Abetting competition, restraining Beijing: Recommendations for diplomacy toward China

The primary challenge in the opening phases of diplomacy with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is to keep Beijing uncertain—neither reassuring it nor driving it to despair. If U.S. actions prompt Beijing to judge that no action it takes will assuage U.S. objections, then Beijing will have no incentive to placate the United States and may stop doing so altogether—leaving the United States with less leverage than if it had left Beijing uncertain. Beijing craves clarity from Washington, but we should feed it ambiguity—at least as a first course.

The new Trump administration will be able to determine the tempo, tenor, and contours of Sino-U.S. competition in the coming year. The United States has the advantage of the initiative in this moment since China remains in a wait-and-see posture. Beijing does not yet know if the new administration is aiming at decoupling or at a deal that addresses U.S. grievances about China’s trade and economic practices. The political calendar also allows the United States to take the initiative. Unlike 2024, in which the United States and Taiwan both held elections, there is no obvious foreseeable event like a Party Congress or an election to drive the bilateral dynamic in 2025.

The view from Beijing

Xi will engage the second Trump administration from a much different position than he did the first. After a dozen years at the top, Xi will likely see himself as a more seasoned statesman than President Donald Trump. At home, Xi is now well into his third term in office, with no expiration date on his rule in sight. By contrast, at the outset of the first Trump administration, Xi was rounding the corner into his second term and still shedding the remaining restraints on his power—such as term limits for the presidency. Xi’s dominance likely insulates him from any pressure—whether from the United States or from within China—to fundamentally change course on economic policy, as reflected in his belated and restrained shift to stabilize the economy last fall even in the face of mounting economic problems.

In the intervening four years, Xi has not only decisively entrenched his decisionmaking dominance, but he and his team have had four years to prepare for the return of either Trump or his policies. In that time, the PRC has put in place a series of measures that would enable Beijing to retaliate during a trade war with the United States—such as export controls, sanctions, and an “unreliable entity list,” among others—but until recently has largely refrained from implementing these measures in any meaningful way. Taken together, these measures are a switchblade rather than a broadsword: they seem designed to deliver targeted and painful jabs to the U.S. economy—especially the technology sector—rather than demolish the bilateral economic relationship altogether. Beijing has announced more stringent measures—such as export controls on critical minerals to the United States—which many have seen as a warning to the incoming administration. These controls could also be China’s efforts to enhance its leverage before a negotiation with the new administration—it could offer to remove these controls as a “concession” during a negotiation, in effect trading away nothing. Xi has generally been loath to follow through on such countermeasures, probably fearing a tit-for-tat cycle of escalation that would hurt China more than the United States since China still relies on access to U.S. capital and technology. Xi’s approach to the United States since the start of the first trade war could be summed up as “no escalation, no concessions.”

So far, the main thrust of Beijing’s approach has been to mollify Washington and avoid actions that would directly antagonize Washington, as evinced by its cooperation on counternarcotics over the past year and the release of wrongfully detained U.S. citizens. Xi’s paramountcy allows him the option to respond to U.S. competitive actions with restraint, even in the opening rounds of a renewed trade war. He has stacked China’s leadership with his allies, and few PRC officials would have the temerity or bona fides to criticize him for being “soft” on Washington. Xi’s actions over the past year and incentives suggest he will continue on this course with the new administration—at least initially.

Alternatively, Xi in his third term may have little patience for U.S. tariffs and other trade measures, and perhaps more appetite for inflicting pain on the United States to dissuade it from intensifying its pressure on Beijing. Ironically, the Biden administration’s tagline for its China policy—“invest, align, compete”—is also a succinct summation of China’s competitive policy toward the United States: China is investing in innovation and key technology sectors at home, aligning with key partners such as Russia and players in the so-called Global South, and doing all this with an eye toward long-term, strategic competition with Washington. Indeed, even as Beijing has sought a tactical thaw going into 2024, it has not let up on pressuring and coercing U.S. allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, most conspicuously the Philippines and Taiwan over the past year. In fact, Beijing is likely to test the Trump administration’s commitment to its allies in the region early on—and thereby play on regional concerns that Trump is willing to jettison long-standing commitments to traditional partners in the region, such as the Philippines.

