The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Michael Brenes – co-director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in History at Yale University and co-author of “The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy” (Yale 2025) – is the 466th in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.”
Examine the origins of great power competition in the Cold War.
In the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a global competition for allies, influence, and security. To many policymakers in the United States, this competition was existential in nature. And while the Cold War yielded some benefits for Americans – good paying jobs in defense factories, an impetus to ameliorate racial inequality – the Cold War was also incredibly violent, destructive, and furthered conspiracy theories, xenophobia, and reactionary politics around the world.
But when great power competition emerged in 2015 as a framework for U.S. grand strategy, the memory of the Cold War promulgated by foreign policymakers – now used to justify a “New Cold War” with China – was one that ignored this history. They viewed the Cold War as a “long peace” that led to an unequivocal U.S. victory; freedom and democracy triumphed over an “evil empire.” This limited, if not distorted memory of the Cold War has come to underlie the premises of great-power competition with China. That is, policymakers believe that the U.S. must wage a protracted, unending conflict with a foreign enemy for the benefit of global freedom.
This concept of great power competition, one born from a misreading of the Cold War, is our concern. It elides the violence and anti-democratic politics inherent to the Cold War and how they might reemerge in a “New Cold War” with China.
How does geopolitical rivalry with China poison U.S. politics?
Rivalry with China animates a host of bad-faith actors who use the China threat as a cudgel against their political opponents. “China-bashing” has pervaded American politics, in both conspicuous and insidious ways. Accusations of being “soft on China” circulate in mainstream politics. This occurs mostly within right-wing circles, but Democrats are also guilty of using the China threat to paint their opponents as weak or unprepared to take on the challenges of the 21st century.
Take the 2022 Ohio Senate race between Tim Ryan and J.D. Vance. Both accused the other of being insufficiently tough on China; both claimed that China had stolen American jobs – ignoring the fact that the “China shock” had been a global phenomenon, one encouraged by U.S. policymakers.
China rivalry has also, in our view, exacerbated xenophobia and nativism, leading to an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States, particularly during COVID. This is particularly destructive for a multiracial, pluralistic democracy like the United States. Demonizing an enemy “other” is not going to rejuvenate our politics, end polarization or unite the American public. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Analyze how China-U.S. rivalry worsens economic inequality.
Former President Biden remade U.S.-China rivalry during his four years in office. Under President Trump (his first term), competition with China was just that: competition for the sake of competition, to keep China down and the U.S. the predominant power in the world. But Biden sought to combine his domestic agenda with his foreign policy agenda. Build Back Better or “Bidenomics” reflected the sense among Biden officials that China rivalry could remake our economy and provide good paying jobs to outcompete China in sectors of advance technology and climate. But “Bidenomics” proved to have limited consequences and failed to create jobs on a mass scale.
Using China rivalry to revive the American welfare state, by design, can’t create the jobs and development needed to provide economic relief to Americas on a national scale; Bidenomics through China rivalry did not and could not provide a “New New Deal.” The economic policies to emerge from rivalry have heightened the sense among the American public that the gulf between the wealthy and the poor widened during Biden’s presidency. And the statistics bear this out.
Explain why the U.S. should relinquish its ambitions for primacy in order to reach a sustainable equilibrium with China.
Pursuing primacy in an increasingly multipolar era is not going to have the same results as it did during the Cold War. Primacy could work in a bipolar framework akin to the Cold War (where one superpower could dominate over the other), but as I stated already, we are not in a “New Cold War.” Pursuing primacy in 2025 is anachronistic; you can’t, by definition, achieve primacy in a multipolar order.
We already see the limits of trying to maintain American primacy through China rivalry. China vastly outnumbers the United States in the production of climate technology (solar, wind turbines, electric vehicles). It is responsible for almost 50 percent of global manufacturing, leading industries such as steel and aluminum. The United States cannot catch up to China on these fronts. Trying to dominate China in all facets, in all domains, is simply unreasonable and will only breed mutual antagonism and anti-China and anti-American sentiment.
A better approach recognizes that primacy, or some version of it, can be remade to accommodate a multipolar order. I don’t think the United States is going to abdicate its position in the world; nor will national security officials reject primacy voluntarily. More likely is that global conditions are going to catch up to the United States and force a reckoning that reveals the fruitlessness of primacy, which I think is already happening to a certain extent. But in an ideal world, the United States would not wait for structural conditions to wake us up. We would try to accommodate this multipolar order, recognizing that there are many “fence sitters” in the Global South who do not want to choose between the United States or China, and that the U.S. will be economically reliant upon China – and countries that depend on China’s economic power – for the foreseeable future.
What is the alternative to great power rivalry between the U.S. and China?
The alternative begins with abandoning primacy as the means and ends of U.S. foreign policy. But it then entails the United States prioritizing opportunities for cooperation as opposed to competition with China. We lay out some of these areas in the book: engaging in war prevention as opposed to war preparation, particularly regarding Taiwan and its security, working with China on climate change and global debt relief, rolling back protectionist, nationalist policies, including the Trump tariffs, that harm consumers, limit economic growth, and fuel irrational animosity toward China. Pursuing a more cooperative stance also limits the possibility of threat inflation, which is a real danger and one of the most unfortunate outcomes of a near decade-long era of U.S.-China rivalry.