The Essence of the Strategic Competition with China

U.S. national security strategy and defense policy have come to focus on China as the primary emphasis in the strategic competition outlined by recent U.S. strategy documents. Outside government, an avalanche of recent reports and essays lays out the China challenge in sometimes fervent terms, depicting an ideologically threatening revisionist state with malign intentions. As the Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf put it recently, Across-the-board rivalry with China is becoming an organizing principle of U.S. economic, foreign and security policies. There is little question that Chinas growing power, its military buildup, its bold regional and eventually global ambitions, and its outsized self-conception pose very real challenges to the United States and the post-war, rule-based order. China is neither infinitely powerful nor wholly malicious. But its belligerent coercion of its neighbors, threat to use force to absorb Taiwan, violations of human rights, predatory economic behavior, and many other activities mark its rise as a potential threat to U.S. security and any sort of rule based international system.