Deep Rivalry or Elite Obsession? Washington’s Search for Dominance Over China

Dmitri Alperovitch, World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century (PublicAffairs, 2024).

Visit the home of any D.C. foreign policy watcher and you will be sure to find bookshelves groaning under the weight of new China tomes. Every issue of Foreign Affairs, the in-house journal of Washington’s foreign policy establishment, is packed with articles about China. We are routinely told that, in a city more deeply divided by ideology and party affiliation than at any time since the Civil War, China is the one issue that brings the warring tribes together.

Yet from the outside (the writer is based in Australia), this preoccupation, and the apparent political unity on the China question, looks like it is built on weak foundations. This is not a reference to policy differences among the tribes. Rather, it is a comment on the gulf separating Washington from the rest of the United States. Because the evidence — or rather, the lack of it — suggests Americans are far less preoccupied with China than those who govern them.

America’s China debate is largely confined to its policy elites, among them Dmitri Alperovitch, who has written World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century. Alperovitch, a Russian émigré, is co-founder of the tech security firm CrowdStrike and now a Washington policy entrepreneur who in 2020 launched the Silverado Policy Accelerator.

“The only foreign policy goal in the twenty- first century that really should matter,” he writes, is avoiding “hot conflict with China while ensuring our country remains dominant on the global stage.” Except, that’s two goals, not one. In World on the Brink, as in much of the China commentary emerging from Washington, the tension between them is never resolved. This may be deliberate, because confronting this tension would require choices that Washington’s elites prefer not to make, since they know they have yet to recruit the American people to their cause.

To illustrate the point, it’s worth comparing the competition between Washington and Beijing to that between Washington and Moscow from 1945 to 1991. Alperovitch is among those who claim that the contest with China constitutes a second cold war. If so, then version one ought to offer a benchmark. Yet the differences are more evident than the similarities. We’re all aware of the stark power differential between China and the Soviet Union — Alperovitch quotes Rush Doshi’s bracing observation that the United States has never before faced a rival or group of rivals with more than 60 percent of its GDP, yet China passed that mark a decade ago.

Politics is another big point of difference between the two cold wars: U.S. President Harry Truman attempted to recruit his people to the cause of anti-communism from the start, in a nationally broadcast speech to Congress in 1947, in which he declared that containing Soviet-led communism would henceforth be the nation’s defining mission. President Joe Biden made an early attempt to frame America’s China relationship as part of a larger ideological contest between democracies and autocracies, but that effort faded quickly. Neither Biden nor any of his contemporaries have spoken to Americans about China as Truman did about Soviet containment, even though the economic challenge this time is already much larger. In part, this is because China poses no ideological threat, since it has no evident ambition to spread Marxism globally.

Nor is there much evidence of the China threat shaping American culture, as fear of communism suffused Cold War American cinema, television, and science fiction. Intellectually, there is no equivalent to the debates that produced figures such as Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and William F. Buckley. Even the unlamented “Global War on Terror” generated more intellectual ferment than the so-called second cold war  has, raising to prominence figures such as Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan, and Michael Ignatieff. The intellectual voices prominent in America today — Ross Douthat, Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Brooks, and Jordan Peterson, for example — have almost nothing to say about China, a subject that foreign policy elites such as Alperovitch insist is the defining challenge of our time (Ezra Klein is a notable exception, as are some of Silicon Valley’s “oligarch intellectuals”).

Alperovitch says that “at almost every turn and policy front, the depth, breadth, and scope of China’s threat to the global security order and international rule of law is almost impossible to capture.” A few pages later, he describes it as a “truly existential threat.” He endorses Michael Beckley and Hal Brands’s claim that China’s sense of vulnerability pushes it toward aggression: “The perception of danger everywhere drives a strong impulse to expand. Only by pushing outward can China secure its frontiers, protect its supply lines, and break the bonds a punishing environment imposes.”

While World on the Brink is commendably focused on avoiding a calamitous war between the United States and China, it gives equal weight to maintaining American dominance over China and doesn’t allow that those objectives might be incompatible. For Alperovitch, it’s not enough for the United States to maintain peace with China — it also has to win. The peace must be on American terms.

That’s a familiar framing for those of us who lived through the Global War on Terror. It even has echoes of a quote attributed to Ronald Reagan: “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.” It doesn’t escape Alperovitch that China is not al-Qaeda, or even that the Cold War with the Soviet Union is the wrong comparison. Still, the massive scale of the China challenge doesn’t deter Alperovitch. The objective, he insists, is American victory, and that can only be secured through dominance.

That doesn’t mean seeking regime change in Beijing, but it does mean that China needs to be convinced to work “within the existing global order, respecting territorial sovereignty, engaging fairly in global trade, and putting an end to the practice of economic and military coercion of other nations.” Needless to say, the United States routinely exempts itself from such standards, but that’s the privilege of dominance, and not one afforded to subordinates in the system.

One suspects Alperovitch would prefer China as a supersized post-World War II Japan or West Germany: an economic giant and a strategic minnow. But that’s not a realistic demand. No nation of China’s size will be content to remain indefinitely subordinate to another great power in its own region. China wants, at the very least, what America has: a regional sphere of influence, and the ability to exclude rivals from it.

The question Americans must ask is whether it is vitally important for their country to deny China this ambition. Must China remain subordinate in a system led by an unrivaled United States? Or can Americans live in a world that sees China and the United States as equals, as envisaged by Singaporean statesman Lee Kuan Yew?

To answer that question, American leaders will need to be much more open with their citizens about what is required to achieve dominance over China — a truly national effort over generations involving most arms of government and broader society. That’s what was needed to win the Cold War, and if this is indeed a new cold war, the challenge will be even greater.

Above all, what marked American commitment to fighting the Soviet Union was a willingness to make sacrifices, to bear heavy burdens, and risk a potentially massive human cost to prevent Soviet world domination. That resolve is what convinced Moscow that a military assault on Western Europe would ultimately be met by an American nuclear response, even if that meant the United States would face retaliation against its own cities.

As World on the Brink describes it, Taiwan is the epicenter of the U.S.-Chinese contest — the Berlin of the new cold war. Alperovitch lists various reasons why Taiwan’s security is vital for the United States. But another long section of the book is devoted to the many reasons why America underestimates its own strength. It’s the kind of argument (entirely persuasive, to my mind) that is always best made by an immigrant who more clearly sees the greatness in his adopted homeland. But it leaves the reader wondering how a country so young, so strong, and so innovative could be threatened by the loss of a distant island with a population of 23 million people. Such a loss would be a tragedy for the Taiwanese people, but surely not a major blow for America. Or at least, not a big enough loss to consider fighting World War III to prevent it.

It leaves one wondering if Americans are once again prepared to make the kinds of sacrifices asked of them in the Cold War. The gulf between the American public and its elites on the China question, and the unwillingness of those elites to try to bridge it, suggests that the national resolve needed to fight another cold war is absent this time around.

Sam Roggeveen is director of the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute, Sydney. He is the author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace.

Image: U.S. Department of State via Wikimedia Commons