As Xi decides whether to opt for restraint or reprisals, he is unlikely to be moved by diplomacy that tries to bank on appeals to a personal relationship with him because personal rapport counts for little with Xi—as evinced by his willingness to jettison his own protégés for corruption over the past two years. Xi is driven by calculations of power—and the crucial variable determining whether Xi responds with restraint or retribution will be his assessment of the Trump administration’s objectives and China’s own relative position vis-à-vis the United States. If Xi thinks that tariffs are the opening move in a negotiation, as seems increasingly likely, he may be more inclined toward restraint. But if he thinks that Trump is looking for a divorce rather than a denouement, Xi might instead calculate that he would be better off demonstrating to the United States—and key political constituencies in the United States—the unwisdom and palpable pain of trying to disentangle the world’s two largest economies.

In terms of the overall power dynamic between the two countries, China faces a more challenging environment both at home and abroad than it did at the end of the first Trump administration. Thanks both to Beijing’s own choices and the Biden administration’s successes, Washington has made real headway in the competition with China, though much work remains to be done. China’s ebullience in 2021—when the Chinese Communist Party celebrated its centenary and seemed to have managed the COVID-19 pandemic far more adeptly than the other great powers—has subsided. We are now entering a phase in which the competition with the United States is likely to tighten and intensify across domains. For example, since at least 2021, China has slowed the pace of its foreign lending and financing—and as a result, its own spending is roughly on par with U.S. development assistance. Notably, this choice came on the heels of mounting negative press about China’s Belt and Road projects across the globe, which when combined with the reality of China’s economic slowdown has blemished the shiny promise of PRC largesse—which had been such a defining feature of China’s burgeoning influence, especially in the so-called Global South, during the 2010s.

However, China’s challenges should not overshadow its resilience as a great power—and should certainly not be seen as evidence that China is somehow “peaking.” China’s economic challenges at home are real, but so is its capacity for addressing those challenges. For example, Beijing is not yet at a point where it seems to be countenancing any “guns vs. butter” tradeoffs as it pursues its military buildup. Indeed, barring some exogenous shock or real lapse into recession, China’s economic challenges are unlikely to undermine its ability to be a formidable competitor to the United States. In fact, despite its economic slowdown at home, Beijing in recent months has pursued a reasonably effective “charm offensive” to attenuate tensions with some U.S. allies and partners, such as India, in order to brace itself for the incoming Trump administration.

Assessing the Biden administration’s China policy: A start, not a finish

As we enter this next phase of the competition, the key question is where the Trump administration should focus its energies. The previous two administrations put important pieces into place. While the first Trump administration undertook a long overdue shift toward an explicitly competitive posture, the Biden administration focused on devising a sustainable approach for competition over the long term—initiating a number of policies that by design would fully materialize under subsequent administrations, whether Democratic or Republican. Both administrations took steps to close gaps that allowed China access to advanced technologies that China could employ to accelerate its military modernization or enable its human rights abuses at home. The Biden administration focused heavily on pursuing an array of diplomatic initiatives to align U.S. China policy with that of America’s allies and partners. These efforts of the preceding eight years are a start and not a finish. If left unattended, these initiatives will wither—benefitting no one but Beijing.

The Biden administration’s policy of “invest, align, compete” has real merit, but it was only a down payment. The new administration will of course reevaluate the approach, but it would be wise to harvest the fruits of the Biden administration’s labor, especially given the elements of continuity on some key issues. Most notably, the Biden administration’s investments at home—particularly in technology and manufacturing—will only start to yield meaningful advantages in the coming four years. Those investments, however, should not be considered the final price tag of success in this competition with China; by themselves, they will be insufficient for success.

The outgoing administration also has made real headway on the diplomatic front with allies and partners, but these diplomatic gains—as hard-won as many of them were, such as the trilateral arrangement with the United States, South Korea, and Japan—were arguably the easiest wins to secure in the competition with China, especially since many of them involved matchmaking among our long-standing friends, rather than getting out of our diplomatic comfort zone and enlisting new partners. Moreover, these gains remain fragile, and even perishable. For example, our European allies have more or less come around to the dangers posed by China to our collective interests—a dynamic galvanized by China’s support for Russia’s war against Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, by the surge of PRC overcapacity. However, our allies’ ambivalence about how hard to compete with China probably has led Xi to calculate that the diplomatic price he is paying in Europe for supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war is affordable. Moreover, Xi may believe that Trump’s return to power will create an opening for Beijing to encourage Europe to pursue its own path rather than become hostage to America’s designs toward China. To be sure, the prospect of U.S. tariffs and Trump’s doubts about NATO’s usefulness are likely to strain U.S. relationships in Europe, which is already debating whether to respond to the threat of U.S. tariffs with retaliation or conciliation.

