Van Jackson is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. This essay was originally published at Un-Diplomatic, Jackson’s newsletter, and is republished here with permission.
Team Biden might have left office believing that it kept America out of World War III, but it made so many decisions with a militarist bent that it’s far too early to declare even that much.
Zero-sum biases plague US foreign policy, especially toward China. And Trump has inherited a China-obsessed war machine that’s even more lethal than the one he presided over during his first term. So if the end of everything were to happen in the coming years, Biden’s choices to heighten rather than ameliorate rivalry with China—the world’s other greatest power—will almost certainly have been among its conditions of possibility.
For our planet to survive this era, the United States needs to adapt to China (and the world) in a more relational and less predatory way. But not only is that a tall order; the US national security state itself actively impedes it. A breakthrough toward a more just and stable world will require resorting to politics, not simply the bureaucratic production of policy. And while violence is intrinsic to how Trump operates, he is, ironically, making himself essential to keeping us out of World War III even as he makes it more likely over the long run.
The “Competition” Consensus
Substantial evidence now exists that, whatever disagreements about China may reside within the US foreign policy community, they are minor, tactical, relative to the larger shared consensus in favor of viewing China as a threat and a competitor that ought to be America’s foreign policy priority.
While power hoarding and military superiority have been a means and end of US foreign policy since at least the 1980s, it is newly incompatible with the world as it actually exists. We are no longer in the “unipolar moment.” A foreign policy that tries to claim a lopsided share of global power in a multipolar world pushes the US to be more aggressive, revisionist, as it flails against the tide, unable to secure the position of domination it long took for granted.
Because US goals are so extreme and mismatched to reality, the result is what we have seen over the past four years: heightened ethnonationalisms, the securitization of everything, a breakdown of economic interdependence in favor of a shift toward economic decoupling, and a fixation on preparations for major-power war unseen since the Cold War.
In Washington, these ingredients for Armageddon find expression in the simple shorthand “great-power competition”—a phrase that Trump has scarcely uttered but that all of his foreign policy appointments have repeatedly stressed. Marco Rubio, for example, declared great-power competition the priority of an “America-First foreign policy” in his first cable instruction to the State Department.
The anti-China consensus that Trump presided over in his first term—but that in fact started under Obama—not only endures but is a profound obstacle for those wishing to avoid World War III. A shift to something more peaceful and enlightened than geopolitical rivalry is unlikely to come from within the US national security state, which has fully retooled for conflict with China.
The hawkish groupthink that pervades how Washington relates to China is hard to break when the US national security state has banked the legitimacy of its institutional existence on indefinitely chasing China’s shadow around the world while optimizing for a war that no sane person should want. The solution to Sino-US rivalry lay in adopting a different approach that rejects primacy in word and deed, but the ability to do that can only come from political forces outside the national security state.
What Is to Be Done
The most enlightened policy wonks in Washington advocate for “competitive coexistence” or “congagement” (competition and engagement in parallel). This is more or less what Biden attempted. But pursuing the brutality of great-power rivalry with guardrails never made much sense, and neither did his China policy. Sure, a new Cold War in which adversaries talk to each other is preferable to a Cold War without direct communications; nobody should want to live in a state of perpetual Cuban Missile Crisis.
But zero-sum statecraft is a dead end. Any policy agenda premised on a net-antagonistic relationship between the great powers facilitates a process of hawkish outbidding within domestic politics, and as we have seen the past decade, that divides America rather than unites it.
A more stabilizing, war-averting existence would accommodate power realities rather than resist them at the point of a gun. The reason why it is so hard to take America off the path to World War III is precisely that the things that need to be done to better the world situation do not lend themselves to simple policy interventions.
Suspending military competition, especially in nuclear modernization, is essential but literally the opposite of what a foreign policy of great-power competition demands. Keeping China interdependent with the world—rather than trying to sever it from the US and world economy—encourages Chinese restraint in foreign policy, but is contrary to the economic nationalism that has become en vogue. Increasing domestic consumption in China would help alleviate the need for Xi Jinping to rely on ethnonationalist appeals to sustain his political legitimacy, but only the CCP can take that decision. And US financing of Chinese green tech for export in exchange for China extending sovereign debt relief to the global South would catalyze a virtuous cycle: Making good on a global green new deal—>resolving China’s overproduction of electric vehicles and solar panels—>and growing consumer markets in the global South to provide a new source of global growth. But coordinating a grand green bargain of this ambition presumes habits of cooperation and mutual good will that do not exist.
