America’s China Strategy, With Rush Doshi

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is America's China Strategy.

With me to discuss how the United States should navigate its geopolitical rivalry with China is Rush Doshi. Rush is a C.V. Starr Senior Fellow for Asia studies and director of the China Strategy Initiative here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before joining CFR in April, Rush was deputy senior director for China and Taiwan on the staff of the National Security Council where he helped manage the NSC's first China Directorate. Rush is the author of The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, which was published in 2021 and named the winner of the Edgar S. Furniss Book Award, which recognizes an author's first book in English that makes an exceptional contribution to the understanding of international, national, or human security. Rush, thank you for joining me.

DOSHI:
Thank you, Jim.

LINDSAY:
And congratulations on the Furniss Award. Quite an accomplishment.

DOSHI:
Thank you.

LINDSAY:
Let's begin with the big picture. Seemingly everyone agrees that we have entered an era of geopolitical rivalry with the main contestants being China and the United States. So what's driving the competition?

DOSHI:
Well, thanks, Jim, and it's great to be on the podcast. Let me just start by saying that I think this is an intense rivalry that has a lot of dimensions to it. On the one hand, it's driven by the fact that there are structural tensions, that is China's growing more powerful relative to the United States. That creates rather some inevitable tension. There's another element too. There's an ideological gap between the U.S. and China that's growing. That is the U.S. and China just don't see the world the exact same way.

These are some of the drivers. There's many, many others. But look at the structural one, for example. When we look at that shrinking power gap between the U.S. and China, there's an economic component, there's a tech component, there's a military component. And so ultimately, all these factors are making the competition more intense.

And fundamentally, I think I would probably characterize a few attributes of this competition. The first is that I think China probably seeks to displace the United States as the world's leading state. Now that's a controversial assumption. It's one that I happen to believe in and make the case that that's in fact ongoing, but that's a first foundational assumption. I think a second point you could think about making with respect to this competition is that it's global. It's not just regional, and it spans just about every regional and functional policy domain around the world. That is the military domain, the economic domain, tech, politics, et cetera. And finally, I think it's important to keep in mind that China's not going anywhere. It's going to be here for the foreseeable future, and that means even as this competition intensifies, U.S. and China will have to find some kind of way to live alongside each other.

LINDSAY:
There's a lot there. I want to focus on an issue that's gained a lot of attention, and it's the idea popularized by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison about the existence of a Thucydides trap. Obviously reference to the historian Thucydides and his great history of the Peloponnesian War where Sparta was threatened by the rise of Athenian power. To what extent do you think we are in a Thucydides trap with a high probability of conflict?

DOSHI:
It's an important question and certainly a frame that the Chinese have spoken a lot about too. You've seen President Xi reference Graham Allison's book and also specifically the Thucydides trap publicly many times over the last several years since that book came out. I think of the Thucydides trap less as a firm template for U.S.-China relations and more as an example of the kind of structural forces that are putting pressure on the relationship.

Whenever you have one power rapidly gaining strength in the international system relative to many others, including the leading hegemon, there are going to be questions about what that power is going to be used for. And I think some of the problem here is that there's real questions about China's intentions. That doesn't take away from the fact that there are actual disagreements between the U.S. and China on economic issues, technology issues, values issues, and many, many other issues given their separate systems. So I think the Thucydides trap can function as a way of identifying some of the forces that are at play here rather than being a straitjacket for how we look at the relationship.

LINDSAY:
So let me ask you about another concept that's gained a lot of currency recently, Rush, and that is a notion of a "peak China." The idea that yes, China over the last thirty years has grown tremendously, but now it's plateaued, it's flattened out, and the notion that China is going to gain sufficient power to surpass the United States is something that's not going to come to fruition. And that in of itself could be quite dangerous as China believes it has to act before it goes into a downward slope. How do you assess those arguments about peak China?

