No Substitute for Victory

America’s Competition With China Must Be Won,

Not Managed
BY MATT POTTINGER AND MIKE GALLAGHER May/June 2024

Published on April 10, 2024

MATT POTTINGER served as U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser from 2019 to 2021 and as
Senior Director for Asia on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. He is a co-author
and editor of the forthcoming book The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan.

MIKE GALLAGHER served as U.S. Representative from Wisconsin from 2017 to 2024 and
chaired the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

Amid a presidency beset by failures of deterrence—in Afghanistan,

Ukraine, and the Middle East—the Biden administration’s China policy
has stood out as a relative bright spot. The administration has
strengthened U.S. alliances in Asia, restricted Chinese access to critical
U.S. technologies, and endorsed the bipartisan mood for competition. Yet
the administration is squandering these early gains by falling into a
familiar trap: prioritizing a short-term thaw with China’s leaders at the
expense of a long-term victory over their malevolent strategy. The Biden
team’s policy of “managing competition” with Beijing risks emphasizing
processes over outcomes, bilateral stability at the expense of global
security, and diplomatic initiatives that aim for cooperation but generate
only complacency.
The United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it
should win it. Beijing is pursuing a raft of global initiatives designed to
disintegrate the West and usher in an antidemocratic order. It is
underwriting expansionist dictatorships in Russia, Iran, North Korea, and
Venezuela. It has more than doubled its nuclear arsenal since 2020 and is
building up its conventional forces faster than any country has since
World War II. These actions show that China isn’t aiming for a stalemate.
Neither should America.

What would winning look like? China’s communist rulers would give up
trying to prevail in a hot or cold conflict with the United States and its
friends. And the Chinese people—from ruling elites to everyday citizens
—would find inspiration to explore new models of development and
governance that don’t rely on repression at home and compulsive hostility
abroad.

In addition to having greater clarity about its end goal, the United States
needs to accept that achieving it will require greater friction in U.S.-
Chinese relations. Washington will need to adopt rhetoric and policies
that may feel uncomfortably confrontational but in fact are necessary to
reestablish boundaries that Beijing and its acolytes are violating. That
means imposing costs on Chinese leader Xi Jinping for his policy of
fostering global chaos. It means speaking with candor about the ways
China is hurting U.S. interests. It means rapidly increasing U.S. defense
capabilities to achieve unmistakable qualitative advantages over Beijing. It
means severing China’s access to Western technology and frustrating Xi’s
efforts to convert his country’s wealth into military power. And it means
pursuing intensive diplomacy with Beijing only from a position of
American strength, as perceived by both Washington and Beijing.

No country should relish waging another cold war. Yet a cold war is
already being waged against the United States by China’s leaders. Rather
than denying the existence of this struggle, Washington should own it and
win it. Lukewarm statements that pretend as if there is no cold war
perversely court a hot war; they signal complacency to the American
people and conciliation to Chinese leaders. Like the original Cold War,
the new cold war will not be won through half measures or timid rhetoric.
Victory requires openly admitting that a totalitarian regime that commits
genocide, fuels conflict, and threatens war will never be a reliable partner.
Like the discredited détente policies that Washington adopted in the
1970s to deal with the Soviet Union, the current approach will yield little
cooperation from Chinese leaders while fortifying their conviction that
they can destabilize the world with impunity.

BIDEN’S NEW BASELINE

The administration’s China policy initially showed promise. President Joe
Biden maintained the tariffs that President Donald Trump had imposed
on Chinese exports in response to the rampant theft of U.S. intellectual
property. He renewed, with some adjustments, the executive orders Trump
had issued to restrict investment in certain companies affiliated with the
Chinese military and to block the import of Chinese technologies
deemed a national security threat. In a particularly important step, in
October 2022, Biden significantly expanded the Trump administration’s
controls on the export of high-end semiconductors and the equipment
used to make them, slowing Beijing’s plans to dominate the
manufacturing of advanced microchips. Across Asia, Biden’s diplomats
pulled longtime allies and newer partners closer together. They organized
the first summits of the Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue,
bringing together the leaders of Australia, India, Japan, and the United
States, and convened high-profile trilateral summits with the leaders of
Japan and South Korea. Biden also unveiled AUKUS, a defense pact
among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
As it turned out, however, aggression would come from the opposite
direction, in Europe. Less than three weeks before invading Ukraine,
Russian President Vladimir Putin had signed a “no limits” security pact
with Xi in Beijing. In a prudent step after the invasion, Biden drew a
redline by warning Xi in a video call that the U.S. government would
impose sweeping sanctions if China provided “material support” to
Moscow. Xi nonetheless found plenty of ways to support the Russian war
machine, sending semiconductors, unarmed drones, gunpowder, and other
wares. China also supplied Moscow with badly needed money in
exchange for major shipments of Russian oil. Chinese officials, according
to the U.S. State Department, even spent more money on pro-Russian
propaganda worldwide than Russia itself was spending.

