Is This How a Cold War With China Begins?

Speaker 2

I want to hold on this policy for a second because to zoom out, the reason this particular policy got a lot of attention in my view is that it was a little bit of a crossing of a bridge. And maybe I'll quote, Cleat Williams, who worked on international economic policy towards China under Trump on this. He said to Politico that the Biden administration views Chinese indigenous innovation as a per se national security threat. And that is a big leap from where we've ever been before. And you can take that too far. They don't view it that way on everything. But Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, said that they don't just see it this way. And semiconductors, they see it this way on renewable energy technology. They see it this way on biotechnology. And it's true that all of these things have or can have either a national security dimension, chips go in a missile, or they can become something where other countries have a dependency on Chinese production. And so China has coercive capabilities in the way that maybe Russia did with natural gas towards Europe. But I mean, we're really then saying that very, very important technologies are just intrinsically national security threats. And we are, I mean, I don't really know how to think about this. We are really just saying we are going to try to slow China's technological advancement as a country because we think it is unsafe for us in the world if they pass us or match us in next generation technological capabilities. And that's a really, I mean, I'm not saying that there's no rationale for it. It's just a very profound stance to take towards another country that you also are intertwined with the need to cooperate with and are not at war with.

Speaker 1

I think you've put your finger on it. It is a really big shift in the way that we have regarded and treated China.

Speaker 2

You wrote in a piece for Foreign Affairs that quote, overreacting by framing competition with China in civilizational or ideological terms, risks backfiring by turning China into what many in Washington feared already is. I was thinking about that because I've been doing more reporting around this question and something I'll hear from administration officials is, look, China gets up in the morning and they want to become the world's leading superpower. They think we stand in their way. I'm paraphrasing here. Then basically the next sentence is something like, and we take them seriously on that and we are completely determined to stand in their way. There's this funny way in which, to the point of your quote, it certainly seems like we might be making the other side's fears about us truer than they would otherwise be, which then makes it more reasonable to act in these ways, which then makes the fears even truer. I just worry about, I wonder about a cycle of turning ourselves into antagonists and how inevitable or necessary that really is.

Speaker 1

That's exactly the dynamic that I see taking place. I think some would say, well, of course, there's nothing to do about that. They couldn't be persuaded otherwise. That's their ambition. I see it a little bit differently. In fact, many in the US intelligence community don't conclude that China has been on global domination.

Speaker 1

Their current argument would be that we tried the Obama administration tried very hard to engage China to bring it into the international system and look what happened. They militarized the South China Sea, they stole our intellectual property and really there's no good faith effort on their side. Even if we wanted to, they're bent on taking advantage of the privileges that have been afforded to them and the access that they have had. I would say that there's bad faith in a lot of mistrust, I would say mutual suspicions on both sides and that even though that history can't be redone, nonetheless, the bet all along I think was that having China on the inside of these institutions was better than having China on the outside of them and that even though China is no longer liberalizing, we still have to figure out how to live with one another.