DOSHI:
These have been really important arguments in the debate and they're worth discussing, and I think anybody who easily dismisses them or accepts them probably is missing part of the story. There's a lot of complexity here. But I think I should give a shout-out to Hal Brands and Mike Beckley for really helping bring this concept into the mainstream so that we can debate it, and their book is really excellent and I recommend it.

I think you can divide the peak China question into two parts. The first is objective, is China actually peaking? And the second is perceptual, does China think that it's peaking? So, let's talk about the first one objectively. I mean, a big part of the peak China discourse is the idea that China faces major demographic challenges and these challenges are going to slow it down as time goes on. And it's true. China is a fast aging society with the below replacement fertility rate. That should pose some problems.

LINDSAY:
Its population is shrinking.

DOSHI:
Its population began shrinking now for very first time in the past calendar year. It's a pretty big deal. At the same time though, China has made this enormous bet on automation and on technology being able to propel growth forward. And if you look at electric vehicles, an industry where China now is maybe the leader globally, and you look at any of the factories that China has to mass produce these EVs, you see that there's actually not a lot of human labor involved. They're heavily automated, and I think that's largely a bet that China can somehow circumvent or rather bypass these demographic challenges by focusing on capital. Now, they may be wrong about that. It might be that the biggest challenge for China isn't going to be that they're peaking in absolute terms or even in relative terms, but rather that they're automating so fast it's not clear what everybody else is going to do.

There were some analysis from the Financial Times I think not that long ago, which suggested that China's investments in industrial robots outstripped every other major economy by multiple factors, by three or fourfold in some cases, tenfold in other cases. That's a pretty significant data point. So objectively speaking, is China peaking? I think it's too early to say given how competitive they are in some sectors, but maybe.

Second though is the perceptual question. Does China think that it's peaking? And here I think we have a lot more confidence that the answer to that question is no. Now, Xi Jinping has this phrase, and I previously thought a lot about it, written about it, it's called "great changes unseen in a century" or "百年未有的大变局" And that phrase is really interesting because it's an assertion, in my opinion, of confidence in China's trajectory. And you see that phrase continuing to appear again and again. And if you're Xi Jinping and you look at the current day, you probably think that you're doing okay. We may disagree, but you probably think you're doing okay. You see China leading in key sectors. You see it gaining market share. You think you're 35 percent of global manufacturing. You think your military is modernizing at a rapid pace, and you think you've been able to basically unite the party under your leadership for better or for worse. You think you've been able to achieve it. You probably don't look at that situation and look at your last ten years and say, "Wow, I've left the country worse off."

And I would say that their system, it's going to be really hard in that system to believe that you're peaking. That's a politically dangerous thing to believe. So there are incentives within the system not to believe it. And that all leads to behavior. I'm not sure that we can assume a China that is peaking objectively and certainly they don't believe they're peaking perceptually is going to act more dangerously than a China that's already acting as if it's ascending. That may be even more dangerous ultimately than peak China.

LINDSAY:
Just to pick up on that point about perception, Rush, it seems to me that what's factoring into Chinese perceptions is also the belief that the West and particularly the United States is in decline, perhaps in a terminal decline. Or am I missing something from the debates coming out of Beijing?

DOSHI:
No. Jim, you are totally right, and actually I should have spoken more to that component of this "great changes unseen in a century" phrase. A big part of it is its perception of American power. I think if you look back, if I could just take a second to take us through an interesting detour here, you look back since the end of the Cold War, and I think the biggest variables shaping Chinese grand strategy are the perception of American power and the perception of American threat.

And basically during the Cold War, the perception of American power, it was pretty high, but the threat was low, so they weren't too worried about it. But after the Cold War ended, they still thought America was very powerful, but they thought it was a lot more threatening because of Tiananmen Square and the Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

LINDSAY:
But we're a challenge to Chinese Communist Party rule.

DOSHI:
That's what they thought. And we didn't exactly disabuse them of that notion, even as we were trying to reassure them in the '90s by taking an approach that brought them into institutions and put them into WTO and worked with them on military—

LINDSAY:
And our politicians, political leaders gave speeches saying, "We're bringing China into the WTO because that is going to undermine the Chinese Communist Party and also the internet and the rest."

