In 1946, George Kennan, who was acting as the head of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, wrote a message to the Secretary of State, known as the “Long Telegram”.
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who → act → Telegram
In the Long Telegram, Kennan laid out a theory of how Soviet power could be defeated.
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power → lay → theory
He argued that Soviet leaders would always be hostile to the U.S., but that they were also cautious — they wouldn’t recklessly start a world war like Germany had.
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Germany → argue → war
He also argued that the Soviet system was weak and unstable, and that given enough time, it would collapse from its own internal contradictions.
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it → argue → contradictions
This became known as the doctrine of “containment”, and it ended up being exactly the strategy that the U.S. used to win the Cold War.
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U.S. → know → War
It took 45 years for the strategy to work and the USSR to fall.
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USSR → take → years
I’ve never lived in China, I haven’t been there in many years, I don’t speak Chinese, and I certainly don’t talk to any leaders there.
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I → live → leaders
I’m also not a career diplomat or a professional geopolitics guy of any kind.
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I → ’m → kind
So although I’m going to write a blog post with the same general goal as Kennan’s Long Telegram, I don’t want to suggest that it’s anywhere near as authoritative or insightful.
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it → go → Telegram
But I’m still going to write a post about “how to beat China”, because I think it’s useful to think through these sorts of big strategic questions.
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it → go → questions
This post is also an important follow-up to a series of posts I wrote about geopolitics during the Biden years, about U.S.-China competition:
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I → write → competition
(There were more, but I figure your appetite for clicking through old posts is limited.)
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appetite → be → posts
The basic premise of those posts was that the competition between a China-led New Axis and the U.S. and our old allies — Europe, Japan and Korea, hopefully India, etc. — would define the upcoming era of geopolitics.
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competition → lead → geopolitics
And my conclusion was that we should use an updated version of the basic strategy we used against the USSR in Cold War 1.
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we → use → War
I recommended that we should build up economic power within our bloc of allies, establish military deterrence, and wait for China’s internal contradictions to do the heavy lifting of removing the threat.
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contradictions → recommend → threat
That strategy was always going to be harder than it was in Cold War 1, because China A) is a lot bigger than the USSR, B) has a better economic model, and C) is a lot more globally integrated.
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China → go → model
The strategy I recommended was much tighter economic cooperation between the U.S. and a maximally large set of allies, to build up a bloc capable of overmatching even the mighty Chinese manufacturing juggernaut.
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I → recommend → juggernaut
This is the approach that’s being promoted by experts like Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell.
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that → promote → Doshi
If you’re interested in reading about how that approach would work, and why it would be helpful, I recommend Doshi’s interview with ChinaTalk:
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I → ’re → ChinaTalk
Anyway, I still think building up an anti-China economic juggernaut would be a great thing to do, and I still think the U.S. would benefit from closer economic integration with its friends and allies.
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U.S. → think → friends
But I think the election of Trump shows why this strategy probably isn’t going to work.
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strategy → think → Trump
The United States is simply too internally divided to engage in the sort of far-seeing, purposeful, smart kind of international competition that we pursued so effectively in the 20th century.
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we → divide → century
Americans care more about fighting other Americans than about fighting the Chinese, and that state of affairs will persist for a while.
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state → care → while
Donald Trump’s presidency is an outgrowth of America’s internal divisions; he cares much more about fighting his own internal enemies than about prosecuting international rivalries.
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he → care → rivalries
He has willfully degraded or torn up America’s key alliances, especially with Europe, and created enmity where friendship once reigned.
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friendship → degrade → enmity
He has flagrantly trampled on every principle of human rights, mutually beneficial economic cooperation, democracy, and international non-aggression that the post-WW2 U.S.-led international order fought to uphold.
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order → trample → that
He has, in short, made it impossible to prosecute the sort of Cold War 2 strategy that I spent the Biden years advocating.
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I → make → years
This doesn’t mean America’s alliance system is necessarily dead forever.
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system → mean → ?
As Doshi and Campbell pointed out in a recent article, the old alliances could be reconstituted, if America credibly overcame its internal divisions and returned to being the mostly unified, stable, reliable great power that it was last century.
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it → point → divisions
But overcoming those divisions is going to take decades at the very least, and that’s exactly the window of time during which China will be at its peak of relative power.
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China → overcome → power
So I think we’ve basically missed the chance to use that strategy effectively, and I’ve recalibrated my thinking.
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I → think → thinking
This post is meant to explain my recalibration.
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post → mean → recalibration
I do think there’s a path to defeating Chinese power, but it doesn’t look like what I previously had in mind.
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I → think → mind
Who is “we”, what does it mean to “beat” China, and why should we even care?
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we → mean → China
Before getting to the question of how to beat China, we need to answer the questions of who and why should do this “beating”.
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who → get → beating
In 2024 the answer was obvious — the U.S. and its erstwhile allies still represented a far more liberal power than China and its allies, so ensuring that the former was more powerful than the latter would further the cause of global liberalism.
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former → represent → liberalism
China threw minorities in concentration camps, threatened its neighbors with invasion and war, supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and repressed free expression all over the world.
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China → throw → world
That was — and is — behavior worth resisting.
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That → resist → ?
But the election of Trump changes that calculus.
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election → change → calculus
Trump threatens other countries with invasion, and sometimes even attacks them if he thinks they’re weak enough.
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they → threaten → them
…and 16 more, not listed.
The Aporia
