---

Before joining the Biden administration’s National Security Council as deputy senior director for China, Rush Doshi published an influential book on Chinese policy, The Long Game. Doshi pored through Chinese government and Communist Party documents to discern Beijing’s long-term strategy, which he believes is to replace the U.S. as the world’s leading power. It’s a controversial position, but one that has influenced Democratic and Republican policy makers alike. Among his responsibilities at the NSC, Doshi worked on negotiations that led to AUKUS, a trilateral security partnership between the U.S., Australia, and the United Kingdom. A protege of Democratic party China expert Kurt Campbell, Doshi now heads the Council of Foreign Relation’s China Strategy Initiative. The program plans to make reams of Chinese official documents available to the public in English, track Chinese actions globally, and propose strategies for the U.S. to compete with China.

Q: Before you served in the National Security Council, you wrote The Long Game, in which you talked about how China was looking to “blunt, build and displace” the U.S.. Did what you see in the White House confirm your view, or did it change your mind?

A: The book focused on the idea that we could get a sense of Chinese grand strategy by looking at the texts of the Chinese Communist Party, and looking at the behavior of the Chinese government. And the conclusion was, yes, that China sought to displace the American order, first at the regional level and then at the global level through strategies of blunting, building, and expansion

I feel more confident in my assumptions about China’s global ambitions even than I was when the book came out in 2021. ​​First, it became much more apparent in the last few years that China is pursuing [military] basing globally, not just regionally — Western hemisphere, Mediterranean, the Middle East, Asia, West Coast of Africa — all a matter of public record. It is hard to explain the decision to explain global basing unless you assume China wants to project power globally.

Second, if you look at technology competition, it’s not clear that China has a positive-sum view of technology. As I say in the book, they want to lead and dominate the next round of technological revolution. If you look at Xi’s language going back a decade on technology, it’s very much about China leading the next round in every industry to win the fourth industrial revolution, which would not only bring it prosperity but also power. 

You can look at the economic story as well. When I wrote the book, ‘dual circulation’ was still a relatively contested question. The same year, after the book came out, we got a great article by Xi Jinping in [Communist party journal] Qiushi, which many of our allies would bring up with us in high-level meetings. In it he explains that dual circulation really is about increasing the world’s dependence on China and reducing China’s dependence on the world.

If you look at the political story, it’s very hard to look at China’s decision to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to support closer ties to Iran and the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — North Korea ] to look at the ways in which it’s challenging European security and Asian security simultaneously, to look at its serial production of vessels — which far exceed what you might need just in a regional contingency — and think this is a country that has just regional ambitions.

You have written about the need for a president to make an Oval Office speech about China. Why do you think that’s important? And why didn’t Biden do it? 

Every American president since the first Gulf War has given some speech from the Oval Office about some set of developments in the Middle East and how we’re going to respond. ​​It shows that in the public and elite consciousness other theaters loom larger. I’m not saying that we should abrogate our commitments or remove our focus from that region entirely. But part of what needs to happen in this country is to rise to the China challenge, and for the government to rally and mobilize the American people.

We need to triumph over parochial or vested interests, and we need some coordination across various means of statecraft. Only the president can say, ‘Hey, we need to take this challenge seriously so that we can move faster.’ 

Did folks in the National Security Council urge the president to make a speech on that subject? 

There were a number of conversations about what the president should and shouldn’t talk about at any given time. He spoke about China many times. Remember in 2021 he gave a very long press conference where he spent about 20 minutes talking about China. But a public Oval Office speech is not the kind of thing that is chosen lightly.

One of the interesting things about these interviews is getting to talk about things that happened in the past and why the U.S. did or didn’t do something. I would say that a fair theme from people in your administration and the Obama administration is that the U.S. should have responded more forcefully to China back in the Obama administration.

I think there was a reassessment, not just in the Democratic Party, but across the political spectrum, that some of the assumptions about China from 2008 to 2016 were overly optimistic, or maybe even just wrong in some cases. What you saw was less an effort to relitigate the debates of the past and more an effort to say, ‘Well, with this new set of assumptions, in what direction should we proceed? What should we do?’