DOSHI:
So during that period, and I think you could argue they could have discounted some of that rhetoric too because there's lots of reassuring things that were being done. Today you have less reassuring rhetoric and you have action that they wouldn't find reassuring. At least back then, you had action that was pretty reassuring, but they still thought we were threatening.

Then you get to the financial crisis and they changed their perception of American power. They think the U.S. is in decline. So in that earlier phase right after the Cold War, they were blunting us because they had to find a way to non-assertively challenge the foundations of American order. They had to do it non-assertively because they were weaker. But after the financial crisis, they could be more assertive. And in fact, they changed their grand strategy from hiding capabilities and biding time or 韬光养晦 to actively accomplishing something.

LINDSAY:
Deng Xiaoping's phrase.

DOSHI:
Deng Xiaoping's phrase to 积极有所作为 which was Hu Jintao's corollary to the Deng Xiaoping doctrine, you could argue. And he put them in a dialectical relationship. The bottom line is the key change for that strategy was the perception of American power. And in that new phase of actively accomplishing something, they were way more assertive regionally.

And now we get to the present day. Now we get to the phrase, "great changes unseen in a century," which emerges in 2017 at a time when they think populism is weakening the West and hollowing it out, and they think that America basically isn't up to global competition. They're selling out its allies, et cetera. And "great changes unseen in a century" is a bet that the great change in the century right now is a global order is up for grabs because of the power shift and because technology is changing the game, the U.S. is in decline and this is China's moment.

Now, people push back. They say, "Rush, you're wrong about that. There's lots of risks in that concept too," and that's true. They also think the great changes bring significant risks. But here's the key point, Jim, the risks come from the opportunity, that is the risks are a product of American decline, a declining hegemon they think will lash out on the way down.

LINDSAY:
Well, let's talk a little bit about the Chinese grand strategy, and I'm struck with your book The Long Game that your subtitle was "China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order." And I focus on that because I have been in a lot of meetings and I believe you've been in even more meetings in which the Chinese insist they have no such intention, that they want to peacefully coexist, and it is American belligerence and aggression that is creating problems. In essence, Washington is unwilling to give up its dreams of primacy in hegemony. So what do you see as the Chinese grand strategy?

DOSHI:
Right. In these different phases, and I focus on the word order because I'm not suggesting in the book that it's just purely positional. There's a positional element here, but they really don't like the elements of the order that currently exist. So when they were blunting us in the 1990s and early 2000s, that's what I call the period associated with hiding capabilities and biding time after Deng Xiaoping, what they were trying to do is find a way to asymmetrically challenge us militarily. They were trying to find a way to join the institutions we were creating in Asia, but undermine them so they're not so dangerous. They don't become an Asian NATO, which is what they were worried about, not just today, but thirty years ago.

And then economically, they were looking for ways for us to essentially tie our hands behind our own back with the economic leverage we have. They were concerned about us raising tariffs on China, and they really did see mostly nation status or permanent normal trading relations and WTO accession as a way of constraining us. So that was the blunting part. Then we get to the building part after the global financial crisis. And building was not just about undermining American order or weakening some of the foundations, but building the foundations for China's own order in the Indo-Pacific.

And so militarily, it's not about asymmetrically targeting us. It's about building your own navy that can go out and reach out and touch others. Economically, it's not just about undermining our ability to sanction or tariff them. It's about using sanctions and tariffs in your own right or using the Belt and Road to create influence over others. And then at the political level, it's not just about joining our institutions and slowing them down, it's about building your own institutions.

Order, you could argue, and there's lots of ways to define that, it's probably some combination of coercive power, consent where you think, okay, this is good for me, and legitimacy where you think, okay, this order is right. And they're working on all three of those undermining our aspects and building back. That's natural. That brings us to the global question.

