In any competitive field, competitors are constantly striving to do better. They look for innovations that will improve their position and strive to imitate everything that seems to work for their opponents. We see this phenomenon in sports, in business, and in international politics. Imitation does not mean that one has to do exactly what others have done, but ignoring policies that have benefited others and refusing to adapt is a good way to continue losing.
Today, the need to compete more effectively with China is perhaps the one foreign policy issue on which almost all Democrats and Republicans agree. This consensus shapes the US defense budget, advances efforts to strengthen partnerships in Asia, and encourages an expanded high-tech trade war. But apart from accusing China of stealing American technology and violating previous trade agreements, the group of experts wary of China rarely takes into account the broader measures that have helped Beijing achieve this. If China is truly eating America's lunch, shouldn't Americans ask themselves what Beijing is doing right and what the United States is doing wrong? Does China's approach to foreign policy offer some useful lessons for people in Washington?
To be sure, much of China's rise was due to purely internal reforms. The world's most populous country has always had enormous power potential, but this potential has been suppressed for more than a century due to deep internal divisions or misguided Marxist economic policies. Once its leaders abandoned Marxism (but not Leninism!) and embraced the market, the country's relative power was bound to increase sharply. One could argue that the Biden administration's efforts to develop a national industrial policy through the Inflation Reduction Act and other measures reflect a belated attempt to imitate China's state-backed efforts to seize a high profile in several key technologies.
But China's rise was not due solely to internal reforms or complacency in the West. Moreover, China's rise was due to its broad approach to foreign policy, which is something that US leaders should consider.
First, and most obviously, China has managed to avoid the costly quagmires that have repeatedly ensnared the United States. Even as its power has grown, Beijing has been wary of taking on potentially costly commitments abroad. It has not promised to go to war to defend Iran, for example, or to protect its various economic partners in Africa, Latin America, or Southeast Asia. It supplies Russia with dual-use technologies of military value (and gets good money for it), but Beijing is not sending Russia lethal weapons, nor is it discussing whether to send military advisers, or consider sending its own forces to help Russia win the war. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin may talk a lot about their “borderless” partnership, but China continues to make tough deals in its dealings with Russia, especially in its demands for access to Russian oil and gas at competitive prices.
By contrast, the United States appears to have an unerring instinct for shifting foreign policy sands.
When it's not toppling autocrats and spending trillions of dollars trying to export democracy to places like Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya, it's still providing security guarantees that it hopes it will never have to respect to countries around the world. It is striking that US leaders still believe that taking on the task of protecting another country constitutes some sort of foreign policy accomplishment, even when that country has limited strategic value or is unable to do much to help advance US interests.
Now the United States is officially committed to the defense of more countries than at any time in its history, and trying to fulfill all of these commitments helps explain why the US defense budget is so much larger than China's. Just imagine what the United States could do every year with the difference of more than half a trillion dollars between what China spends and what we do. If it wasn't trying to police the whole world, the United States could probably have world-class rail, urban transportation, and airport infrastructure — you know, like China does — and a smaller budget deficit, too.
This is not an argument for leaving NATO, severing all US commitments, and retreating to America's fortress, but it does mean that we should be wiser about expanding new commitments and insisting that our current allies must do their best. If China can become stronger and more influential without pledging to protect dozens of countries around the world, why can't we?
Second, in contrast to the United States, China maintains functional diplomatic relations with almost everyone. It has larger diplomatic missions than any other country, its ambassadorial positions are rarely vacant, and its diplomats are increasingly well-trained professionals (rather than amateurs whose main qualification is their ability to raise money for successful presidential candidates). China's leaders realize that diplomatic relations are not a reward for others' good behavior; It is an essential tool for obtaining information, communicating China's views to others, and advancing their interests through persuasion rather than brute force.
By contrast, the United States still tends to withhold diplomatic recognition from countries with which we disagree, making it more difficult to understand their interests and motivations and making it very difficult to communicate their interests and motivations. Washington refuses to officially recognize the governments of Iran, Venezuela, or North Korea, although the ability to communicate with these governments on a regular basis would be beneficial. China, of course, is talking to all of these countries, and to America's closest allies as well. Shouldn't we do the same?
