The Chinese Communist Party has a penchant for offering “definite maybes” in exchange for concrete concessions by American leaders. During the Biden Administration, climate was the lever. Now, fentanyl, rare earths, chips, and trade are the crowbars of choice.
While the issues change, the PRC playbook’s basic foundation remains consistent: entrap the U.S. government in preliminary maneuvering and “dialogue” that dangles the amorphous prospect of cooperation and perhaps offer a few concessions on things Beijing didn’t really care about—but only upon the up-front payment by Washington of concessions on key security and values items. Furthermore, encourage Washington to preemptively constrain itself with restrictions that China won’t reciprocate anytime soon.
In this vein, consider the latest meeting between President Trump and General Secretary Xi. China made unspecified, contingent pledges to buy more U.S. soybeans, curtail fentanyl flows, and ease rare earth export curbs while the U.S. committed to concretely reduce tariffs on Chinese imports from 57% to 47%.
But what do these signals from the Chinese side actually mean? Its eminently foreseeable that senior officials may simply look the the way while “orders” get lost in the bureaucracy. Such was the case for years as the Chinese state imposed major non-tariff barriers to trade in order to advantage local Chinese firms and abetted massive pilferage of foreign firms’ intellectual property to the same end.
A key dynamic to watch: Coercion for which precise responsibility is deniable but for which the effects are real and painful is a PRC specialty.
Likewise, Beijing has a more than 3 year record of doublespeak on Ukraine. It proclaims the importance of “dialogue” and peace but massively boosts shipments of dual use components into Russia’s war machine while the PRC Foreign Minister admits that China wants the war to continue so that the United States remains distracted from a full focus on China.
The United States should not impute good faith to a regime that seeks to displace and replace it, first in Asia then globally. Washington now risks appearing an “ardent suitor” on fentanyl, rare earths, and trade, just as it did on climate cooperation during the Biden years.
Beijing is deploying a potent and proven playbook: entrap American interlocutors in endless, fruitless negotiations with China’s numerous, capable official counterparts. The goal is obvious: to delay and diminish larger U.S. policies to counter PRC aggression effectively by diverting and distracting key U.S. officials and constituencies with incessant dissuasions nad periodic meaningless concessions of “spiritual opium.”
Each day that US policymakers ignore these realities brings us a day closer to serious strategic compromise, and if things go far enough, defeat. China is relentlessly seeking to reshape the global economic, security, and technological architecture in its favor. Consider former National Security Advisor Gen. H.R. McMaster’s recounting of then Premier Li Keqiang’s monologue during a 2017 meeting in Beijing:
“He began with the observation that China, having already developed its industrial and technological base, no longer needed the United States. He dismissed U.S. concerns over unfair trade and economic practices, indicating that the U.S. role in the future global economy would merely be to provide China with raw materials, agricultural products, and energy to fuel its production of the world’s cutting-edge industrial and consumer products.”
Much in the world has changed since 2017, but People’s Republic of China grand strategic goals are not one of them. If anything, Beijing has accelerated its efforts. Headline “deals” or effusive words do not change the stark truth: China wants to replace the U.S. as the dominant global power and appears as a society to be confident in its national project.
The global consequences of a shift from Pax Americana to Pax Sinica would be profound at almost every level. Taiwan would only be the beginning. As Matt Pottinger (Deputy National Security Advisor during Trump 1.0) tells us in a recent article, Chinese leaders aspire for the US to become something like a slightly improved Russia: a good source of raw materials but not a strategic competitor. We ignore this reality at our peril.
The future can be very different and far more positive, but that will require consistent actions rooted in a coherent strategy designed to maintain American technological pre-eminence, restore our industrial base, improve people’s lives across our vast and great nation, and recognize the value of our international partners.
US policy should not discount the emergence of a different China in the future that has a less zero sum worldview. But concessions today only set the stage for a worse future tomorrow. Now is a time to hold the line.
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