Today I think this building strategy is going global as part of this third phase associated with the "great changes unseen in the century" concept. And as part of the global expansion phase, they're thinking more about a global PLA. They want overseas global bases. Economically, they're thinking about what they call dual circulation, which is a phrase they use to define a system where they're less dependent on the world and the world is a bit more dependent on their supply chains. And Xi Jinping spoke about it. It's in 求是 it's a journal article in China, a journal rather, in 2021. He goes into great detail. In technology they want to achieve leapfrog development. They want to get ahead of the United States in every key technology sector.

We just saw that recently in EVs, but they're looking at that in multiple places. And they have a phrase now associated with it, which is the "new quality productive forces," but it's an older idea. They had an earlier phrase called 赶超美国 which was to "catch up and surpass America." And then politically, they want to reset the global norm. A lot of the current system has liberal assumptions built into it. They'd like it to be agnostic or at the very least, a bit more favorably inclined towards authoritarian systems. So this is where they want get in terms of global grand strategy, and they're taking steps to build global order that looks like that. And I think realistically that's going to be a partial hegemony over parts of the world, not any total hegemony, but that's what they're aiming for.

LINDSAY:
Rush, let's talk about where we are today, and I would put our discussion against the backdrop of the meeting that took place between President Joe Biden and Chairman Xi on the margins of the APEC leaders meeting in San Francisco last November. That was a meeting I believe you helped staff. The description at the time was this was a meeting designed to put a floor under U.S.-China competition. And we're now more than eight months out. Did we in fact succeed in establishing a floor and is the floor holding?

DOSHI:
The Woodside meeting was a really big deal. It was only the second time that President Biden and President Xi really met for any extended period face-to-face in this administration. And what was interesting is that that meeting was really what I would call part of the third phase of U.S.-China relations in the Biden administration.

The first phase began with the inauguration. China thought the U.S. was in a hurtling decline as we discussed earlier. And the Biden approach was really to push back on some of that and say, "No, we're not in hurtling decline. We're pretty committed to investing in our strengths, working with our allies and partners." And there was probably a lot of tension associated with the fact that both sides were pushing on each other and you had a lot of acrimony.

LINDSAY:
We saw that in Anchorage where Secretary Blinken met with counterparts and my understand there was a frank and candid exchange of views.

DOSHI:
There was a big public flare up at Anchorage. Privately, the rest of the meeting was quite productive, but publicly, there was a lot of this animosity and that was part of this first phase. Then there was a second phase. China supported essentially Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Speaker Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan. This second phase was even worse than the first phase. And there was a meeting between President Biden and President Xi in Indonesia, in Bali, and that meeting took some of the tension out. But then this Chinese balloon flew over the United States and was shot down, and we were right back to no communication, really just a low point in relations.

But then there was a third phase. And what's interesting to me and maybe the most important part I think it directly answers your question is that the U.S. increased the number of competitive steps it was taking, but also was able to stabilize the relationship. So the third phase is simultaneously the best U.S.-China relations had been, and also the most the U.S. has done to improve its competitive position and advance its interests simultaneously. So that's a paradox. How did that happen? And I think Woodside is part of the answer. Before Woodside, there were a series of meetings. First, the national security advisor went to Vienna, met with Director Wang Yi. That set up a series of high-level exchanges, cabinet-level meetings in both directions. And all that led to the Woodside summit.

And what you were seeing as part of American diplomacy was a commitment to managing competition, which isn't a slogan. It's an actual set of practices that are fundamental and elemental in diplomacy. It's explain what you're doing, explain what you're not doing, give the other side face, find off-ramps, meet regularly. The meetings aren't an end goal. The purpose is not to have a meeting for the sake of a meeting, and therefore you can't really accomplish anything by threatening to cancel the meeting. Some people say, well, the Biden team would back down if the meeting was going to be canceled. Well, that's not true. The purpose of the meeting is to help better explain what is happening in the relationship to each other so that the competition that is intensifying doesn't fundamentally blow up the entire relationship.

LINDSAY:
But the Chinese don't seem eager to want to explain what they're doing.

