Much to the Joe Biden administration’s credit, it appears to be taking the potential threat that China poses the United States more seriously than it did during the contentious 2020 presidential campaign. Yet one must ask an uncomfortable question: What if China’s representatives are correct? As my colleague David P Goldman reports, “American influence is fragile in several key Eurasian nodal points and China has the capacity to hurt the United States in retaliation for American efforts to build an alliance to contain it.”
In other words, as America spastically pivots to Asia, China judiciously swings toward its west – and the reason that China is even attractive to the powers along its western periphery is China’s increasing power.
Part of the problem is perception. The way that American policymakers measure national power is insufficient for the 21st century. Chinese scholars, in my opinion, have developed a much better method to analyze the competitive power of a nation-state.
