U.S. Versus China: A New Era of Great Power Competition, but Without Boundaries
New York Times
WASHINGTON — When President Trump
President Xi Jinping of China this week to discuss contentious trade issues, they will face each other in another nation that was once the United States’ main commercial rival, seen as a threat to American dominance.
But the competition between the United States and Japan, which
the
this week for the first time, settled into a normal struggle among businesses after waves of American anxiety in the 1980s. Japan hit a decade of stagnation, and in 2010, China overtook it as the world’s second-largest economy.
There is no sign, though, that the rivalry between the United States and China will reach the same kind of equilibrium. For one thing, Japan is a democracy that has a military alliance with the United States, while China is an authoritarian nation that most likely seeks to
. In China’s competition with the United States, a rancorous trade war has persisted for a year, and issues of national security are
into economic ones. Some senior American officials are pushing for “decoupling” the two economies.
The main elements in relations — economic and commercial ties — have become unmoored, and few agree on the future contours of the relationship or the magnitude of the conflicts.
For American officials, the stakes seem much higher now than in the race with Japan. Most economists estimate China will overtake the United States as the largest economy in 10 to 15 years. And some senior officials in Washington now view China as a steely ideological rival, where the Communist Party aims not only to subjugate citizens but to
— particularly surveillance, communications and artificial intelligence technology — and
across
and
.
Though Mr. Trump incessantly praises Mr. Xi — he said they
— the idea of China as a dangerous juggernaut, more formidable than the Soviet Union, has become increasingly widespread in the administration. It was articulated by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a visit to the Netherlands, part of a weeklong trip across Europe this month in which he talked about China at each stop.
“China has inroads too on this continent that demand our attention,” he told a news conference in The Hague. “China wants to be the dominant economic and military power of the world, spreading its authoritarian vision for society and its corrupt practices worldwide.”
The
issued by the White House in December 2017 sounded the alarm: The United States was re-entering an era of great power competition, in which China and Russia “want to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests.” But since then, Mr. Trump and cabinet officials,
and other foreign policy matters, have failed to outline a coherent strategy.
That has left administration officials struggling to piece together an approach to China that has elements of competition, containment and constructive engagement, none of them sharply focused.
Mr. Trump’s closest advisers on China are split on strategies. His top foreign policy officials,
and
.
, have pushed for tough policies, as has Peter Navarro, the trade adviser and creator of a polemical book and documentary film,
In the opposite camp are
— among them Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Stephen A. Schwarzman and Steve Wynn.
Midlevel bureaucrats are formulating their own ideas. The view of a drawn-out ideological conflict was laid out in stark terms by Kiron Skinner, the head of policy planning at the State Department,
.
“This is a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that before,” she said. “The Soviet Union and that competition, in a way, it was a fight within the Western family.”
Now, she said, “it’s the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.”
Many analysts have tried to discern whether the striking remarks point to a new policy direction. Officials say privately that is not the case.
to
— critics say they see strategic ambiguity without the strategy.
“The economic and security and technological and even scientific components of the U.S.-China relationship are now being conflated,” said
, a professor of government at Cornell University who studies
and nationalism. “What’s worrying to many is not being able to decipher different levels of risk and how far and how quickly the efforts to indiscriminately decouple the United States and China will go.”
That idea of decoupling rests on the premise that two economies so intertwined poses a significant security risk to the United States. The linking accelerated when China
in 2001 and in recent years had seemed irreversible. But Mr. Trump’s hard-line trade advisers want the two nations to unwind their supply chains, which means some American businesses exit China, and others stop selling components to Chinese companies.
Mr. Trump is narrowly focused on
deficit with China, which many economists say is not meaningful. But his imposition of tariffs and the general uncertainty around the economic relationship are forcing some American companies to rethink keeping operations in China. And putting Chinese companies, notably Huawei, the giant maker of communications technology, on what officials call an entity list to cut off the supply of American components is
.