Beijing was also coordinating more closely with Iran and North Korea,
even as those regimes sent weapons to help Moscow wage war in Europe.
Yet Washington was pursuing siloed policies—simultaneously resisting
Russia, appeasing Iran, containing North Korea, and pursuing a mix of
rivalry and engagement with China—that added up to something
manifestly incoherent. Indeed, the situation that Xi had forecast at the
start of the Biden administration was becoming a reality: “The most
important characteristic of the world is, in a word, ‘chaos,’ and this trend
appears likely to continue,” Xi told a seminar of high-level Communist
Party officials in January 2021. Xi made clear that this was a useful
development for China. “The times and trends are on our side,” he said,
adding, “Overall, the opportunities outweigh the challenges.” By March
2023, Xi had revealed that he saw himself not just as a beneficiary of
worldwide turmoil but also as one of its architects. “Right now, there are
changes, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years,” he said to Putin
on camera while wrapping up a visit to the Kremlin. “And we are the ones
driving these changes together.”
If ever the time was ripe to call out Beijing for fomenting chaos and to
start systematically imposing costs on the country in response, it was early
2023. Biden, inexplicably, was doing the opposite. On February 1,
residents of Montana spotted a massive, white sphere drifting eastward.
The administration was already tracking the Chinese spy balloon but had
been planning to let it pass overhead without notifying the public. Under
political pressure, Biden ordered the balloon shot down once it reached
the Atlantic Ocean, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a
scheduled trip to Beijing to protest the intrusion. Press reports suggested
the administration had kept quiet about the balloon in order to gather
intelligence about it. But a troubling pattern of downplaying affronts by
Beijing would persist in other contexts.

In June 2023, leaks to the press revealed that Beijing, in a remarkable echo
of the Cold War, was planning to build a joint military training base in
Cuba and had already developed a signals intelligence facility there
targeting the United States. After a National Security Council
spokesperson called reports about the spy facility inaccurate, a White
House official speaking anonymously to the press minimized them by
suggesting that Chinese spying from Cuba was “not a new development.”
The administration also greeted with a shrug new evidence suggesting
that COVID-19 may have initially spread after it accidentally leaked from
a Chinese laboratory. If the virus, which has led to the deaths of an
estimated 27 million people worldwide, turns out to have been artificially
enhanced before it escaped, the revelation would mark a turning point in
human history on par with the advent of nuclear weapons—a situation
that already cries out for U.S. leadership to govern dangerous biological
research worldwide.

In the spring of 2023, as Beijing’s actions grew bolder, Biden initiated

what the White House termed an “all hands on deck” diplomatic
campaign—not to impose costs on Beijing but to flatter it by dispatching
five cabinet-level U.S. officials to China from May to August. Blinken’s
June meeting with Xi symbolized the dynamic. Whereas Xi had sat
amiably alongside the billionaire Bill Gates just days earlier, the U.S.
secretary of state was seated off to the side as Xi held forth from the head
of a table at the Great Hall of the People. For the first time in years, Xi
appeared to have successfully positioned the United States as supplicant
in the bilateral relationship.

What did the United States get in return for all this diplomacy? In the
Biden administration’s tally, the benefits included a promise by Beijing to
resume military-to-military talks (which Beijing had unilaterally
suspended), a new dialogue on the responsible use of artificial intelligence
(technology that Beijing is already weaponizing against the American
people by spreading fake images and other propaganda on social media),
and tentative cooperation to stem the flood of precursor chemicals fueling
the fentanyl crisis in the United States (chemicals that are supplied
mainly by Chinese companies).