In the coming four years, if we are to avoid isolating ourselves and emboldening Beijing, the new administration will not just have to hold together these coalitions, it will also have to prod them to produce more than joint statements and the occasional joint military exercise. The existing minilateral initiatives established during the Biden administration—some of which, like the Quad, were pursued by the first Trump administration—must become durable impediments to China’s ability to advance its own interests at the expense of our shared ones. Otherwise, these incipient initiatives risk dissipating and dissolving under pressure from Beijing—leaving us worse off than when we started. The new team will also have to bring emerging partners—especially key players in the so-called Global South, such as India and Vietnam—deeper into the U.S. fold.

Some in the Republican Party might be tempted to minimize the prospect of diplomatic losses with allies and partners, arguing that Republicans merely prefer a unilateral approach to competition, whereas Democrats will prefer a multilateral one—much as Democratic and Republican administrations oscillated between symmetric and asymmetric approaches to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. However, a more unilateral U.S. approach to competition with China would only abet Beijing’s strategy rather than undermine it—primarily by creating openings for China to realize its enduring strategic goal of driving wedges between the United States and our allies, especially in the Indo-Pacific. Beijing would like nothing better than the fraying of our security ties in the region. Conversely, Beijing sees the emerging shift from a “hub-and-spokes” model in the region to something more akin to a latticework as a real threat to China’s interests.

The material impact of the U.S. diplomatic maladroitness with our allies and partners may seem a bit abstract barring a crisis or contingency that requires us to marshal a coalition—but the evolving technological competition should underscore how crucial our allies will be even in peacetime, especially for preserving our more tangible technological advantages. That is because the United States does not control some of the “chokepoints” in the supply chain for crucial items, such as the most advanced semiconductors. The Netherlands and Japan, among others, do, which is why the Biden administration has worked so assiduously to get these allies on board with U.S. export controls, despite the negative impact on their own businesses. Indeed, even with this joint effort in place, the press is already populated with regular reports of Beijing’s efforts to circumvent U.S. export and investment controls, jeopardizing the Biden administration’s efforts to slow down China’s advance to the technological frontier. If our allies are not on board with these efforts—and with subsequent initiatives to tighten loopholes and enforcement—the United States will in effect be trying to carry water with a colander, with similarly hapless and messy results. The effort is leaky enough even with their support. Certainly, the Biden administration’s most significant contributions to the competition with China have been on the diplomatic and technology fronts—but these are still relatively nascent efforts that will require additional care and nourishment to mature into a robust restraint on Beijing.

The best offense is a strong defense industrial base

Meanwhile, many of the bigger structural challenges to U.S. competitiveness remain largely unaddressed—most notably in the military domain. The challenges here are numerous, daunting, and intricate—and nothing short of the president’s authority at the apex of the chain of command, combined with his sustained use of the bully pulpit, will remedy the deep-seated problems hindering our military’s focus on China. The hard reality is that when it comes to defense policy, we are not better off in the Indo-Pacific than we were four years ago—or even eight years ago—even though the Pentagon has named China as its top priority in the last two national defense strategies. Indeed, despite the Pentagon’s nominal focus on China, it is not clear what iterative initiatives over the preceding decade such as Air-Sea Battle, the Third Offset, and Integrated Deterrence have in fact yielded for ensuring that the United States military remains apace of China. As the saying goes, a vision that lacks resources is just a hallucination. Military power should be in the background rather than the foreground of our competition with China—but it must be there to deter Beijing, to respond to its provocations as needed, and to be a viable option in a contingency.

The deteriorating military balance in the Indo-Pacific has been documented for years, especially in flagship military periodicals like Proceedings. According to the most recent annual report to Congress on “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” China now has the largest navy in the world and the largest air force in the region—and one should note that China, unlike the United States, can devote these considerable assets almost entirely to the Indo-Pacific theater. At the same time, the United States’ sprawling and seemingly more urgent interests and commitments require it to be “everything, everywhere, all at once.” This dynamic has strained the joint force and deferred focus on gearing up in earnest for long-term competition with China. The U.S. defense industrial base’s deficiencies have become well known as the United States has struggled to marshal the materiel to support Ukraine’s grinding defense against Russia. That should be sufficient to prompt action, but so far it has not. We cannot afford to wait for a vivid “Sputnik moment” to shock us out of our somnambulance on this problem.

