Solves the trade war without killing primacy.

FORTUNATELY, THERE IS a sound alternative to the current knee-jerk China hawkishness—one that recognizes the real challenges that China poses yet relies less on self-flagellation and beggar-thy-neighbor bellicosity and more on America’s traditional, proven strengths.

First, the United States should embrace unilateral tariff reform. Most obviously, the administration should immediately lift the Trump-Biden tariffs on imports from China, which cover goods wholly unrelated to national security, harm the U.S. economy, and fail to discipline China’s mercantilism, all while emboldening CCP hardliners. Other tariffs on industrial inputs, raw materials, and capital goods—which undermine both American manufacturers’ global competitiveness and relations with key allies—should also be lifted.

Policymakers should also reauthorize the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), which cuts tariffs on products from more than 100 developing (non-China) countries, yet expired in 2020. Now that GSP’s tariff savings are gone, companies that relocated China-based manufacturing to GSP beneficiary countries like Indonesia, Thailand, and Cambodia are moving production back into China. Reauthorizing this program, which enjoys broad bipartisan support, would halt this troubling trend while boosting GSP countries’ economies and their relations with the United States.

Second, U.S. policymakers should rediscover trade agreements, which can boost economic growth and extend U.S. soft power. As James C. Capretta and Stan Veuger recently noted in Foreign Policy, Washington’s newfound hostility to trade is deeply misguided. Given China’s ascendency in recent years, the strategic case for trade liberalization and strengthening alliances is stronger today that at any time in recent memory. In particular, the United States should join (or in a sense, rejoin) the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the agreement that arose after President Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The CPTPP includes eleven Pacific Rim countries and will soon welcome the United Kingdom.

By eliminating trade barriers with key AsiaPac nations like Vietnam and Malaysia and by promulgating U.S.-backed disciplines on core issues (digital trade, industrial subsidies, state-owned enterprises, etc.), participation in the agreement would strengthen the United States’ economic and geopolitical positioning in a critical region heavily influenced by China’s gravitational pull. It also would serve as a platform for engaging with other countries that have expressed an interest in joining the CPTPP, with or without the United States.

Washington should also pursue other trade agreements, including by restarting talks with the European Union and Kenya. It has been more than a decade since the United States last inked a free trade deal—a record that stands in stark contrast to continued efforts by China and other nations to liberalize trade and investment on a preferential basis. Our absence from the arena has put U.S. farmers, companies, and diplomats at a major disadvantage.