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On Wednesday (October 13), the White House released a long-delayed national security strategy report. The overwhelming challenge for the U.S. in the coming years will be overtaking China and containing Russia, the report said. It also emphasized the need to work with allies to address the challenges common to democracies.
One such report is issued with each new administration in the United States, and the Biden administration’s report was supposed to be published last winter, but was delayed due to reasons such as the Russian-Ukrainian war.
“China is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and the growing economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to advance that goal,” the report said. In addition, it said that “the next decade will be a decisive decade for the competition between the United States and China.”
U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the Ukraine crisis did delay the release of the document but did not “fundamentally change” Biden’s foreign policy approach.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning responded on October 13 that he had noticed the “National Security Strategy” report issued by the US government. She said, “We oppose clinging to outdated concepts such as the Cold War mentality and zero-sum game, and do not agree with exaggerating geopolitical conflicts and major power competition. These practices are contrary to the trend of the times and the expectations of the international community, and will definitely be unpopular and will eventually fail. .”
China represents the greatest challenge to the global order
Even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China represents the greatest challenge to the global order, and the US must win the economic arms race with the superpower if it wants to maintain its global influence, the report claims.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the US remains committed to responsibly managing competition between the two countries and that China has the intention to reshape the international order and is increasingly capable of doing so, enabling global The competitive environment is tilted towards it.
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In the last few years of Obama’s term, the United States began to gradually withdraw from the Middle East, announced its return to the Asia-Pacific region, and stepped up efforts to check and balance China. However, during Trump’s tenure, the contradiction between China and the United States suddenly intensified. At first, it focused on the field of trade. After the new crown epidemic, it spread to various fields such as diplomacy, science and technology, and politics, and the relationship between the two countries fell to a freezing point.
After Biden took office, the US policy toward China has not changed, but claimed to set up a “safety fence” for the relationship between the two countries. In early 2021, Biden also defined Sino-US relations as “extremely fierce competition” rather than “conflict”.
However, in 2020, due to events such as the Russian-Ukrainian war and Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, the relationship between the two countries took a sharp turn for the worse.
Strategically, the United States attaches almost unprecedented importance to China. Daniel Russel, the top U.S. diplomat in charge of East Asian affairs under Obama, commented that, after 21 months of deliberation, the report has apparently focused overwhelmingly on competition with China.
“While this document purports to avoid viewing the world solely through the lens of strategic competition, competition with China fills every chapter,” Russell said.
Prospects for International Cooperation
Sullivan said Washington must address transnational challenges, including climate change, food security, the pandemic, terrorism, energy transition and inflation, while dealing with China relations.
In recent years, China and the United States have maintained friendly and cooperative relations in addressing climate change. At last year’s Glasgow climate summit, China said it would cooperate “urgently” with the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
China and the United States have also found rare common ground in their efforts to crack down on the trade in illicit drugs such as fentanyl.
However, in August, when U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a delegation to Taiwan, China retaliated by announcing a halt to cooperation with the U.S. in several key areas, including climate change, military exchanges and combating international crime.
Russell said the strategy promised to build the broadest coalition of nations to address global challenges, but it would be difficult to do so without China, and it did not address how such cooperation would be ensured.
Regarding the future Sino-US relations, Ma Zhao, an associate professor at the East Asia Department of Washington University in St. Louis, believes that the current US policy towards China is “competitive but not face-breaking”, and China’s policy towards the US is prevention and confrontation. This kind of “quasi-Cold War” The situation will continue for quite some time.
In Ma Zhao’s view, there are three reasons why this “quasi-cold war” has not yet reached a “new cold war”: the economic interdependence of the two sides and the integration of market systems have prevented the relationship between the two sides from falling off a cliff; Biden does not want competition with China to evolve into Military confrontation; allies of the two countries do not want to take sides in this competition.