The Biden approach on China was different from the Obama approach because it was a different world. And the assumptions about China had been updated to take into account China’s interests, values, and activities around the world. You see it in the Taiwan Strait, in regional flashpoints, and in the economic and technology competition as well. If your set of assumptions is that this is an intense competition, and that the PRC might have this desire to displace the U.S.-led order globally, that takes you to a different set of policy prescriptions.

You mentioned Taiwan. Your administration focused enormously on Taiwan. That was a big change from the first Trump administration. Is Taiwan now more secure than it was when you came into office? 

The approach that the Biden administration took on Taiwan evolved over time to the point where the aim was to support Taiwan’s ability to defend itself, to send signals that we supported Taiwan and that the international community supported Taiwan, and to demonstrate our capability within the region. All that is on the deterrence side of the ledger.

But there’s another side of the ledger which is to help clarify what we seek and do not seek to do. On that front, the Biden approach is not well understood. Particularly after August 2022, the Biden approach was relatively successful in stabilizing cross-strait affairs for about a year and a half. Washington and Taipei made this broad assessment that de-escalation on political symbolism was valuable. [In Aug. 2022 Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan after which China ramped up military exercises in the air and sea around Taiwan.]

That meant staying within certain precedential lines on political symbolism. In Beijing, it meant making the determination that staying within certain military boundaries would be appropriate. There’s this extensive body of precedent, political and military, that is often informal but implicitly observed by both sides as a kind of bargain. 

That bargain broke and it was then put back together for a period of time. It was never going to be stable or perfect. It took enormous force to keep it together through the year 2023 and Taiwan’s elections and of course, all the way into the period of the inauguration of a new leader in Taiwan. 

The question then was always going to be who would use the time better? The PRC is using the time well to prepare for kinetic action at some point down the road against Taiwan. Taiwan is not using the time as well as it could, as you can see right now with the challenges in its legislature on defense spending. And the United States could also use the time much better. 

[Shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Taiwan’s opposition party, the KMT, which controls the legislature, pushed through cuts in military spending.]

In general, important steps have been taken to increase Taiwan’s security. But there’s a lot more work that needs to be done. This is a baton-passing exercise across administrations and between the executive and Congress. It’s going to take a lot more time, effort, resources and understanding for us to put ourselves in a better position.

Left: Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te visits Honolulu, Hawaii, December 1, 2025. Right: Lai Ching-te visits the U.S. territory of Guam, December 5, 2025. Credit: 總統府 via Flickr

I feel confident the certain efforts that were undertaken in the Biden administration, like the Replicator initiative and greater resourcing for defense innovation, will play a role in putting Taiwan in a better position. The real thing that is affecting Taiwan’s current position, other than its domestic politics being a little bit messed up, is the signaling by the Trump administration that maybe Taiwan isn’t that important to the United States.

[The Defense Department’s 2023 Replicator initiative seeks to develop the capability to produce many thousands of drones and autonomous ships within a year or so.]

My clear impression from the first Trump administration was that the President, frankly, didn’t care much about Taiwan and would have traded Taiwan for a deal with China. There were plenty of people among his national security advisors who cared a lot about Taiwan, but he was quite transactional about it.

There has always been a division between President Trump’s transactionalism and the more bipartisan China view that his staff has. What is changing now is the question of whether the president is outside that consensus on certain issues. In the first term, he offered to lift export controls on Huawei and ZTE, he was willing to settle for a Phase 1 deal that didn’t address the larger industrial policy concerns — declaring victory before achieving it — and if you look at human rights he said “go ahead” on Xinjiang and “this is your internal affair” on Hong Kong. There has always been a difference between President Trump and the bipartisan approach of his staff.

The irony of it is that President Trump deserves some credit for creating the bipartisan approach on China but then has never fully embraced it. I think that irony is at the heart of the second Trump term.

Do you think Trump looks at China as an existential threat, or perhaps the biggest competitor of the U.S.?

I don’t know. A lot of people think that President Trump is very hawkish on China and has a confrontational view of China. But it’s also the case that President Trump in his meetings with President Xi was willing to flatter him, was thrilled with his visit to the Forbidden City, and is inclined to respect power and to seek to do deals.

It’s complicated. Covid was a unique moment because President Trump really did blame China and the Chinese Communist Party, which he thought damaged him politically. So, there was an element of personal animus that infused China policy and led to the kind of hawkish correction in 2020.

