In September 2015, President Barack Obama boasted that “greater prosperity and greater security — that’s what American and Chinese cooperation can deliver.” But by the time the Trump administration issued its first national security strategy only two years later, great-power competition with China — not cooperation — guided US foreign policy. President Joe Biden’s strategy differed in tone from Trump’s, but it also isolated China as the preeminent threat to US national security. With Trump’s return to the White House, rivalry with China is certain to continue driving the focus of US foreign policy. It will remain the principal justification for a larger defense budget and an expansive national security state for the foreseeable future.
The world of the early 2000s, in which US-China relations were looked on with hope, now seems hard to imagine. What happened? How did China go from an economic partner to an existential threat to the United States in less than a decade?
The answer is not reducible to partisan politics. While the neoconservative faction of the Republican Party has viewed China as a potential threat since the days of Mao Zedong, they had little influence during the Obama years, the period in which the United States’ current policy toward China has its origins. Although the Trump presidency oversaw a decisive downturn in Sino-US relations, Pentagon leaders were promoting the idea of “great-power competition” in 2015. For some Obama officials, China was the key military challenge of the future as early as 2010, the year before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a “pivot to Asia.”
For some, the United States and China are simply two empires slugging it out on the world stage, a version of a…
Auteur: Michael Brenes