Any doubts that Xi saw the American posture as one of weakness were
dispelled after Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel. Beijing exploited the
attack by serving up endless anti-Israeli and anti-American propaganda
through TikTok, whose algorithms are subject to control by the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP). Chinese diplomats, like Russian ones, met with
Hamas’s leaders and provided diplomatic cover for the terrorist group,
vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that would have condemned
Hamas. And there is little sign Beijing has done anything, despite
Washington’s requests, to help rein in attacks carried out by the Houthis
on commercial vessels and U.S. warships in the Red Sea—attacks
conducted by the Yemeni rebel group using Iranian missiles, including
ones with technology pioneered by China. (Chinese ships, unsurprisingly,
are usually granted free passage through the kill zone.)
Whether Xi is acting opportunistically or according to a grand design—
or, almost certainly, both—it is clear he sees advantage in stoking crises
that he hopes will exhaust the United States and its allies. In a sobering
Oval Office address in mid-October, Biden seemed to grasp the severity
of the situation. “We’re facing an inflection point in history—one of those
moments where the decisions we make today are going to determine the
future for decades to come,” he said. Yet bizarrely—indeed, provocatively
—he made no mention of China, the chief sponsor of the aggressors he
did call out in the speech: Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Through
omission, Biden gave Beijing a pass.

THAT ’70S SHOW

The current moment bears an uncanny resemblance to the 1970s. The
Soviet Union was undermining U.S. interests across the world, offering no
warning of its ally Egypt’s 1973 surprise attack on Israel; aiding
communists in Angola, Portugal, and Vietnam; and rapidly expanding its
nuclear arsenal and investing heavily in its conventional military. These
were the bitter fruits of détente—a set of policies pioneered by President
Richard Nixon and his top foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, who
stayed on and continued the approach under President Gerald Ford. By
using pressure and inducement, as well as downplaying ideological
differences, the United States tried to lure the Russians into a stable
equilibrium of global power. Under détente, Washington slashed defense
spending and soft-pedaled Moscow’s human rights affronts. The working
assumption was that the Soviet Union’s appetite for destabilizing actions
abroad would somehow be self-limiting.

But the Russians had their own ideas about the utility of détente. As the
historian John Lewis Gaddis observed, the Soviets “might have viewed
détente as their own instrument for inducing complacency in the West
while they finished assembling the ultimate means of applying pressure—
their emergence as a full-scale military rival of the United States.” Nixon
and Kissinger thought détente would secure Soviet help in managing
crises around the world and, as Gaddis put it, “enmesh the U.S.S.R. in a
network of economic relationships that would make it difficult, if not
impossible, for the Russians to take actions in the future detrimental to
Western interests.” But the policy failed to achieve its goals.

President Jimmy Carter came into office in 1977 intending to keep

détente in place, but the policy didn’t work for him either. His attempt to
“de-link” Soviet actions that hurt U.S. interests from Soviet cooperation
on arms control ultimately yielded setbacks in both categories. The Soviets
became more aggressive globally, and a wary U.S. Congress, having lost
faith in Moscow’s sincerity, declined to ratify SALT II, the arms control
treaty that Carter’s team had painstakingly negotiated. Meanwhile,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, had grown
increasingly skeptical of détente. Brzezinski felt that a turning point had
come in 1978, after the Soviets sponsored thousands of Cuban soldiers to
wage violent revolution in the Horn of Africa, supporting Ethiopia in its
war with Somalia. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the following year
was “the final nail in the coffin” for arms control talks, Brzezinski wrote in
his journal—and for the broader policy of détente.

By the time President Ronald Reagan entered the White House, in 1981,
Nixon and Kissinger’s invention was on its last legs. “Détente’s been a
one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its aims,” Reagan
stated flatly in his first press conference as president, effectively burying
the concept.

Reagan sought to win, not merely manage, the Cold War. In a sharp
departure from his immediate predecessors, he spoke candidly about the
nature of the Soviet threat, recognizing that autocrats often bully
democracies into silence by depicting honesty as a form of aggression. In
1987, when Reagan was preparing to give a speech within sight of the
Berlin Wall, some of his aides begged him to remove a phrase they found
gratuitously provocative. Wisely, he overruled them and delivered the
most iconic line of his presidency: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

THE SMOKELESS WAR

Washington must adopt a similar attitude today and try harder to
disseminate truthful information within China itself and to make it
possible for Chinese citizens to communicate securely with one another.
Tearing down—or at least blowing holes in—the “Great Firewall” of
China must become as central to Washington’s approach today as
removing the Berlin Wall was for Reagan’s.

