US, China, and The Great Competition

Realism not Ideology when it Comes to US-China Relations

Many people in the New Right search for a sensible foreign policy. A foreign policy that does not involve constant regime change abroad. In the New York Times, conservative writers Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Gladden Pappin wrote an article titled Hawks Are Standing in the Way of a New Republican Party (archive), which asks for restraint in liberal jingoism. While a good sentiment, I am compelled to ask: what does that mean for the United States?

The authors lay out two significant pillars, foreign and domestic policy, which I will break into three items. First is the restraint of NATO’s expansion. Given the general theme, we can perhaps apply that to the “Quad” and AUKUS. Second is what I interpret as a limited form of engagement with China. Especially of interest, “But we should also find areas of cooperation, exchange and shared interests, seeking to avoid any future wars and instead communicating with mutual respect for a civilizational equal.” The third is a policy of domestic production and energy independence.

Taken in reverse order, I’ve written about domestic production and why that’s important for the United States. These policies are something the Republican party needs to take seriously, or it risks turning into a regional party as part of the Democrat Party quietly pivoting towards domestic industrial policy.

The foreign policy items leave further questions of what that policy looks like in effect. President Joe Biden made it clear that Ukraine is not joining NATO in the foreseeable future, which is the most substantial foreign policy Realism seen in American foreign policy regarding Eastern Europe since 1990. However, that still doesn’t answer the longer-term question of what to do with the US-Europe relationship. As John Mearsheimer points out in numerous places, the United States had a Europe-first policy before entering its two-front conflict in World War II. Europe is still necessary as a fundamental strategic interest for the United States despite the pivot to Asia.

Europe is a tremendous consumer of American products and technology and will rapidly depopulate soon. We also receive a lot of foreign investment here and in other places of American geopolitical interest from Europe. Europe is necessarily dependent upon the United States more than just militarily. Consequentially, the Russian situation will be largely dependent on American and British efforts for better or worse. What gives Western Powers its leverage in the situation is NATO and Russia’s interests in Ukraine. This scenario is the best opportunity for Engagement with Russia over the long term – and to encourage the normalization of relations to face the looming competition of China.

The United States created China into a modern power through maximum Economic Engagement. To emphasize further: we made a great power rival in a kind of strategic blowback in an overcommitment to defeating the Soviet Union. We never reimagined the United States’ role in a post-Cold War environment.

We are facing a return to geopolitics as it once was, in the flavor familiar with the 19th Century and early 20th Century. However, unlike that period, there were fewer major world powers. These players are the United States, China, and Russia. The powers of Europe are not going to be prime drivers of geopolitical competition.

The authors of the New York Times piece are correct to identify that China and the United States are not in direct conflict, though they do not say so directly. It is a crucial point to address. However, the competition is genuine and very dire between the US and China.

In Africa, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere we’ve seen several governments flips to and from pro-Western and pro-Eastern governments. There’s competition between China and the US, too, in the Western Hemisphere. Whether the entrance of Huawei into the Americas, the Chinese-backed Nicaragua Canal Project or Chinese involvement in the fentanyl drug trade, the game is afoot whether we like it or not.

To expand further on two contemporary issues, grains and Taiwan, China perceives itself in a Great Power Competition with the United States. China this year has panic purchased “approximately 69% of the globe's maize reserves in the first half of the crop year 2022, 60% of its rice, and 51% of its wheat.” Meanwhile, conflict in Ukraine looms, further threatening global grain production. China is heavily invested in the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, displacing the United States. This activity allows China to leverage the power of debt-based agricultural development to secure food imports ahead of other powers and gain further ground in the Developing World. Driving up food costs worldwide also allows China to increase the average size of development loans making them more difficult to pay back and refuse. At the same time, China increases its blue and white-water navy capabilities and threaten Taiwanese independence. These aren’t actions of a country that expects to find itself in a cooperative environment.

Anecdotally, John Mearsheimer speaks of how Chinese strategists appreciate his writings and rhetoric far more than Americans and identify that China is in a Great Power Struggle with the United States.

What is the motive behind writing the article with its buried lede of US-China relations? That only the authors can tell the world. I do not know them personally, and I’m contented in being blocked by Sohrab Ahmari on Twitter. The article is a bold statement. However, the notion of civilizational equals is probably a mistake. There are many civilizations on the planet, with objective standards of accomplishment between them, including respect for human rights. Civilizational equality strikes me as a kind of liberalism in geopolitics, a highly abstracted and post-Rawlsian liberal justice-as-fairness approach. I could be wrong, however.

That’s not to say sensible people shouldn’t respect their friends and competitors. I respect them so much that I take them seriously when they act and speak. It would be phenomenal to achieve the relative calm of the 1990s world, but that is not how the world works. Thousands of years of competition and conflict speak otherwise. China’s continued rise is uncertain though the trendline tells us otherwise. It’s incumbent upon the United States to unleash the engine of competition now and rise to meet the challenge; else, it may end in the Thucydides Trap everyone fears.