"The China Debate We're Not Having" | Part 2: What Does the United States Want?

“To get to the question, what the United States wants, the United States does not know what it wants. We're in a moment right now where to state the obvious, the old consensus has come apart. I think that memo first landed with Trump's election in 2016. There was a brief interregnum in 2020 where it seemed that we got through this weird anomaly, this hiccup of Trumpism, and now we're ready to get back to the business of running the world and upholding the so-called rules-based order. But it turned out that for years, and Trump proved again in 2024 that this is an enduring phenomenon.”

“One is there's been a 40% increase since 2024 in the extent to which the American public has friendly, a sort of friendly disposition towards China. It's now at around 53%. I mean, this is an extraordinary figure. There's a partisan gap, as with most things in the United States right now. Two-thirds of Democrats and one-third of Republicans have a positive, friendly attitude towards China. But I think that, and that's significant, but even one-third of Republicans is significant. The big shift is the overall headline number.”

“If you're going to prioritize the Indo-Pacific and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific... that's going to mean that we're going to need our allies and other theaters in particular to take on more of the burden. Now, I think one of the biggest threats to our ability to do that is what we're seeing happen with Iran right now. Iran is a factor that we have to acknowledge and talk about because in order to do prioritization and to actually maintain integrity of having four key lines of effort, it's going to come at the expense of other things.”

“We have an affordability and energy crisis in this country. You can't buy any gas turbines to get more generation online. And so China has excess capacity in solar panels and also makes pretty good batteries that are fairly cheap. Maybe we can think about creatively what China could bring to the table in terms of solving some of those issues and what the governance strategies would be for extracting some kind of learning out of that investment if it were to come.”

“Nobody is more confused than America's allies about what the United States wants. And this is especially the case when it comes to China. I've sat in a lot of meetings recently where Europeans have said, what does the United States expect of us in our relationship with China? Sort of generally, but concretely, what would you like us to do? I think it was, there was actually tremendous clarity around the Huawei issue. Now, I think it's a little bit uncertain.”

“The US has lost 100% of its credibility on promoting human rights on the global stage. And if part of the mechanism is, if it were to kind of make that a prominent part of its policy, it would have this dilemma of how do you get everybody to buy in to, hypocrisy has always been a huge issue for any great power, certainly for the US. It's historically put a lot into its democracy promotion and support of human rights. But the hypocrisy thing has kind of gone off the charts.”