Some might object that this focus on defense would provoke an arms race in the Indo-Pacific, but in fact, a regional arms race has already been underway for several decades. While the United States has largely been preoccupied and distracted by other crises throughout this century, Beijing has been pouring considerable and still growing resources into its military modernization program—pursuing perhaps the most dramatic military buildup since World War II. As a result, the more pronounced and disconcerting risk now is not of provoking an arms race—but of losing the one already well underway. If Beijing were to surpass America in the military domain, it would have perilous consequences for U.S. and allied interests in the region. It is not just that our capacity to deter Beijing will start to fray, but that Beijing’s ability to coerce our allies—and possibly the United States—could intensify in the coming decade.

To avoid this outcome, Trump will need to marshal the sprawling array of vested interests across Congress and its sundry specific constituencies, the defense industry, and even the broader public. The signal must be sustained, explicit, and come from the president himself to be effective. This endeavor will require the president’s personal imprimatur to ensure the Pentagon hears that this message is coming from the top of the chain of command. The focal point of this effort should be devising a plan to recapitalize the American defense industrial base for this new period of competition. Theoretically, this priority should align well with the bipartisan emphasis across the last two administrations on rebuilding America’s manufacturing might at home.

However, the details will bedevil the executors of this policy. The services and their private sector suppliers will be loath to pull back from legacy systems that have dubious utility in a China contingency. For example, the mighty aircraft carrier has long been vaunted as a symbol of U.S. might. These assets continue to serve the United States in regions that are the domicile of lesser powers, like the Middle East. But in a contingency with a near-peer like China, they risk becoming expensive but fragile ornaments of our power since they are increasingly vulnerable to a growing array of Chinese weapons systems. Moreover, preparing in earnest for the panoply of challenges posed by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will not be cheap—and in this competition, the cost curve favors China, not the United States. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union spent a much higher percentage of its GDP on defense than the United States. In this competition, it is the United States that is burdened by national debt, while China’s national government is on a sounder fiscal footing. Therefore, moving forward with this project will require hard choices—not just more resources that placate all concerned parties.

Wait for it

The secondary and subsidiary question for the next administration is how to conduct diplomacy with the PRC in order to manage the risks of these competitive actions and muffle Beijing’s responses to these policies. As the new administration builds out its competitive approach to China, it should be patient about pursuing high-level diplomacy with the PRC early on. Senior PRC officials will be plenty eager to connect and perhaps even ingratiate themselves with key figures in the new team—and, as a tactical move, the new administration should wait for the PRC to reach out to it. This approach would enhance U.S. leverage by accentuating Beijing’s uncertainty about the new administration’s intentions, thereby prolonging the “wait and see” period during which Beijing would seek to avoid escalation with Washington.

This approach has advantages, but it would contrast with incoming administrations’ more typical—and almost reflexive—tendency to engage the PRC at a high level early on. Adopting the old approach would be an unforced error that would reward Beijing and dissipate U.S. leverage. The new administration should remember that the visual of China’s leaders being accorded respect by an incoming American president is of the utmost importance for the PRC. For Beijing, the meeting is the objective.

The administration can and should parlay Beijing’s focus on form over substance against the PRC—primarily by allowing existing areas of cooperation and communication at lower levels to persist without suggesting new channels or areas of cooperation at the outset. Unfortunately, Beijing over the past decade has proven unhelpful even in areas of more obvious mutual interest such as climate change and health security. Its promises to the United States on climate change have largely gone unfulfilled, while decades of cooperation on health security did little to ensure Beijing’s collaboration when it really counted during the COVID-19 pandemic. The new administration should therefore try to withhold the higher-level engagements Beijing will likely crave until it sees concrete signs of good faith on the limited areas of cooperation, most notably counternarcotics. Ironically, a cooler approach is more likely to make Beijing amenable than ardent courtship.