But if you ask me about his base approach on China, it looks like he takes China seriously as a competitor. He thinks they’re well governed. He thinks they’ve taken advantage of the United States. But that doesn’t mean he’s ready to wage a new Cold War on China, or that he’s super-confrontational. The record is more complicated. 

Competition is more than just the export control or outbound investment part of our policy toolkit. Competition is also about contesting standards at multilateral institutions or pushing back on certain PRC approaches in the UN. It is bigger than economics and technology…

Just as people were thinking that President Trump was going to pursue a big deal [in his second term], he has taken a series of actions against China. He proposed fees for Chinese vessels docking in U.S. ports, and added a tariff of 10 percent on top of the other 10 percent he already imposed. And he has a new America First Investment Policy National Security Memoradum which is quite good in many respects.

I don’t know that anybody can tell you conclusively what President Trump really thinks about China. I think his views are probably complex.

You have written about the importance of learning from China. China invited investment in areas where they were behind. Would it make sense to have Chinese solar companies and other leaders in technology to invest here to try to learn how they do business? 

Yes, with the right protection. Chinese cyber actors have compromised American critical infrastructure, so an inbound investment structure would need to have significant firewalling off of Chinese investment around data and cyber. The right regulatory structure also has to be codified by Congress, not just under executive order, because then it creates greater stability, predictability and security.

If the U.S. is behind in global manufacturing and China’s ahead, how are we going to catch up if we don’t find some way to benefit from their knowledge and expertise? The Chinese would have access to one of the largest markets in the world in the U.S.. We would have access to knowhow, capability and technology. They’re not going to want to give away the crown jewels. We’re going to want as much as we can get. There’s a negotiation to be had there.

If it’s done the wrong way, it’s a massive national security challenge for the United States. If it’s done the right way, it’s an enormous opportunity. So, the real question is, do we have the capacity, both in Congress and the executive to make this work? My view is inclined towards supporting investment done the right way. 

Let’s go back to the Biden administration for a bit. It seemed to me that the three legs of the Biden administration approach to China were investing domestically, working with allies, and hobbling China. Let’s look at them one at a time.

I don’t know about hobbling China…

We can get to ‘hobbling.’ In terms of investing domestically, the CHIPS act seems fairly safe under Trump, but the Inflation Reduction Act [environmental] funding probably has problems. If funding under the IRA goes down, how lasting of an impact would that have? 

The ‘Invest’ agenda was chips, infrastructure and the IRA. Those are the triumvirate pieces of legislation. If you lose the industrial policy effort in the IRA, it will be very difficult for the U.S. to succeed in those sectors competitively. It would also create a large concern that America’s investment climate isn’t predictable, so therefore people shouldn’t make multibillion dollar investments in building productive capacity in the U.S. Maybe you won’t get the support or the tax credits you counted on.

If your goal is supply-chain diversification out of China, creating uncertainty about investing in the United States diminishes your ability to succeed. 

In terms of working with allies, what is the significance of strengthening the Quad? [The Quad is a grouping of the U.S., Japan, Australia and India.] India, for instance, has been enormously helpful to Russia during the Ukraine war by buying its oil.

The Quad, along with AUKUS [the grouping of the U.S., Australia and the UK], and the alliance between the U.S, Japan and Korea are some of the most significant allied and partner accomplishments of the Biden administration.

The Quad had never really met at the leader level until the Biden administration. Now it’s an actual institution rather than just the name you give to a certain kind of meeting. It’s taking on tasks, has dedicated staff in each country, is putting real capital behind some of its projects, and is increasingly thinking about areas relevant for security competition in Asia. 

Quad states have their own interests on other issues, including related to Russia. As you mentioned, India is a purchaser of Russian oil. But at the same time, with Asia, I see enormous. commonality of perspective and purpose.

If you want to know whether the Quad matters, just ask Beijing, because I don’t think that they find it irrelevant. They think it’s a notable development that they find a little bit concerning.

What about AUKUS? The skeptical view is that, OK, Australia will build some submarines. Is it more significant than that?

AUKUS is a lot more than Australia buying a few submarines. Around 10 years ago, the tilt of Australia when it came to the competition between the U.S. and China was that Australia was up for grabs. There was a sense that it might even tilt away from the United States and be more neutral. 

That is no longer the case. AUKUS was a political bet supported by both parties that Australia’s future was better aligned with the United States. AUKUS is as much a political question as it is a military question. 