Beijing is waging a bitter information war against the United States—

which is losing, despite its natural advantages. Xi and his inner circle see
themselves as fighting an existential ideological campaign against the
West, as Xi’s words from an official publication in 2014 make clear:

The battle for “mind control” happens on a smokeless battlefield. It

happens inside the domain of ideology. Whoever controls this
battlefield can win hearts. They will have the initiative throughout the
competition and combat. . . . When it comes to combat in the ideology
domain, we don’t have any room for compromise or retreat. We must
achieve total victory.

For Xi, the Internet is the “main battlefield” of this smokeless war. In
2020, the scholar Yuan Peng, writing before he resurfaced under a new
name as a vice minister of China’s premier spy agency, also recognized the
power of controlling speech online: “In the Internet era . . . what is truth
and what is a lie is already unimportant; what’s important is who controls
discourse power.” Xi has poured billions of dollars into building and
harnessing what he calls “external discourse mechanisms,” and other
Chinese leaders have specifically highlighted short-video platforms such
as TikTok as the “megaphones” of discourse power. They aren’t afraid to
use those megaphones. According to a February 2024 report from the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, TikTok accounts run by
Chinese propaganda outfits “reportedly targeted candidates from both
political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022.”

As the CCP seeks to set the terms of global discourse, what it wants more
than anything from the United States and the rest of the West is silence—
silence about China’s human rights abuses, silence about its aggression
toward Taiwan, and silence about the West’s own deeply held beliefs,
which contrast irreconcilably with the party’s. It is no surprise, then, that
so much of the CCP’s strategy on the smokeless battlefield is about
drowning out speech it doesn’t like—both inside and outside China. It is
American silence—not candor—that is truly provocative, for it signals to
the CCP that China is advancing and the United States is retreating.

REARM, REDUCE, RECRUIT

What U.S. officials need first is clarity about the contest with China. They
have to recognize that rising tensions are inevitable in the short run if the
United States is to deter war and win the contest in the long run. Once
they have faced these facts, they need to put in place a better policy: one
that rearms the U.S. military, reduces China’s economic leverage, and
recruits a broader coalition to confront China.

Xi is preparing his country for a war over Taiwan. On its current

trajectory, the United States risks failing to deter that war, one that could
kill tens of thousands of U.S. service members, inflict trillions of dollars in
economic damage, and bring about the end of the global order as we
know it. The only path to avoid this future is for Washington to
immediately build and surge enough hard power to deny Xi a successful
invasion of Taiwan. Yet the Biden administration’s latest budget request
sheds badly needed combat power, proposing the retirement of ten ships
and 250 aircraft and a drop in the production goal for Virginia-class
submarines from two per year to just one. It replenishes only half the $1
billion that Congress authorized for the president to furnish military aid
to Taiwan. And in its 2023 supplemental request, the White House asked
for just over $5 billion in weapons and industrial base spending earmarked
for the Indo-Pacific—barely five percent of the entire supplemental
request. Looking at the budget trend line, one would think it was 1994,
not 2024.

The Biden administration should immediately change course, reversing

what are, in inflation-adjusted terms, cuts to defense spending. Instead of
spending about three percent of GDP on defense, Washington should
spend four or even five percent, a level that would still be at the low end of
Cold War spending. For near-term deterrence in the Taiwan Strait, it
should spend an additional $20 billion per year for the next five years, the
rough amount needed to surge and disperse sufficient combat power in
Asia. Ideally, this money would be held in a dedicated “deterrence fund”
overseen by the secretary of defense, who would award resources to
projects that best align with the defense of Taiwan.