China has diplomatic and economic ties with every country in the Middle East, for example, including those closely linked to the United States such as Israel or Egypt. In contrast, the United States has a “special relationship” with Israel (and to some extent with Egypt and Saudi Arabia), meaning that it supports Israel no matter what it does. At the same time, it does not have regular contacts with Iran, Syria, or with the Houthis in Yemen, who control much of that country. America's regional partners take its support for granted and often ignore its advice, because they never have to worry about the possibility of the United States reaching out to their rivals. Case in point: Saudi Arabia maintains good relations with Russia and China and has used implicit threats of realignment to extract greater concessions from Washington, but U.S. officials never try to play the same balance-of-power politics game in return. Given this asymmetric arrangement, it is not surprising that it was Beijing, not Washington, that helped bring about the recent detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Third, China's general approach to foreign policy emphasizes national sovereignty: the idea that every country should be free to govern itself according to its own values. If you want to do business with China, you don't have to worry about what it tells you how to run your country, and you don't have to worry about being sanctioned if your political system differs from Beijing's.
In contrast, the United States sees itself as the primary promoter of a set of global liberal values and believes that spreading democracy is part of its global mission. With some noteworthy exceptions, they often use their power to get others to do more to respect human rights and move toward democracy, sometimes making their assistance conditional on other countries pledging to do more to respect human rights and move toward democracy. But because a clear majority of the world's countries are not full democracies, it is easy to understand why many countries might prefer the Chinese approach, especially when China offers them tangible benefits. As former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers recounted: “Someone from a developing country told me: What we're getting from China is just an airport.” “What we get from the United States is just a lecture.” If you were an unrepentant autocrat, or the leader of a less-than-perfect democracy, which approach would you find most attractive?
What makes matters worse is America's tendency to take moral stances, which makes it vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy whenever it fails to live up to its own standards. Of course, no great power lives up to all of its stated ideals, but the greater a country's claim to be uniquely virtuous, the greater the penalty when it falls short. Nowhere has this problem been more evident than in the Biden administration's strategically incoherent response to the war in Gaza. Instead of condemning the crimes committed by both sides and using the full extent of American influence to end the fighting, the United States provided Israel with the means to undertake a brutal campaign of retaliatory destruction, defended it in the United Nations Security Council, and rejected it. Plausible accusations of genocide despite the abundant evidence and harsh assessments of both the International Court of Justice and the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. At the same time they insist on how important it is to maintain the “rules-based order.” No one should be surprised to learn that these events have severely damaged the image of the United States in the Middle East and in much of the Global South, or that China is benefiting from them. It is striking that US officials have not yet issued a clear statement explaining how the US response to this tragedy makes Americans safer, more prosperous, or admired around the world.
The bottom line is that China has emerged as America's main rival partly by mobilizing its latent power potential more effectively, but also by reducing its foreign commitments and avoiding the self-inflicted wounds of successive US administrations. This does not mean that China's record is clean, on the contrary. It was a mistake for Xi to publicly abandon the policy of peaceful rise, and his ultra-nationalist “wolf warrior” diplomacy has alienated countries that had previously welcomed closer ties with Beijing. The much-hyped Belt and Road Initiative has been at best a mixed bag, generating goodwill and resentment and creating large debts that Beijing will have difficulty collecting. Its implicit support for Russia in Ukraine has tarnished its image in Europe and encouraged governments there to back away from tighter economic integration, and it does not always live up to its supposed commitment to the principle of national sovereignty either.
But Americans who are deeply concerned about China's rise should consider what Beijing has done well and what Washington has done poorly. It is hard to miss the irony here: China has risen rapidly in part by imitating America's early rise to the top of global power. The nascent United States had many innate advantages, including a fertile continent, a scattered and divided indigenous population, and the protection of two vast oceans, and it leveraged those assets by staying out of trouble abroad and building power at home. The United States fought only two wars with foreign countries between 1812 and 1918, and its opponents in those wars—Mexico in 1846 and Spain in 1898—were weak states with no significant allies. Once a superpower, the United States allowed the other major powers to balance each other out, stayed out of their conflicts as long as possible, suffered the least amount of damage in the two world wars, and “won the peace.” China has followed a similar path since 1980, and it has paid off handsomely so far.
German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once said: “Only a fool learns from his mistakes. Only a wise person learns from the mistakes of others.” His comment could be modified: A wise state not only learns from the mistakes of others, but also from what they did right. The United States should not seek to become more like China (although former US President Donald Trump clearly envied the one-party system), but it could learn a thing or two from Beijing's more pragmatic and self-interested approach to dealing with the rest of the world. .
