It is an eventful several weeks. Most dramatically the 20th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party has launched – indeed it is approaching its conclusion. There is little doubt that Xi Jinping will claim a third term ending the effort by earlier leaders to limit leadership to two terms. His statements will likely be our best guide to Chinese foreign policy for the immediate future. But more on that in a future blog post.

And then there’s the Biden Administration’s release of the National Security Strategy (NSS). The NSS explains the security priorities of the administration to both Congress and the American public and is a legislatively mandated document.This strategic document was about to be released in February of this year but was delayed as the Russia-Ukraine war loomed. With its release just a few days ago, we get some big picture framing for Biden Administration security and foreign policy. Indeed, the advance press call held by Jake Sullivan, the United States National Security Advisor to President Joe Biden, on the day of the document’s release provides an interesting summary and insight of current US policy. Jake sets it out:

The fundamental premise of the strategy is that we have entered a decisive decade with respect to two fundamental strategic challenges. The first is the competition between the major powers to shape the future of the international order. And the second is that while this competition is underway, we need to deal with a set of transnational challenges that are affecting people everywhere, including here in the United States — from climate change to food insecurity, to communicable diseases, to terrorism, to the energy transition, to inflation.

 

And this strategy makes clear that these shared challenges are not marginal issues, they are not secondary to geopolitics, but they operate on a plane alongside the competition — the geopolitical competition with major powers.

 

Now, of course, there are tensions between trying to rally cooperation to solve these shared challenges and trying to position ourselves effectively to prevail in strategic competition. But there are also ways in which these are reinforcing. And we believe fundamentally that the core elements of what the United States must do in the years ahead is — are the same for both sets of challenges.

 

Specifically, we need to invest in the underlying sources and tools of American power and influence, especially our strength here at home, both for the purpose of effective competition and for the purpose of being set up to rally the world to solve shared challenges.

 

Second, we need to build the strongest possible coalition of nations to enhance our collective influence, both to shape the global strategic environment and to address these transnational threats that require cooperation to succeed. And finally, we need to set the rules of the road for the 21st century in critical areas — from emerging technologies in cyberspace, to trade, economics, investment, and more — both so that the international order continues to reflect our values and our interests and so that the international order is better designed to be able to take on the challenges ahead.

 

So this decisive decade is critical both for defining the terms of competition, particularly with the PRC, and for getting ahead of massive challenges that if we lose the time in this decade, we will not be able to keep pace with most notably the climate crisis, but other challenges as well.

 

There is a strong assertion by the Biden Administration in this document in the value for it in pursuing both competition, especially with China, the main strategic contender, and acting on  multilateral collaboration to tackle the dramatic transnational challenges most critically climate change.

Our colleague Anne-Marie Slaughter, President of CAP assessed succinctly her view of the NSS. In an opinion piece in the FT she described the document as “thoughtful and clear”. She then elaborated:

Most important, the new strategy elevates global threats like climate change and pandemics to an equal footing with geopolitical competition and conflict with China, Russia and other autocracies. The US faces “two strategic challenges”, it says. The first is a competition “between the major powers to shape what comes next” after the end of the post-cold war era. The second is a cluster of “shared challenges that cross borders”, including “climate change, food insecurity, communicable diseases, terrorism, energy shortages, or inflation”.

The compete and and also collaborate strategy identified in the NSS, what Anne-Marie calls the “two strategic challenges”,   is underscored  by our colleague, Bruce Jones at Brookings. in his assessment of the NSS. His is view – expressed along with assessments from many of his Brookings colleagues is that the unedifying discussion and tension between a US geopolitical focus and primacy as opposed to a global governance focus is over: As Bruce definitively reflects:

The new NSS puts to rest the least edifying debate in Washington: Should geopolitics or transnational threats primarily pre-occupy U.S. foreign policy? There’s no escaping the reality of great power contestation, and the strategy embraces it. But there’s also no escaping the fact that American lives have been profoundly shaken by transnational challenges. The NSS kicks off a needed debate, too, about how to sustain some type of cooperation against shared challenges while contesting vigorously in the strategic domain.

The resolution, according to Jones and many others, of the tension between geopolitics and global governance is clear is that both must be pursued. The dilemma is, it just may not work, especially, or particularly when it comes to China, the primary geopolitical competitor and at the same time the absolutely necessary partner and collaborator for overwhelming transnational threats.

This strategic approach relies on some form “compartmentalization”. Such an approach accepts that the United States and China can compete in numerous arenas including in the Asia-Pacific and the South China Sea, technology, the global economy but at the same time the two leading powers can set aside those tensions and conflicts and work together and with others, and more pointedly collaboratively in forwarding critical threats global climate change, debt relief, global health etc. But as pointed out by Ethan Paul  in Lawfare (2021) : “Later in September, [2021] Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Biden administration climate envoy John Kerry that “China-US cooperation on climate change cannot be divorced from the overall situation of China-US relations.” Wang called on the United States to “stop viewing China as a threat and rival, and cease containing and suppressing China all over the world,” adding that “he who tied the knot should untie it. The ball is now in the US’ court.”

We also saw China suspending and eliminating various bilateral US-China discussions following Nancy Pelosi’s travel to Taiwan. And, it remains somewhat up in the air whether China will be prepared to finalize even a meeting between President Xi and President Biden at the margins of the Bali G20 Leaders’ Summit. Now it may be that some of these issues are so critical that both sides will be driven to overcome an unwillingness to engage the other in critical discussions due to the threats posed.

Now, its also possible to contemplate a form of, what I would call, ‘minimal collaboration’ to reduce the threat faced by all. This in fact what Bruce Jones explores in a report prepared for the Council on Foreign Relations – “Major Power Rivalry and the Management of Global Threats”.

I will turn to this approach in an upcoming post.