The deterrence fund should headline a generational effort directed by the

president to restore U.S. primacy in Asia. The priority should be to
maximize existing production lines and build new production capacity for
critical munitions for Asia, such as antiship and antiaircraft missiles that
can destroy enemy targets at great distances. The Pentagon should also
draw on the deterrence fund to adapt existing military systems or even
civilian technology such as commercially available drones that could be
useful for defending Taiwan. Complementing its Replicator Initiative,
which tasks the services to field thousands of low-cost drones to turn the
Taiwan Strait into what some have called “a boiling moat,” the Pentagon
should quickly embrace other creative solutions. It could, for example,
disperse missile launchers concealed in commercial container boxes or
field the Powered Joint Direct Attack Munition, a low-cost kit that turns
standard 500-pound bombs into precision-guided cruise missiles.

For U.S. forces to actually deter China, they need to be able to move
within striking range. Given the maritime geography of the Indo-Pacific
and the threat that China’s vast missile arsenal poses to U.S. bases, the
State Department will need to expand hosting and access agreements with
allies and partners to extend the U.S. military’s footprint in the region.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, will need to harden U.S. military installations
across the region and pre-position critical supplies such as fuel,
ammunition, and equipment throughout the Pacific.

But the United States could keep the Chinese military contained and still
lose the new cold war if China held the West hostage economically.
Beijing is bent on weaponizing its stranglehold over global supply chains
and its dominance of critical emerging technologies. To reduce Chinese
leverage and ensure that the United States, not China, develops the key
technologies of the future, Washington needs to reset the terms of the
bilateral economic relationship. It should start by repealing China’s
permanent normal trade relations status, which provides China access to
U.S. markets on generous terms, and moving China to a new tariff
column that features gradually increasing rates on products critical to U.S.
national security and economic competitiveness. The revenue raised from
increased tariffs could be spent on offsetting the costs that U.S. exporters
will incur as a result of China’s inevitable retaliatory measures and on
bolstering U.S. supply chains for strategically important products.

Washington must also halt the flow of American money and technology
to Chinese companies that support Beijing’s military buildup and high-
tech surveillance system. The Biden administration’s August 2023
executive order restricting a subset of outbound investment to China was
an important step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough.
Washington must expand investment restrictions to include critical and
emerging technologies such as hypersonics, space systems, and new
biotechnologies. It must also put an end to U.S. financial firms’ disturbing
practice of offering publicly traded financial products, such as exchange-
traded funds and mutual funds, that invest in Chinese companies that are
on U.S. government blacklists. Using the current export controls on
advanced semiconductors as a model, the Department of Commerce
should reduce the flow of critical technology to China by introducing
similar export bans on other key areas of U.S. innovation, such as
quantum computing and biotechnology.

As China doubles down on economic self-reliance and phases out imports

of industrial goods from the West, the United States needs to recruit a
coalition of friendly partners to deepen mutual trade. Washington should
strike a bilateral trade agreement with the United Kingdom. It should
upgrade its bilateral trade agreement with Japan and establish a new one
with Taiwan, agreements that could be joined by other eligible economies
in the region. It should forge an Indo-Pacific digital trade agreement that
would facilitate the free flow of data between like-minded economies,
using as a baseline the high standards set by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada
Agreement.

To overhaul its dilapidated defense industrial base, the United States

should turbocharge innovation in the defense industry by recruiting
talented workers from allied countries. Every year, the U.S. government
authorizes roughly 10,000 visas through the EB-5 program, which allows
immigrants to obtain a green card if they invest hundreds of thousands of
dollars in American businesses. The program is rife with fraud and has
deviated far from its intended purpose as a job-creation program,
becoming mostly a method for millionaires from China and other places
to become permanent residents. These visas should be repurposed as work
authorizations for citizens of partner countries who hold advanced
degrees in fields critical to defense.

The U.S. government also needs to recruit the next generation of cold
warriors to apply their talents to the contest with China. It should start by
reversing the crisis in military recruitment—not by lowering standards,
promising easy pay, or infusing the force with diversity, equity, and
inclusion ideology but by unapologetically touting the virtues of an elite,
colorblind, all-volunteer force and challenging young Americans to step
up. The intelligence community also needs to recruit experts in emerging
technology, finance, and open-source research and make it easier to
temporarily leave the private sector for a stint in government. National
security agencies need to cultivate deep expertise in Asia and in the
history and ideology of the CCP. The curricula of the service academies
and war colleges, as well as ongoing professional military education,
should reflect this shift.