DOSHI:
Well, it's funny, I think these meetings are super long, and it's not as if just the U.S. side talks. If anything, their set of talking points on the Chinese side sometimes is even longer. There is a desire to explain, and maybe the explanations aren't satisfactory, but part of explanation isn't, "Hey, look at me, I'm right." Part of the explanation is, "Hey, what I've done could have been worse. I could have gone further."

And if you look at the U.S. approach, take economic and technology actions, the 301 four-year review process, it could have led to even more tariffs. It didn't because this was tailored. The export controls on semiconductors could have been broader. Instead, they affect about 1 percent of chips. You look at other—

LINDSAY:
Oh, I understand how the U.S. side is trying to explain to China-

DOSHI:
Sure.

LINDSAY:
...its rationale and its reasoning, and we've had Jake Sullivan talk in terms of export controls about small yard with high fences. I understand that, but I'm not persuaded, Rush, that Beijing is as eager to want to talk about what it's doing. Yes, it will tell us its red lines on Taiwan and Tibet and Xinjiang.

But for example, in terms of its nuclear buildup, the Chinese seem very reluctant to engage in conversations with the United States about what it is doing and indeed recently canceled meeting. I'm wondering if China really is buying into this notion that we need to have guardrails. I've heard it described as the Chinese aren't interested in putting guardrails on roads they didn't build.

DOSHI:
I mean, they're not as interested in guardrails. And I think your question captures something very important, which is that there's an element of this, which is bilateral. There are sensitive areas where there can be mutual reassurance and they have things to say which are valuable and helpful. And we can get into some of that later. But there's also a unilateral element, which is that they have a dark view of the United States. It can always get darker, and they can take more steps that be disastrous over the long run if they saw everything that we were doing from the worst possible light.

So there's a value in some degree of taking steps that are deterrent. Obviously when it comes to Taiwan, to South China Sea, there's a value in taking steps that safeguard American national interest. And there's a value, even if it's unilateral at times, in communicating what we are and aren't doing. And when we do that well, it creates more space to take additional competitive steps without blowing up the relationship. So if you think about it as there's a certain threshold before things go completely off the rails, this raises the threshold which allows for there to be more competition, quite frankly, including especially what we want to do. That's really what this is about.

I mean, I think it's fair to say, "Hey, this diplomacy doesn't necessarily solve fundamental issues between the two sides." And that's true. They're not getting us to stop taking our economic and technology actions. They're not necessarily going to change what they're doing. What's changing is perception, and we're managing each other's perception. And I think if you can get to a point where both sides fundamentally believe that this is not an existential competition, that this is a positional competition, sure, but not an existential one, the CCP is not going to fall out of power, we're not trying to destroy their economy, it creates stability, which, again, is healthy because the alternative is a rule—

LINDSAY:
We get peaceful coexistence.

DOSHI:
Well, they would call peaceful coexistence, and they like that term because it comes from the Cold War. I think our aim is not peaceful coexistence per se. It's really living alongside each other, but in a way that's favorable for American interests. And that's why I think for the U.S., the end goal isn't what kind of government China has, it's not what kind of relationship we have.

LINDSAY:
Well, let me ask you about that, Rush, because it seems to me that that is the point of contention among people who are contributing to the debate over U.S. strategy toward China. So for example, you have Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher recently with a piece in Foreign Affairs, which if I read it correctly, says the United States should try to win this competition. And I'm not sure what winning means in this context. That doesn't create dynamics that we wouldn't want to avoid. So how do you assess this question of what the goal actually should be? I mean, again, is it trying to achieve something in a positive sense, winning? Is it more about a negative strategy sense preventing certain things? Some mix of the two?

DOSHI:
What I would say here is first, that piece in Foreign Affairs was very impactful. It really changed the debate. And Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher have made major contributions to American-China policy. They've helped turn the ship on key issues. And so in many ways, this disagreement is interesting, but I also think what's more important is the common ground, which I'll turn to in a moment.

But let's talk about the end state question. I think their argument was that essentially the end state is victory. But again, as you noted, Jim, it's not clear what exactly victory means. Is it the collapse of the CCP? It's not clear if that's what they're thinking about.