AUKUS also created the space for the U.S. and Australia to work together in other areas, not just on submarines but on other advanced capabilities which are relevant, including asymmetric capabilities relevant for Australia’s security. We saw the PRC exercise in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. It looked like they were doing an exercise that included land-attack capable vessels.That’s a clear signal to Australia.

Just today, I saw a piece of propaganda from the PRC side which indicated that it was laughing about Australia’s anxieties about the exercises in the Tasman Sea, and said that the real Chinese goal was essentially to rebuild [Japan’s World War II] Co-Prosperity Sphere.

It said the joke was, don’t draw a nine-dash line. Do a solid line that includes all of Australia, Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea. That’s why Australia should be concerned. [The nine-dash line on Chinese maps is a claim of territory that includes Taiwan and the South China Sea.]

What’s the significance of Japan growing closer to South Korea and the Philippines? 

It’s incredibly important. In Asia, the U.S. has an allied hub-and-spoke network; the U.S. is the hub with many spokes. People have talked for over a decade of putting a so-called tire on the hub and spokes, connecting all the spokes. 

The phrase that the Biden administration used at the Pentagon, State Department and the White House was a ‘latticework,’ which I always found kind of a cumbersome phrase. The idea was that you’re networking your allies and partners together to create greater capability.

Japan has an exceptionally capable military in the Indo-Pacific. It has a very large navy and its greater association with the ROK is very important for deterrence. Its greater association with the Philippines is likewise very important for deterrence, including for Taiwan-related scenarios. 

Now to the hobbling part. I’m essentially referring to the effort to constrain or restrain Chinese efforts to catch up to the U.S. technologically, particularly with chips. How has that gone? You hear about DeepSeek [the highly publicized Chinese AI large language model] and about Huawei building AI chips.

Competition is more than just the export control or outbound investment part of our policy toolkit. Competition is also about contesting standards at multilateral institutions or pushing back on certain PRC approaches in the UN. It is bigger than economics and technology, though it is also steps to support American economic and technological competitiveness that don’t necessarily ‘hobble’ the PRC.

When you look at the export controls, the argument that I would make is that DeepSeek and others are probably benefiting from the last gasps of a more permissive export control regime. DeepSeek was able to buy a lot of U.S. chips that hadn’t been controlled until 2023. The initial controls were in 2022. They were able to take advantage of controls that perhaps were not adequately enforced at the Department of Commerce.

They were able to also be extremely innovative, which they deserve credit for. But had the U.S. taken a more forceful approach to export controls earlier, and been more effective on implementation, it would have been much harder for DeepSeek to achieve what it did. 

But let’s put a pin in that because DeepSeek is the past. Let’s think about the future. To me, there are two schools of thought on DeepSeek. There are the DeepSeek deniers, people who say it doesn’t matter, they just stole their way there. And there are DeepSeek hypers who think this is the most important thing in the world and that all export controls are futile.

To me, the truth is somewhere in the middle between the hypers and deniers. If you believe, as the CEO of DeepSeek does, that the future of agentic AI, or ASI (artificial super intelligence) requires significant increases in compute — orders of magnitude more — maybe there is still a computer moat. Maybe what DeepSeek did was catch up in the commodity LLM [Large Language Model] space. But the next level of the game might be so demanding on compute that you can’t steal your way to the frontier. 

[When technologists talk about ‘compute,’ it’s shorthand for ‘computing power.’]

Then you can’t ultimately bypass what is essentially a bottleneck in AI — that you need vast quantities of compute. If that’s true, then the U.S. export control approach should work if it’s tightened and better enforced. 

If that’s false, then the PRC will be able to commodify LLMs and the U.S. will spend hundreds of billions of dollars as the first mover in an area where they’ll probably lose the advantage. My ultimate take is that many interesting applications will require an order of magnitude or two more compute, and that will provide further disadvantage for China.

I had an interview with [Biden administration technology chief] Jason Matheny who said the goal basically was to push Chinese AI companies to use American cloud computing.

That would be another thing that could happen here. If you have the export controls but you leave open cloud computing so they can train models on the American cloud, then you have a better sense of what China’s up to. And it is true that the PRC has used American cloud companies to do some of their training.

One more on the Biden team. Why did we never see the FBI report on the spy balloon?