None of these ideas amounts to pulling a lever or pushing a button—that’s the wrong way to think about changing the world. Rather, they are worldmaking projects that cannot happen within a strategy of primacy, whether described as an “America-First foreign policy” or a “foreign policy for the middle class.” Such slogans mask the assumption that security is a scarce resource that must be hoarded at others’ expense. And that is just not true.
A Politics of Peace
Overcoming Washington’s hawkish groupthink requires agents of change capable of contesting, overriding, or redirecting the national security state’s anti-China fetish. The tragedy and the silver lining in this regard are the same: Trump.
American militarism cannot be tamed by those who are its purest embodiment. As General Charles Horner once quipped, “…don’t count on the Pentagon to change the Pentagon…it has to come from outside…The executive branch has to provide leadership.” Where, then, to turn?
Popular sentiment against war and China-bashing is worth cultivating. Organized labor has been mostly aligned with anti-militarism and peace activists in recent years—the transformative potential of labor and peace is immense. But the reality is that Trump is showing every sign of weakening labor activism and criminalizing peace protests. The alternative, materialist prospects for overcoming the China hawks, then, lay with two other forces: the imperial presidency and the capitalists most dependent on a globalization-style world.
To take the latter first, the capitalist class is disunified and consists of sections that either benefit or are harmed by the ethnonationalist world of rivalry that is emerging. American exporters (especially in agriculture) as well as firms who rely on foreign markets to survive (like Hollywood) thrived in the old world of neoliberal globalization. Crucially, they still need an interconnected world for their business models to work. That makes them a well-resourced power bloc on behalf of, if not peace, then at least keeping war at bay and limiting the encroachment of “national security” into every aspect of the economy.
A different section of capital directly benefits from great-power rivalry and the preparations for World War III it entails. The defense technology industry, cryptocurrency speculation, artificial intelligence infrastructure, and semiconductor production are among the few promising growth sectors for Silicon Valley venture capital (VC). In a peaceful world, these investments have little promise but a world of nationalist conflict puts them in the black.
What all this means is that, as a political force, some capitalists, in lobbying for restraint on the Trump administration out of their own interests—as Elon Musk has appeared to do on behalf of Tesla’s business in China—will be doing work that rubs against the great-power competition enthusiasts who run Washington.
The decisive force in the balance between war hawks and everybody else is Trump himself. Trump’s key political appointments on China—Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Elbridge Colby, Mike Waltz, and a slew of lower-level staff— have so far all been extreme hawks favoring great-power rivalry. And yet, Trump talks as if he is a conditional dove on China.
Trump had a friendly call with Xi Jinping upon inauguration. The opening tariffs he imposed on China (10%) were lower than what he had previously foreshadowed (and lower than what he announced for Mexico and Canada). In his inauguration speech, Trump laid down a desirable rhetorical marker: “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end. And, perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That’s what I want to be. A peacemaker and a unifier.”
Marco Rubio, taking his cue from Trump, had a call with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on January 24 where he reportedly said that: “The United States does not support ‘Taiwan independence’ and hopes that the Taiwan issue will be peacefully resolved in a way accepted by both sides of the Taiwan Strait.” This is jarringly restrained and defies popular expectations. China, so far, is even responding to the Trump administration more favorably than it ever did to Team Biden.
Donald Trump is no dove. He did much to propel the anti-China hysteria that today plagues Washington during his first term. And the national security state, now led by Trump’s China hawks, is poised to continue pursuing great-power rivalry, which is tantamount to playing Russian roulette with the world’s fate.
How ironic, then, that we are all somewhat trapped, relying on Trump to be a much-needed voice of restraint in Sino-US relations because the national security state and the Democratic Party have refused the job. It is an unhappy situation, but such are the dire straits that US policymakers have foisted upon us.
