China Should Be Viewed as an Economic Competitor, Not an Inevitable Military Threat
The rise of China is one of the most important geopolitical developments of the twenty-first century. In Washington, China is increasingly described as America’s principal strategic competitor and, at times, as an existential threat to the United States. There are legitimate disagreements between the two countries involving Taiwan, technology, trade practices, human rights, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and military power in the Pacific. Those issues should not be ignored. But Americans should also question whether China’s economic success automatically makes it an enemy.
A prosperous China does not necessarily require an impoverished America. Instead of treating economic competition as preparation for military confrontation, the United States should rediscover an older American tradition: compete vigorously through commerce, innovation, investment, diplomacy, and economic strength while avoiding unnecessary foreign wars.
China’s global rise has been primarily economic. Since beginning market-oriented reforms in the late 1970s, China has transformed itself from a relatively poor country into the world’s second-largest economy. It became a manufacturing powerhouse by building factories, ports, highways, railroads, power plants, telecommunications systems, and enormous supply chains.
China has certainly expanded its military capabilities, particularly in its own region, and Americans should not dismiss that development. Yet China’s overseas military footprint remains substantially smaller than America’s. The United States maintains hundreds of military installations and facilities outside its borders. China, by comparison, does not maintain an American-style worldwide network of hundreds of military bases.
That difference should cause Americans to think carefully about the meaning of national power.
China has often attempted to expand its influence abroad through trade, lending, construction, infrastructure investment, and joint commercial projects. Across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and other developing regions, Chinese companies and financial institutions have participated in projects involving roads, railways, mines, ports, telecommunications networks, electrical generation, and other infrastructure.
These relationships are not acts of charity. China expects economic and strategic benefits from them, and some projects have generated serious controversies involving debt, environmental impacts, labor practices, transparency, and political influence. Nevertheless, the basic strategy deserves American attention: economic influence can sometimes accomplish objectives that military power cannot.
Imagine two countries competing for influence in a developing nation. One arrives primarily discussing military cooperation, security assistance, and geopolitical alliances. The other arrives offering financing for a railroad, power plant, port, factory, or telecommunications network. Which relationship is more likely to become embedded in that country’s economy for decades?
America should learn from that question rather than simply condemn China for answering it effectively.
The United States possesses tremendous advantages that could make it the world’s greatest practitioner of economic diplomacy. America has extraordinary universities, capital markets, technology companies, agricultural productivity, engineering capabilities, entrepreneurs, energy resources, and financial institutions. Instead of viewing every Chinese infrastructure project as another battlefield in a new Cold War, America could compete by offering developing countries better investment opportunities.
We should compete with China by building better products, developing superior technologies, financing infrastructure, expanding trade, educating the world’s brightest students, increasing American productivity, and making the United States the most attractive place on Earth to invest.
There is an important historical argument for such an approach.
America’s Founders were deeply suspicious of permanent military entanglements and concentrated political power. George Washington famously warned in his Farewell Address against permanent foreign attachments, while Thomas Jefferson later spoke of “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations.” The Founders did not oppose military force under every circumstance, nor did they live in a world resembling today’s global system. America itself fought wars during the founding generation.
Nevertheless, there was a powerful early American belief that commerce could connect nations while excessive foreign entanglements could endanger republican government.
The Founders therefore would probably recognize something important in a strategy centered on commerce rather than permanent military commitments. That does not mean they would necessarily “admire China” as a political system. The People’s Republic of China is a one-party state whose political structure differs fundamentally from the constitutional republic the Founders created.
But they might admire certain elements of a foreign policy that recognizes trade, infrastructure, production, and economic relationships as sources of national power.
The irony is that the United States sometimes behaves more like the European great powers that early Americans distrusted. America has accumulated an enormous worldwide military presence and has fought costly wars thousands of miles from its shores. The wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan demonstrate that overwhelming military superiority does not guarantee political success.
America spent enormous amounts of money and sacrificed thousands of lives in those conflicts. Meanwhile, China spent decades expanding factories, ports, infrastructure, exports, and commercial relationships.
That contrast deserves serious consideration.
Every dollar devoted to an unnecessary military intervention is a dollar that cannot simultaneously rebuild an American bridge, modernize an electrical grid, finance scientific research, educate an engineer, improve a port, or strengthen domestic manufacturing.
National security requires a capable military. The United States should unquestionably be able to defend itself and its legitimate interests. But having the world’s strongest military does not mean military power should become America’s default instrument of foreign policy.
The greater challenge is preventing competition with China from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If Washington assumes that China’s economic growth necessarily represents a threat, expands military containment in response, and Beijing responds with additional military expansion of its own, both nations can enter a security spiral. Each side interprets the other’s defensive actions as offensive preparations. Eventually, the prediction that conflict is inevitable can help produce the very conflict policymakers originally hoped to prevent.
A war between the United States and China would be catastrophic. These are nuclear-armed powers deeply connected to the global economy. Conflict could disrupt international shipping, semiconductor production, financial markets, manufacturing supply chains, agriculture, and energy markets. Even without nuclear escalation, the economic consequences could extend far beyond the two countries.
There is another path.
America can compete with China without hating China. We can disagree with the Chinese government without treating 1.4 billion Chinese people as enemies. We can protect American technology and national security while continuing mutually beneficial commerce. We can maintain a powerful military while making diplomacy and economic engagement our preferred instruments.
Most importantly, America should respond to China’s success by becoming more competitive itself.
Build better infrastructure. Produce more energy. Develop artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing. Strengthen American education. Restore fiscal discipline. Expand international trade. Build faster ports and rail systems. Encourage entrepreneurship. Invest in scientific research. Make American products so competitive that countries voluntarily choose them.
China’s rise should not frighten America into abandoning the principles that made America prosperous. It should challenge us to rediscover them.
The most powerful response to China’s economic rise is not another military base. It is another invention, another factory, another successful American company, another trading relationship, another infrastructure project, and another generation of entrepreneurs.
America does not have to defeat China for America to succeed.
The better objective is peaceful competition—commerce instead of conquest, investment instead of unnecessary intervention, and prosperity instead of permanent conflict. That approach would be closer to the Founders’ warnings about foreign entanglements and their emphasis on commerce, while giving the United States the opportunity to demonstrate that an open, constitutional society can compete successfully with China without turning economic rivalry into war.