LINDSAY:
Or if that would even be in America's interest.

DOSHI:
Right. And you could argue that there are certain challenges that would be associated with the collapse of the CCP too. And fundamentally, I would say that American strategy has always gone off the rails when it was focused on what kind of China we want to have, what kind of relationship we want to have with China.
Let me unpack that. We focus on what kind of China we want to have or what kind of government we want to have in China to be more precise. That led us under engagement at times to think that we could shape internal politics in China, empower reformers, and somehow things would be better. So the same end goal—

LINDSAY:
You're going to tell me we don't have a good track record in doing that?

DOSHI:
It turns out that that didn't work too well, Jim. And so I think at the end of the day, when you make your policy about that as your end goal, you can make bad decisions or decisions that aren't grounded in facts. And actually they'd be the first to criticize the era of engagement. But if you're criticizing the era of engagement, you've got to start with the end goal, which is the same end goal in many ways that I think they would have.

Then you get to the other side of the ledger. Okay, if it's not about what kind of government is in charge in China, what if it's about the relationship we want with China? Well, that's also problematic. Because if you just focus on whether we have stability, you're ignoring the question of American interests. The real question for us is how do we advance American interests without triggering conflict that we don't want to get into? And that's where I think the end goals for American policy should be defined affirmatively in terms of our interests.

We want an Indo-Pacific free from hegemony. That's been a long-standing American interest, you could argue, for almost two centuries. We want to make sure that America leads in economics and technologies, certainly in the frontier technologies that will define our prosperity. We want to make sure that the broader regional architecture is conducive to democracy flourishing. It doesn't have to always be defined by a democracy flourishing.

LINDSAY:
But Rush, that sounds like a recipe for continued Chinese-U.S. hostility and rivalry, because I can't imagine Beijing would want to accept any of those three American interests you just laid out. I mean, let's just take the issue of freedom of navigation. Yes, that has been a core principle of U.S. foreign policy for two centuries, and we have a Navy designed to be able to do that. But as you know, the Chinese have declared the South China Sea essentially their own lake and are aggressively militarizing it despite promising President Barack Obama that they wouldn't, designed in a way to push the United States out of the region. How do you square that circle?

DOSHI:
Well, I think if I could rephrase your argument, what you're saying is that American interests and Chinese interests are in conflict, and I agree with that. My point isn't that the end game is to resolve all sources of those conflicts. It's to manage that conflict without sacrificing the American interest.

And so yes, you could avoid the conflict by basically giving up on certain key aspects of American interest. You could say, who cares if we lead in technology or EVs or whatever? We're not going to put tariffs in place. That would create more harmony, so to speak. But in effect, that wouldn't really address American interest.

LINDSAY:
Oh no, I agree with you. I just think those conflicts are going to be very difficult to keep contained because they are core interests and they are opposed; they're in conflict.

DOSHI:
So the question is, as both sides pursue their interests, can you manage the competition? And that's why I encourage in my response to the Foreign Affairs piece you mentioned earlier that managing competition is exactly about how you do that. It is essentially a set of actions or processes that are helpful in allowing you to prosecute your interests, but at the same time preventing things from going off the rails. That is a fragile tenuous position at any time, but it's the only way forward.

And let's think about a possible alternative approach. You could say, look, your interests are in conflict. Let's have an end game. That's the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party. Well, that turns the competition into something much more existential. Now, I should be fair, it's not clear to me that that's what their Foreign Affairs piece was arguing. It may or may not be depending on your reading of it, but I think you and I could basically—

LINDSAY:
The Chinese read it that way.

DOSHI:
Certainly right that they read it that way. And I think that radicalizes the competition. It makes it a lot more existential. Differences of interest are one thing, but you live a rather—

LINDSAY:
Survival is different.

DOSHI:
Survival is different. Rather, the idea of "I live, you die" is a fundamentally different question, and it means that there's no incentive for restraint. So the idea here is great powers are going to have tensions. That's historic. It's been there forever. And historically, the way to manage that was through a series of diplomatic efforts that did the things that I mentioned earlier, common sense how you do diplomacy. And that's I think where we should try to go. And it worked in the last year and a half.