Finally, U.S. officials need to recruit everyday Americans to contribute to

the fight. For all the differences between the Soviet Union yesterday and
China today, U.S. policymakers’ squeamishness about the term “cold war”
causes them to overlook the way it can mobilize society. A cold war offers
a relatable framework that Americans can use to guide their own
decisions—such as a company’s choice whether to set up a sensitive
research and development center in China or an individual’s choice
whether to download TikTok. Too often, however, elected officials on the
left and the right give the impression that the competition with China is
so narrow in scope that Americans can take such steps without worry. The
contest with Beijing, they would have people believe, shouldn’t much
concern ordinary citizens but will be handled through surgically precise
White House policies and congressional legislation.

CHINA AS A NORMAL COUNTRY

It is a peculiar feature of U.S. foreign policy today that the elephant in the
room—the end state Washington desires in its competition with Beijing
—is such a taboo subject that administrations come and go without ever
articulating a clear goal for how the competition ends. The Biden
administration offers up managing competition as a goal, but that is not a
goal; it is a method, and a counterproductive one at that. Washington is
allowing the aim of its China policy to become process: meetings that
should be instruments through which the United States advances its
interests become core objectives in and of themselves.

Washington should not fear the end state desired by a growing number of
Chinese: a China that is able to chart its own course free from communist
dictatorship. Xi’s draconian rule has persuaded even many CCP members
that the system that produced China’s recent precipitous decline in
prosperity, status, and individual happiness is one that deserves
reexamination. The system that produced an all-encompassing
surveillance state, forced-labor colonies, and the genocide of minority
groups inside its borders is one that likewise desecrates Chinese
philosophy and religion—the fountainheads from which a better model
will eventually spring.

Generations of American leaders understood that it would have been

unacceptable for the Cold War to end through war or U.S. capitulation. If
the 1970s taught Washington anything, it is that trying to achieve a stable
and durable balance of power—a détente—with a powerful and ambitious
Leninist dictatorship is also doomed to backfire on the United States. The
best strategy, which found its ultimate synthesis in the Reagan years, was
to convince the Soviets that they were on a path to lose, which in turn
fueled doubts about their whole system.

The U.S. victory wasn’t Reagan’s alone, of course. It was built on strategies
forged by presidents of both parties and manifested in documents such as
NSC-68, the 1950 Truman administration policy paper that argued that
the United States’ “policy and actions must be such as to foster a
fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system.” One can draw a
straight line from that document to National Security Decision Directive
75, the 1983 Reagan administration order that called for “internal
pressure on the USSR to weaken the sources of Soviet imperialism.” In
some ways, it was the détente years, not the Reagan years, that were an
aberration in Cold War strategy.

Ironically, Reagan would end up pursuing a more fulsome and productive

engagement with the Soviets than perhaps any of his predecessors—but
only after he had strengthened Washington’s economic, military, and
moral standing relative to Moscow and only after the Soviet Union
produced a leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom Reagan could make
real progress. Reagan understood that sequencing was everything. He also
knew that the confrontational first phase wouldn’t be easy or comfortable.
His first directive on national security strategy, in May 1982, predicted,
“The decade of the eighties will likely pose the greatest challenge to our
survival and well-being since World War II.” It was a tense and unsettling
period, to be sure, during which Reagan called out the Soviet Union as
“the focus of evil in the modern world” and deliberately sought to weaken
its economy and contest its destabilizing activities around the world. Yet it
paid off.

Xi, who has vilified Gorbachev and fashioned his own leadership style
after that of Joseph Stalin, has proved time and again that he is not a
leader with whom Americans can solve problems. He is an agent of chaos.
Washington should seek to weaken the sources of CCP imperialism and
hold out for a Chinese leader who behaves less like an unrelenting foe.
This does not mean forcible regime change, subversion, or war. But it does
mean seeking truth from facts, as Chinese leaders are fond of saying, and
understanding that the CCP has no desire to coexist indefinitely with
great powers that promote liberal values and thus represent a fundamental
threat to its rule.

The current mass exodus of Chinese people from their homeland is

evidence they want to live in nations that respect human rights, honor the
rule of law, and offer a wide choice of opportunities. As Taiwan’s example
makes plain, China could be such a place, too. The road to get there might
be long. But for the United States’ own security, as well as the rights and
aspirations of all those in China, it is the only workable destination.

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