger his envoy to Churchill, depriving anti-intervention Republicans of top cover. Biden’s foreign policy coalition requires less opposition party courting since few Republicans oppose balancing against China, but he has the problem of skeptics inside his own party that FDR had.

Framing competition as a human rights imperative may help Biden unite the most partisan. Large majorities of conservative Republicans (77 percent) and liberal Democrats (76 percent), as well as lesser ideologues, want the United States to privilege human rights over trade in its relationship with China.

Critics charge that a values-conscious foreign policy confuses what is a security competition for an ideological one. But Sino-American competition is already fundamentally ideological, a fact recently exhibited by Biden’s summit of democracies and China’s denouncement of it. Both the American and Chinese heads of state conceptualize this great-power competition as a battle between clashing ideologies. If the world’s structure “is what states make of it,” as the political scientist Alexander Wendt famously posited, then it seems competition too is what competitors make of it.

IN 1938, a State Department staffer thought America should travel “along the road which leads through constitutional change to the authoritarian state.” Fortunately, Roosevelt transcended such national self-loathing then in vogue and proved democracy could work—and fight. Perhaps America’s victory in the war is what changed the mind of a then young George F. Kennan, whom history remembers as the architect of America’s Cold War containment strategy. The strategy worked so well that Americans have taken for granted a world without contest.

As the unipolar moment wanes and democracy retreats from the Eurasian map, we now know that we can no clearer see the end of history today than Kennan could in 1938. This is because history is neither linear nor cyclic. History is a series of contingencies: some novel, others familiar, but none destined. Biden would do well to probe Roosevelt’s example for guidance.