I mean, there was a lot more U.S. competitive action, and yet the relationship didn't totally explode. And you could argue way more competitive action in that third phase than in the first two combined. So that's a pretty unique way to prosecute your interests. And if you can sustain it, and it's hard to do, then maybe you can avoid this becoming a hot war.

LINDSAY:
I should note that this question of what U.S. policy toward China should seek to achieve is a very complicated one. And I want to give you credit during the launch of your China Strategy Initiative, you chaired a panel that included among others Matt Pottinger, Bonny Lin, and Elbridge Colby, where you went and discussed these. So I would just flag that for listeners—

DOSHI:
If I could on that point actually, you raised something really interesting, it goes to show that it's not really a partisan debate on these questions. Even if you looked at that panel we had at the launch of the initiative, I don't want to characterize their perspectives too strongly and let them do that, but I think you heard Matt basically say, "We should pursue winning the competition, which might mean China attenuates," essentially. And you saw Bridge saying, "No, we wanted to taunt from a position of strength." So they're both former Trump appointees. They have different views at the end game of competition. So I think what that shows is, again, this is a subject where the debates don't run across the usual lines. They're much more complicated than that.

LINDSAY:
Because they are big questions and they have difficult answers. But I want to talk actually about your China Strategy Initiative, which you launched. What are you seeking to doing? How are you going to go about doing it?

DOSHI:
Well, thanks, Jim. And you know this better than I do. CFR has this history over a hundred years of convening Americans across political parties, across geographies, across industries to answer the important foreign policy challenges of the moment. That happened in the '30s, ahead of World War II. It happened in the '40s during World War II. It happened in the '50s in the early Cold War. And it needs to happen now on China.

And as you and I just discussed, this is a big challenging issue and there's not really a neat and clear set of answers to some of these big strategic questions. Our initiative is going to endeavor to convene Americans to basically answer four questions that go to the heart of any sustainable China strategy, and I'll quickly walk through them.

The first is, what is China thinking? That's an important part for any sustainable strategy. And we're going to launch an open source observatory to mass acquire, digitize, and translate at scale Chinese documents. The second question is, what is China doing around the world? We're launching a new project, China 360, that basically tries to understand what China is doing in different regions, in different functional policy domains, and also how the rest of the world is responding. And that draws on all the expertise we have across CFR. We're blessed to have people who study just about every region and just about every policy issue and can think about China in their neck of the woods. The third question is, how should the United States compete? And actually, this goes back to our discussion about this foreign affairs debate. There might've been some differences of opinion on the end goal of U.S.-China policy, but I was struck by how there was a lot of agreement on what the U.S. needs to do to compete.

LINDSAY:
And what are those things?

DOSHI:
The U.S. needs to figure out how to fix its defense industrial base, how do we do industrial policy in the right sectors correctly, how do we secure our infrastructure, critical infrastructure from cyberattack? There's so many other questions that are foundational. What they all have in common is that they're about rebuilding American strength and competitiveness.

And there's many things abroad too. What should the U.S. do with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, with AUKUS, the Quad, et cetera? But the policy accelerator is designed to address what we see as a gap in the field. That there's a lot of focus on what the U.S. should do abroad, but also not as much on what the U.S. needs to do at home to be more competitive. So those questions that I just mentioned, we're going to take some of those questions on and try to answer them.

And finally, there's a question about how should the United States manage the competition, work with China on areas of mutual interest, and avoid war? This is a critically important question. And if I walked away from government with two things, it's the idea that we have to compete more effectively, but we have to manage the competition and we want to figure out how to do that. So we're going to convene, Americans, folks from China, to think hard about these questions through a series of track twos.

LINDSAY:
Should explain what a track two is for people who aren't hip on the Washington, inside-the-beltway lingo.

