Competing with China requires more trade not less

A reminder that you still have one more day to submit questions for Maya’s mailbag on Friday (this one is for paid subscribers).

The United States of America has, without much fanfare, slipped into a version of a New Cold War with China, with the war between Russia and Ukraine serving as a “hot” proxy battle between the two.

You probably don’t think of me as a foreign policy writer, and neither do I. But once upon a time I wrote a book about the Iraq War debate inside the Democratic Party and the urgent need to establish a rules-based international order and avoid a New Cold War dynamic. Then many years later, I wrote a second book accepting rivalry with China as inevitable and calling for a program of domestic renewal and population growth to provide a peaceful path to continued American global leadership. So I actually have thought about this a lot over the years, in a very stepped-back way. I did not stick the landing on timing “One Billion Americans,” because when it came out, a lot of people found the framing puzzling, separate from any points of specific agreement or disagreement.

The current administration differs from Trump’s in many ways, but Biden has maintained Trump-era tariffs on Chinese imports and placed a series of steep new tariffs on Chinese electric cars, prioritizing strategic competition over short-term emission reduction. Congress’ moves on TikTok, similarly, are a complete repudiation of Clinton-era optimism about commercial ties leading to Chinese political liberalization. Today we are concerned, appropriately, about the opposite dynamic — that commercial ties will allow China to export its own authoritarianism around the world. When people eventually look back in a more sober-minded way, I think they’re going to see not only that Biden’s approach has had a lot of continuity with Trump’s, but that Obama pivoted pretty hard away from engagement in his second term.

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