I was deeply involved in handling the spy balloon incident. Even before it was shot down, we knew a lot about it, and we put out almost everything we knew about the balloon, including information that was so on the edge there was concern about compromising sources and methods.

We did so in the interest of democratic transparency and because we wanted people to know that we weren’t being alarmist about this so-called weather balloon. It was in fact an espionage platform. It was great that the thing was shot down over water because it allowed for greater exploitation and collection of this capability. 

There are multiple problems with the spheres-of-influence logic in the current era. When you completely discount the interests of allies and partners in the division of spheres, they have less interest in being on your team.

Being able to exploit pieces that were on the floor, in 40 feet of water off the coast, rather than have them smashed across hundreds of kilometers of farmland, had advantages for us. 

Officials went to the Hill, briefed everyone, and testified about what we found. ‘The report’ is sort of a misnomer. There were multiple reports. There were things we learned that are probably better kept under wraps for the purpose of American competitiveness. 

If you had access to the report (as a journalist) so would the PRC.

But they knew what they had on their platform.

There are reasons why you’d want to say, ‘Hey, maybe there’s things we’ve learned that we want to keep to ourselves.’

Switching to Trump: If you’re sitting in Taipei, how should you interpret what Trump is doing on Russia and Ukraine?

It’s big power diplomacy, ‘divide the world up into spheres’ kind of diplomacy. But what he’s doing also seems to vary from week to week.

I think his staff wants to drive this in a productive direction. They want to find a way to create peace, have America invest in Ukraine’s economic future, and be able to help the Russians see a path to reducing dependence on China over time, and be more of a multipolar player like India rather than a protectorate of China, a junior partner like it is now. 

That’s the charitable view of what they’re trying to do. Whether they can get there or not is really hard to say.

It’s also possible that Ukraine will be thrown under the bus. That’s where Taiwan should be concerned. There’s the possibility that Taiwan could receive similar transactional treatment as a chip in a larger bargain, which wouldn’t be to Taiwan’s interests. 

There are multiple problems with the spheres-of-influence logic in the current era. When you completely discount the interests of allies and partners in the division of spheres, they have less interest in being on your team. We talked about export controls earlier. There’s no successful export control regime without allies and partners being a part of it. 

Taiwan is concerned, but Taiwan also has some leverage. They are the world’s leader in semiconductor technology, and the U.S. government wants more Taiwanese investment in the United States. So, they have cards that they can play to try to get an outcome that’s favorable to them. 

In some ways that gives them more advantage than Ukraine has. Its largest card is moral authority, which it can play to rally the West. But it doesn’t have the industrial-choke-point card Taiwan has.

I had an interview with Trump’s former national security adviser, Robert O’Brien who talked to me about a strategy that’s gotten a lot of attention recently, the so-called ‘reverse Kissinger’. He said he and his deputy, Matt Pottinger, had talked with the Russians about China’s long-term desire to get back chunks of China that the czars had taken. What’s your view of the ability of the U.S to peel Russia away from China and use Russia against China?

There’s a lot of complexity to that question. On the one hand, China and Russia have a very close relationship because they’re both dissidents against the U.S.-led order. They have increasingly tied themselves together since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But that trajectory has been clear since the mid-1990s, with the U.S. intervention in the Balkans.

When you look at all that, the deck is stacked against us when it comes to being able to divide these two. But it’s wise to still try. The question is, can you do that in a way that doesn’t undermine the U.S. geopolitical position? 

What’s concerning about the current approach is that we may be dividing ourselves from Europe. If the West ends up divided and this authoritarian bloc ends up united despite our best efforts, we are, on net, in a worse competitive position.

Although I’m deeply skeptical in the near term that you could ever pull Russia away from China, it’s possible that if this effort is sustained — and this depends on the outcome on Ukraine and whether or not the U.S. has fully lifted sanctions on Russia — you could imagine that over some period of time, maybe five to six years, the approach could make Russia more of a pivot player.

The Chinese are deeply afraid of U.S. engagement with Russia. They always have been. They have more confidence in our ability to split them. That’s also because they don’t trust the Russians and the Russians don’t love being the junior partner of the Chinese. Putin might be willing to accept it, but many others don’t like that. 

The last thing I’ll say is the reason that the ‘reverse Kissinger’ model doesn’t work is because Kissinger didn’t engineer the split. The split was already there. He simply exploited it. There’s not a split right now to exploit.