DOSHI:
Yeah, these are a set of non-governmental meetings of people who think hard about these issues and occasionally can report some of their conversations back to governments and say, "Hey, here's what we were able to figure out together." They're not always the most authoritative, but they can be helpful. And indeed, I found that they were helpful at certain times when we didn't have good connectivity between the U.S. and China. Track twos were valuable and they will be valuable. As you and I both discussed, there might be more tension in the period ahead and these will be more valuable.

But it's not just about U.S.-China track twos. We also think it's important for the U.S. have track twos with other countries about China. And the Global China Forum, which is our answer to the question of how do we manage the competition or how do we work with others, that Global China Forum is something we're going to try to launch in the period ahead.

LINDSAY:
That's going to be a big challenge for the United States, I would imagine, Rush. The United States is used to approaching its allies, friends, and partners with a set of asks, not necessarily sitting down with its friends, partners, and allies and asking, "What do you think and how should we adjust our policies so they work better for you?"

DOSHI:
Well, it's a good point. I have a small anecdote on this that might be interesting. The Biden administration had a phrase, "invest, align, compete," to explain the China strategy. But align is a very carefully chosen word. It's not the word unite. It's align. Alignment is a mutual process. It's not just I align with you or you align with me. It's we align in some sense with each other. And that is, in many ways, the approach the U.S. will have to have. One thing that China has is scale. 1.4 billion people, huge numbers of SOEs, a massive internal market.

LINDSAY:
SOEs, state-owned enterprises.

DOSHI:
State-owned enterprises, a massive internal market. The U.S. is 330 million people. And historically, it's been important for the United States to work with allies and partners because that's the only way you really build scale. And I think an allied and partner centrality to American strategy is probably more essential now than ever before.

In the past, China's economy wasn't that large. And so yeah, they had scale in terms of population, but they didn't have scale in terms of heft or throw weight. Well, they've got that throw weight now. So the U.S. needs it too. And it's asymmetric advantage is this network of alliances and partnerships. But to your point, Jim, that's going to require figuring out how to align with them, not just tell them what to do.

LINDSAY:
And that's coming at a time in American politics where many Americans are deeply skeptical that America's friends, partners, and allies actually offer something to the United States as opposed to taking things from the United States.

DOSHI:
It's not a new debate either. I was reading recently Aaron Friedberg's book, The Weary Titan.

LINDSAY:
Great book.

DOSHI:
It's a fantastic book. I was rereading it just the other day, and he has this great chapter on how Great Britain was focusing on the question of scale versus the United States and Germany and others. Great Britain, a small island. An empire to be sure, but a small island. And for them, the question was now they didn't have allies or partners, they had colonies, unfortunately, but they were trying to think through, can we achieve scale by working more collaboratively with our colonies? And there were debates there too, "No, no-"

LINDSAY:
Because they were being eclipsed by the United States.

DOSHI:
By us because we had scale. And again, that goes to show the relevance of scale in international politics. If the U.S. had scale relative to individual divided European countries, China has scale relative to the individual and divided West. And so it does matter whether the West can come together. And if you look at those debates back then, from 1895 to 1905 in Great Britain, they rhyme a bit with the debates we're having today.

Allies, well, they didn't call them allies, they certainly weren't allies in that system, but are they a burden or are they an asset to achieve scale? Today, are our alliances an asset to achieve scale or are they burden on the U.S.? And the answer is probably a little bit of both. We want your allies and partners to free-ride a lot less, but you also have to do more to make that worth their while.

And these are the fundamental questions for us strategically. How do we do burden sharing in Europe or in Asia? That's the future of American Statecraft. You're right though, the national mood may not be ready for that, but nonetheless, that is where I think we have to go.

LINDSAY:
On that incisive note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Rush Doshi, C.V. Starr Senior Fellow for Asia studies and director of the China Strategy Initiative here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Rush is the author of The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order. Rush, thank you very much for joining me.

DOSHI:
Thank you, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We love the feedback. You can email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Kenadee Mangus with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Ester Fang was our recording engineer. Thank you, Ester. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.