Editor’s Note: The following is adapted from Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance by Michael Sobolik with the permission of the publisher. 

On May 26, 2022, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the Biden administration’s long-awaited China strategy. “Under President Xi,” Blinken asserted, “the ruling Chinese Communist Party has become more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad.” He went on to name the CCP’s offenses: mass exportation of digital surveillance technology, violating international waters in the South China Sea, exploiting American companies, and oppressing its own people. The secretary was equally clear about the entity with the most to lose from the CCP’s actions: —the international order: “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.”

It is an odd thing for the chief diplomat of a sovereign nation-state to elevate the health of global institutions above the interests of his or her own government. Blinken couched his remarks not in terms of the United States’ history as a great power, nor its ideological heritage from the eighteenth century, but in relation to the establishment of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Throughout his remarks, Blinken’s references to the international order outnumbered his mentions of U.S. vital interests. The subtext was unmistakable: the Biden administration’s top priority in its relationship with Beijing is perpetuating the liberal international order. Secretary Blinken is far from alone. President Biden insisted in his remarks at the United Nations in 2021, “All the major powers of the world have a duty, in my view, to carefully manage their relationships so they do not tip from responsible competition to conflict.”

To be sure, President Biden has taken a number of steps within the international system to shore up America’s advantages against the CCP. His administration’s investments in the quadrilateral security dialogue with Japan, India, and Australia are commendable, and his Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity could potentially offer U.S. partners and allies economic alternatives to Beijing’s overtures. Even so, liberal internationalism is naive triumphalism. It is a Pollyannaish miscalculation of how the world works. If nations forego the marginal gains they could accrue by competing in the short run, everyone enjoys larger returns in the long run.

Washington’s Appeasement of Beijing

This outlook has led the Biden administration to downplay competition with the CCP in favor of cooperating with Beijing on multiple occasions. In February 2021, Biden officials were unwilling to admit that the CCP’s genocide of Uyghurs and other groups in Xinjiang was ongoing. That summer, Climate Envoy John Kerry worked to limit the number of Chinese companies that received an effective import ban for slave labor. In September, the Biden administration cut a deal with Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou and allowed her to return to China—a demand Chinese diplomats had officially registered with U.S. officials. In October, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman lobbied Congress against critical human rights legislation. Administration officials subsequently declined to sanction key Chinese entities after that bill became law. The following month, reports emerged of the State Department scrubbing the use of the phrase “malign actions” in its description of the CCP’s behavior. In December, U.S. officials cut the video feed of Taiwan’s digital minister during the Summit of Democracies for sharing a map that colored the PRC and Taiwan differently.

In January 2022, American diplomats reportedly urged Lithuania to refrain from upgrading its de facto Taiwan embassy. In July 2022, President Biden sought to spike Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s planned trip to Taiwan to protect the cooperative momentum Washington and Beijing were building. In early 2023, the Biden administration allowed a PRC spy balloon to enter American airspace and sail across the continental United States. The administration initially sought to hide the balloon’s existence from the public to protect diplomatic overtures with Beijing. Months later, senior State Department officials traveled to Beijing to run advance for Secretary Blinken’s trip and landed in Beijing on June 4, the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The ill-timed arrival gifted a propaganda boon to the CCP. That same month, Secretary Blinken traveled to Beijing. A condition of his trip was not publicizing the FBI’s report into Beijing’s spy balloon. To secure the visit, the State Department also froze human rights sanctions on Chinese officials and delayed export controls on Huawei.

Viewed in context, “responsible competition” seems deeply irresponsible. The problem at hand rests largely with the administration’s belief in liberal internationalism. The objective is not defeating adversaries but co-opting them into global institutions that supposedly transform them over time. Biden administration officials start from this reference point and insist that great power adversaries can coexist peacefully. For evidence, they turn—ironically—to the Cold War.

Misremembering the Cold War

In 2021, Rush Doshi, Biden’s former China Director at the National Security Council, published an impressive tome, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order. It is an exhaustive and measured articulation of the CCP’s plans to unset America as the global superpower. Yet, after three hundred pages of explaining the CCP’s world-sized ambitions, Doshi throws a wrench into his own argument: “China is the necessary partner of the United States on virtually every transnational challenge from nonproliferation to climate change…In the period ahead, the United States will need to delink [cooperation and competition] and hold fast to the rule that there will be two tracks in U.S.-China ties: one focused on cooperation and one on competition.” According to the Biden administration’s own track record, such a feat is easier said than done. But Doshi pointed to a time when America had apparently done this before: “The US and Soviet Union managed to collaborate in a far more existential competition than this one on a host of issues ranging from ozone to polio vaccination to space.” Looking at each example, however, reveals a more complicated story. 

Joint ozone efforts between Washington and Moscow, while impressive in their longevity, owed their success less to aligned political elites in Washington and Moscow and more to the issue’s low political priority at the time. A 1988 academic study put it rather bluntly: “The environmental concerns do not involve strategic issues; there are no national security secrets to be divulged…The low priority accorded the environmental exchanges may also have made them not worth canceling as a pawn in the political rivalries of these superpowers.” Today, however, the dynamic is categorically different. Biden places a high premium on climate policy, and China’s diplomats have exploited it to the detriment of America’s human rights agenda.

At first glance, the polio analogy is compelling. In the midst of an ongoing arms race, the scientific communities in America and the Soviet Union somehow found a way, with help from the World Health Organization, to join forces in vaccine research to blunt the polio epidemic. This ray of sunshine, however, only began to break through the clouds in the mid-1950s—more specifically, after the death of Joseph Stalin. Beyond that, the Soviets were painfully aware of the ways American science could help them combat polio. In the words of one historian, “It was costly socially and economically not to take advantage of the great breakthroughs in American biomedical research vis-à-vis polio.”

These conditions do not exist today. Unlike polio, the health crisis of our time, COVID-19, started because of America’s great-power adversary. The CCP initially concealed the virus’s existence, then punished foreign governments that sought information about its origins. Moreover, Xi rebuffed American-developed vaccines and opted instead for Chinese-produced solutions. Given this recent behavior, the Biden administration’s assumption that the CCP could behave as a good-faith partner on public health policy strains credulity.

Finally, Doshi’s claim of U.S.-Soviet space cooperation is especially odd. In 2008, Roald Sagdeev, the former head of the Russian Space Research Institute from 1973 to 1988, published his first-hand account of U.S.-Soviet space cooperation—or lack thereof: “Both countries gave primary emphasis in their space efforts to a combination of national security and foreign policy objectives, turning space into an area of active competition for political and military advantage…Only in the late 1980s, with warming political relations, did momentum for major space cooperation begin to build.”

This, of course, does not negate the rare moments of substantive collaboration between Washington and Moscow throughout the Cold War, particularly the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project docking mission in the 1970s and jointly photographing Halley’s comet in the 1980s. However, the Soviets regularly linked space cooperation with geopolitical concerns, from Kruschev’s demands for Eisenhower to remove forward-deployed nukes from Europe to Gorbachev’s insistence that Reagan back off of missile defense investments. It wasn’t until 1987, when Moscow formally dropped its linkage of space cooperation and arms control, that the two powers were able “to take steps toward actual cooperation.”

Great power cooperation didn’t just “happen” during the Cold War. It was the product of conditions that do not exist between Washington and Beijing today. That is the failure of liberal internationalism: it presupposes an outcome—peace—that is often the result of the successful exercise of unilateral state power—the very thing it seeks to limit and control.