Opinion – Rethinking the China Challenge

Richard W. Coughlin

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In the U.S. when one party enacts foreign policy, the other party imagines how it will one day exercise power. During the Clinton administration of the 1990s, for example, neo-conservatives formed The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) to revive ideas they had first articulated during the final months of the George H. W. Bush administration: that the U.S. should adopt a more militarized foreign policy to shape the 21st century in line with American values and interests. More recently, the Carnegie Foundation convened a group of foreign policy experts, including Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Advisor, to explore how U.S. foreign policy could advance the economic interests of the middle class in the United States through promoting high-value manufacturing initiatives in defense, semiconductors, and renewable energy technologies. The scale of the new initiatives remained small relative not only to other fiscal policy commitments but also to similar policies by both U.S. allies and adversaries, as Adam Tooze has noted. Biden’s policies were not enough to sustain the presidency and so Democratic-leaning policy intellectuals are once again marginalized, but from the sidelines they are ringing the alarm bells.

This is the spirit in which we should approach Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi’s recent essay in Foreign Affairs, “Underestimating China: Why America Needs a New Strategy of Allied Scale.” The authors offer a compelling diagnosis of the shifting balance of power in international politics – one that would have surely alarmed the neoconservatives aligned with PNAC. At the heart of their argument is the concept of scale — the idea that larger states, through population, economic coordination, and productive capacity, can marshal decisive advantages across military, technological, and economic domains. For Campbell and Doshi, the rise of China represents the latest iteration of a familiar historical pattern: just as the United States once surpassed Great Britain and the Soviet Union overwhelmed Nazi Germany, China now appears poised to eclipse the United States.