No impact to China rise.

NONE OF this is meant to disparage the magnitude of the challenge from China. On the contrary, the U.S.-China competition is severe, structural, and systemic. China is challenging the United States’ post-Cold War status as the sole superpower, the wealthiest and most influential country in the world, and the putative leader of the international order. It is offering its governing model of authoritarian socialism as a viable alternative to democracy. And it is mobilizing its state sector to maximize every Chinese competitive advantage over the United States in trade and technology. But none of these challenges is existential or insuperable. Beijing is not seeking to eliminate U.S. power, wealth, and influence or to eradicate democracy and capitalism. Rather, it seeks a multipolar world in which China is also a “leader,” its interests are secure, and its governing model is accepted as legitimate. Even this vision, however, represents an extraordinary challenge to a United States whose political and economic models are stumbling, whose international reputation has eroded, and whose interests are not wholly secure. These vulnerabilities lend themselves to magnifying the China challenge into a zero-sum or winner-take-all contest in which neither side would find coexistence with the other system tolerable.

The historical context of these trends is important. The fact is that the United States, even before its recent domestic travails, was having more than its share of trouble acknowledging and adjusting to shifts in the global balance of power since the end of the Cold War, 9/11, and the global financial crisis. Whether or not one subscribes to the notion that the United States is in relative strategic decline, it clearly no longer is (if it ever was) a global hegemon that can set the terms of its engagement with the rest of the world at will. The United States no longer enjoys “primacy” either globally or in the Western Pacific, and this further amplifies the perceived threat from a more powerful and competitive China. The prevailing U.S. response to these new historical circumstances, however, seems to fluctuate between denial that U.S. primacy has been lost, and a tacit acceptance that it has—but with a determination to restore and sustain it, presumably into perpetuity. Perhaps the latter is possible, but only if America first gets its domestic house in order.

In the meantime, the United States seems to be resisting acknowledgement of its relatively diminished historical position in the world, and channeling its discomfort and domestic insecurities into a zero-sum contest with China—based on a faulty depiction of Beijing’s intentions and an apparent rejection of any symmetry in the U.S.-China relationship. This mindset is reflected in multiple aspects of the Biden administration’s approach to Beijing.