The Foe We Need Is the Foe We Have

“At a time when we are losing a grip on the fundamentals of the American Experiment, a powerful foe has arisen that stands in direct opposition to those fundamentals.”

For the foreseeable future, the fundamental fact of American domestic politics will be division—deep-seated divisions running along incredibly fraught lines of partisanship, race, religion, geography, worldview, and culture. Meanwhile, the fundamental fact of American foreign policy going forward will be geopolitical competition with other great powers, such as the People’s Republic of China, in particular. These geopolitical competitions have the potential to challenge the current liberal international order.

Both our domestic divisions and China’s threat to the American-led postwar order present immense challenges to the sustained peace and prosperity of the United States of America. American statesmen and policymakers working to cope successfully with these twin challenges would do well to understand them—and present them to the public—as interconnected. By explicitly framing the People’s Republic of China as a geopolitical and ideological foe deserving of sustained competition, we can remind ourselves of the first principles undergirding our experiment in democratic republican self-governance and build support for those principles to transcend our current, seemingly insuperable divisions. At a time when we are losing a grip on the fundamentals of the American Experiment, a powerful foe has arisen that stands in direct opposition to those fundamentals. This is a blessing. Through explicit competition with China and statesmanlike articulation of the ideological stakes of that competition, we can regain a grip on what we stand for, our democratic and constitutional sources of unity, and who we are as Americans.

Ceding any further share of world leadership to China will place greater control of the global economy in the hands of a ruling communist party that is premised on ethnic nationalism, is dismissive and abusive of human rights, and is committed to a pseudo-mercantilist and international rules-breaking economic model. We must wake up and compete with China rather than falling back into 1990s-style wishful thinking that the Chinese Communist Party will magically become a “responsible stakeholder” in the liberal international order. As former National Security Advisor General H.R. McMaster writes in his illuminating book, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, the Chinese Communist Party “has no intention of playing by the rules associated with international law, trade, or commerce. China is a threat to free and open societies because its policies actively promote a closed, authoritarian model as an alternative to the rules-based order.”