So, what we’re talking about is creating the conditions down the road to maybe one day force a split that we can then take advantage of. But is that worth alienating Europe for? Is that worth throwing Ukraine under the bus? Is that worth emboldening China in East Asia? Probably not. There may be a kernel of a good idea here, but everything is in the implementation.

What do you think of the movement which has been backed by some of Trump’s people, to remove Permanent Normal Trading Relations from China. [As part of the U.S. deal with China to join the World Trade Organization in 2001, the U.S. ended its annual review of so-called PNTR, or what was then called Most Favored Nation, for China and to award China the same tariff treatment as other WTO members.]

The biggest way in which China benefited from MFN was predictability, so that American investors could put their capital in, get their factories on the ground without having to worry that somehow the tariff rate would change and they’d be punished. 

Removing MFN could be one way to diversify supply chains out of China [because tariff certainty would end], but it could also be extremely disruptive and inflationary if done immediately. I think creating questions about the endurance of MFN is appropriate given the risk that the U.S. faces. But you’ve got to do it the right way.

Trump hasn’t threatened removing MFN, but he has increased tariffs now with more to come.

Here’s a simple thought experiment. Is the concentration of 35 percent of global manufacturing in China — moving to 50 percent — good for the world and good for the United States? If you answer that over-concentration in one country is bad, then you want diversification. Is the market accurately capturing that risk? The answer is no.

So, tariff policy is a way of injecting further risk. In a certain sense it’s correcting a market failure. When that market failure is corrected, more companies will have to rethink their supply chains. That could in time reduce China’s over concentration in manufacturing.

The Trump tariffs in the first term did not fundamentally reverse China’s high share of global manufacturing, although it could have been higher without those tariffs. And we did see the emergence of ‘China-plus-one’ supply chain networks.

With further uncertainty in the relationship, it’s quite possible that companies will have to think a lot more seriously about moving out of China. That’s not a terrible outcome for the developing world, which deserves a chance to grow. Manufacturing is not an available path to them right now because the over-concentration in China means that Mexico or Nigeria or Brazil or India can’t get into the game.

So, you think there’s value in Trump’s threats? 

There’s value in raising tariffs on China. And the Biden administration did that too. Now, as in all things, the question is how? What’s the practical implementation? But in principle, the idea that we should put tariffs on Chinese goods is sound. 

A more careful and adjusted approach to tariffs would be the right approach. But that takes time, is subject to lobbying, and may never happen. A blunt approach can happen quickly, but it brings a lot more costs. The Trump administration may have chosen this approach because they want to move quickly towards negotiation, towards an eventual de-escalation.

As Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said, sometimes you can increase tariffs to decrease tariffs.

On the other hand, a more curated, careful approach has a million advantages over this if your goal were to increase American economic competitiveness. But the main disadvantage is it’s harder to do and it takes more time. 

A steady state rather than an end state should be the goal of U.S.-China policy. An end state would be the overthrow of the Communist Party, the collapse of China, and some kind of grand bargain. None of that is in the cards or even desirable. 

Would I prefer a more tailored, careful and nuanced approach? One hundred percent. But I can also see why a government hoping to move fast in negotiation with China would take a blunter approach.

What’s your view on the role of diplomacy when it comes to China?

It’s possible for us to compete and manage competition simultaneously. What that turns on is high-level diplomacy to explain to the PRC what you’re doing, and just as importantly what you’re not doing. The Biden export control policy wasn’t intended to sabotage China’s economy, but it did have certain goals. Being able to credibly signal the limits of your competitive approach can be valuable in limiting escalation. This is especially important in a world where President Xi may not have that many information channels.

You need to find ways to think about face, off-ramps, clearing up misperception, clearing up miscommunication, and ensuring that their vision of the U.S. is marginally less dark. If we can stabilize the U.S.-China relationship at a higher competitive threshold and keep it from boiling over, that’s a worthwhile goal.

A steady state rather than an end state should be the goal of U.S.-China policy. An end state would be the overthrow of the Communist Party, the collapse of China, and some kind of grand bargain. None of that is in the cards or even desirable. A steady state is the best you can hope for. The odds of achieving that are not necessarily all that high all the time. It’s very challenging, but it is the best way forward.

---