Reassure allies, not Beijing

The new Trump administration should also parlay Beijing’s focus on form over substance to its advantage by using any initial high-level engagements with Beijing primarily to signal to allies and partners that when the United States competes with China, it is not being reckless. The primary audience for U.S. messaging should not be Beijing—which is seldom moved by U.S. demarches and messages. Rather, the key audience is our allies and partners, especially those in the Indo-Pacific, many of whom fear an escalation of Sino-U.S. tensions, citing the aphorism that “when the elephants fight, the grass loses.” Indeed, one of the primary benefits of the Biden administration’s diplomacy with China is that it has reassured U.S. allies—and thereby made them arguably more amenable to aligning with the United States on an array of competitive China policies. Allowing working-level discussions to continue and signaling openness to overtures from Beijing would by themselves help assuage such anxieties.

Some might argue that engaging Beijing at a high level early on would help reassure Beijing in a manner useful to the United States, but this argument has two flaws. First, at a strategic level, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to reassure Beijing about U.S. intentions, especially this far into this era of overt strategic competition. Moreover, U.S. reassurances during previous U.S. and Chinese administrations have often proved ineffectual. The effort is akin to dropping a penny into a psychic well of suspicion—and often has just as little discernible effect. Xi and his predecessors have seen opportunity but not security in the existing order—primarily because, at some fundamental level, the officials who rise to the top of the Chinese system have internalized the Leninist view that they are dealing with a hostile, late-stage capitalist hegemon. These misgivings about the existing order will not preclude Beijing from rhetorically positioning itself as the guardian of the existing order against a disruptive United States—just as it started to during the first Trump administration—in an effort to reassure U.S. allies about China’s intentions, and thereby undercut the U.S. position.

At a more practical level, reassuring Beijing is also not a cost-free proposition. Once the Trump administration starts offering Beijing reassurances about what it will not do, Beijing will begin to reverse engineer what actions it can take to pressure the United States and its allies and partners in the region without provoking a U.S. response. Moreover, the flip side of reassuring Beijing is that the new administration would—perhaps inadvertently—be sending a signal that it is not willing to take risks to defend its interests, especially in the Indo-Pacific. At worst, reassuring Beijing could in fact alarm allies and partners in the region who fear a “G2” superpower condominium in which the United States trades away the interests of its friends in the region—especially on contested issues like the South China Sea—in exchange for promises from Beijing to behave better on issues that more impinge on more immediate U.S. interests. If allies and partners in the region fear outright Sino-U.S. conflict more than anything else, their second greatest concern is that their own interests will be reduced to disposable pawns for the United States to trade away in its tête-à-tête with China.

At best, the new Trump administration can provide so-called “tactical reassurances” by primarily focusing on frankly explaining the objectives animating U.S. policy and disabusing the PRC of any darker intentions it might ascribe to the United States. These assurances should be reserved for periods of heightened tension and should be expected to only make a difference at the margins. These assurances will also be a heavy bureaucratic lift for the United States because Beijing must hear them directly from the president himself or a senior official clearly empowered by the president to speak on his behalf. It is occasionally worthwhile to prevent miscalculation, but the juice is not always worth the squeeze, and reassurance should be done sparingly to be effective. When it comes to reassurance, less is more.

In fact, Beijing tends to be more restrained toward Washington when it is more uncertain and even caught flat-footed. The PRC system—especially under Xi—is regimented and formulaic when it is not in the driver’s seat of the bilateral dynamic and has to respond to unanticipated U.S. moves. Even senior officials are likely to tread lightly until they get a signal from the top. Previous administrations have sometimes sought to avoid pursuing competitive actions against China during periods that Beijing deemed “sensitive,” such as around important Chinese Communist Party or government meetings. Instead, the incoming administration should consider timing routine competitive actions—such as the announcement of adding certain PRC companies to the Entity List—to occur during these PRC conclaves. The goal should be to muffle Beijing’s response to U.S. competitive actions—not to provoke Beijing gratuitously. Beijing’s leaders still only have so much bandwidth—and during these meetings, they tend to be preoccupied with the dramaturgy these events require and the outcomes, as well as whatever internecine bureaucratic and political turf battles are likely taking place just ahead of these meetings. This dynamic can delay or even diminish Beijing’s ability to formulate a timely, effective, and cogent response. This tactic would be a shift from previous administrations. But one should tread gingerly in pursuing this course and remember that Beijing will be more attuned to the optics and publicity surrounding any U.S. activity than the substance.

Indeed, the United States can actually get quite a bit done—especially with its allies and partners in the region—if it does so with little fanfare. On many but not all issues, Beijing tends to respond more sharply to symbolic than substantive gestures, creating significant opportunities for the United States to advance its interests without escalating tensions with Beijing. For example, in 2022, Beijing unleashed a melodramatic response to then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s August visit to Taiwan, which included firing missiles over Taiwan—even though Pelosi’s visit was precedented and did little to substantively shore up Taiwan’s defenses. However, when the administration announced a $1 billion arms sale just a month later, Beijing’s response was muted—highlighting the opportunities for the United States to safely carry a big stick if it speaks softly.

Welcome cooperation, but do not seek it

The incoming Trump administration should focus on shoring up U.S. competitiveness and avoid seeking Beijing’s cooperation on the hot spots du jour—such as the crisis in the Middle East, Russia’s war against Ukraine, or the deepening cooperation between North Korea and Russia. Not only is Beijing unlikely to intercede in any helpful way, but asking for Beijing’s help only cedes leverage to Beijing—which will want something in exchange for helping the United States. Indeed, the more the United States asks for something, the more likely China will see it as a point of leverage over Washington. Moreover, Beijing will likely use any invitation to ameliorate these crises as a way to undermine the United States’ traditional leadership in these regions. On Ukraine in particular, consulting with Beijing would in effect reward China for its support for Russia’s war against Ukraine and could even provide an opening for Beijing to secure a role in postwar Europe’s security that it has never enjoyed before—and certainly has not earned.

Instead, the Trump administration should highlight its growing concerns about the deepening “adversary alignment” among Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China—and the potential adverse consequences of this alignment. While China likely judges that it benefits to varying degrees from its engagements with each of these governments, it still would rather avoid being lumped in with these international pariahs and remains concerned that “guilt by association” could harm its material interests. Beijing remains especially concerned about the cross-pollination initiated by the Biden administration between the United States’ European and Indo-Pacific allies. The new Trump administration should play on these concerns, not alleviate them, and emphasize the potential costs for Beijing of deepening these ties, rather than seeking Beijing’s assistance, which is unlikely to be forthcoming in any event.

We are our own worst enemies

The above recommendations will put the United States on a strong footing in its competition with China—but by themselves, this approach will not ensure success. For both the United States and China, success abroad will be born at home. Both the United States and China have tremendous resilience. Indeed, each side underestimates the resilience and tenacity of the other at its respective peril. However, both sides are plagued by obvious chronic maladies, including structural dysfunction and political neuroses. Much like the Cold War, the question of which side prevails in this competition is less about which side is ascendant than which can better cope with its symptoms and address its underlying ailments.

The runup to the U.S. election—and the transparency of our democratic process—has illuminated for the whole world the persistence of our deep political dysfunction and the visible deterioration and aging of our own institutions as the United States approaches its 250th birthday. Ironically, China has spent much of the past decade coping with the byproducts of its previous successes, showcasing a dialectical development that Marx himself might have recognized. Market-oriented reforms fed the now-deflated housing bubble. The marriage of wealth and power that allowed the Chinese Communist Party to coopt the emerging bourgeoisie fostered toxic corruption. Xi’s central challenge at home in many ways has been to deal with the long hangover from China’s boom years. As a result, analyzing this particular great power competition has increasingly become an exercise in what could be called comparative dysfunction, even as the contest draws closer. It increasingly seems like the “winner” of this competition will limp rather than sprint across the finish line.

Conclusion

It is worth remembering that in the broader historical arc, we are still in the relatively early phases of competition with China—and that we could still lose it and fall behind China technologically, militarily, and economically with dramatic ramifications for U.S. interests and security. After nearly eight years of overt competition with China, the U.S. policy community has learned some valuable lessons about the most effective ways to compete with China—and how to conduct diplomacy in support of those competitive policies. Since the competition is comprehensive, the U.S. response should be as well. The Biden administration has put into place a number of policies that position the United States well for competition over the long term. Much work remains to be done—especially in the military domain—and the Trump administration would benefit from seeing those policies through. Support from our allies is not optional if we are serious about competing successfully—and Beijing will see any diminution of our alliances as an “own goal” by the United States. In the coming period, U.S. diplomacy should aim primarily at blunting Beijing’s responses to U.S. competitive policies—rather than aiming at negotiating a grand bargain, which is likely to be chimeric. This competition will require the steady accumulation of “singles” and “doubles” rather than home runs. We still have the capacity to prevail in this contest; the real question is whether we have the patience.