What Now? A symposium on the future of the United States.

• Author: Allison, Graham T.

Graham T. Allison

The rise of China presents the most complex international challenge any American president has ever faced. China is at one and the same time the fiercest rival the United States has ever seen, and also a nation with which the United States will have to find ways to co-exist--since the only alternative is to co-destruct. If Xi Jinping's Party-led autocracy realizes its dream, Beijing will displace Washington from many of the positions of leadership it has become accustomed to during the American Century. Unless China can be persuaded to constrain itself and indeed cooperate with the United States, it will be impossible to avoid catastrophic war or preserve a climate in which both can breathe.

To meet this challenge, President-elect Joe Biden and his team will have to craft a strategy that passes what F. Scott Fitzgerald defined as the test of a first-class mind. In Fitzgerald's words, it is "to hold two contradictory ideas in one's head at the same time and still function." Fortunately, in sharp contrast with his predecessor, Biden comes to this test well prepared. Seasoned by decades of experience as vice president, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a legislator during the Cold War, he has wrestled with the hardest choices and developed considered views about how the world works.

On the one hand, unless it crashes or cracks up, Xi's China will be "the biggest player in the history of the world," as Lee Kuan Yew once put it. With four times as many people as the United States, if Chinese were only one-half as productive as Americans, China would have a GDP twice our size. That would allow it to invest twice as much in defense as we do. Since the beginning of this century, China has risen to become the largest economy in the world (according to the metric the CIA judges the best yardstick for comparing national economies). Today, it is also the manufacturing workshop of the world, the No. 1 trading partner of most major economies, and since the financial crisis of 2008, the primary engine of global economic growth. At the end of 2020, only one major economy will be larger than it was at the beginning of the year. And that is not the United States of America.

To create a correlation of forces that can shape this China's behavior, the United States will have to attract other nations with heft to sit on our side of the seesaw of power. Despite President Donald Trump's disdain for allies, his vice president and secretary of state recognized this imperative. But their hope to take a page from America's successful strategy in the Cold War by persuading other nations to "decouple'' from China behind a new economic iron curtain misunderstood the underlying realities. As a politician, Biden knows that the mandate of other countries' leaders to govern depends on their ability to deliver increasing standards of living for their people. Any attempts to force them to choose between their military relationship with the United States that makes them secure, and their economic relationship with China that is essential for their prosperity, are thus a fool's errand. Enlisting allied and aligned powers in a much more complex web will be vastly more difficult than it was when confronting the Soviet Union.

On the other hand, Biden knows full well that the United States and China share a small globe on which each faces existential challenges it cannot defeat by itself. Technology and nature have condemned these two great powers to find ways to live together in order to avoid dying together. As a veteran Cold Warrior, Biden understands in a way most of today's generation do not that we continue to live in a MAD world. He recalls how difficult it was for American policymakers to get their minds around the concept of nuclear MAD--mutually assured destruction--and to accept its strategic implications for sane statecraft. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy and his successors learned the lesson Ronald Reagan summarized succinctly in his favorite bumper sticker: a nuclear war cannot be won and must therefore never be fought. Realizing what that meant in practice for the U.S. rivalry with the Evil Empire was a huge struggle--one in which Biden spent countless hours helping Senate colleagues appreciate.

Today, in addition to nuclear MAD, President-elect Biden knows that we also face Climate MAD. Sharing a small globe on which we breathe the same air, either one of the top two emitters of greenhouse gases can disrupt the climate so severely that neither can live in it. Recognizing that reality, Biden worked with President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry to hammer out a climate accord with China that made possible the international Paris Agreement that began to bend these curves. While Trump withdrew from this agreement, Biden will rejoin it on Day 1 and seek to work with China to stretch to more ambitious targets.

In sum, the challenge posed by China is daunting. But brute facts are impossible to ignore. Having overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles to become the forty-sixth president of the United States, Biden will be ruthlessly realistic about the magnitude of this challenge, and unflinching in his determination to do what has to be done.

Emma Ashford

There's some truth to the saying that you can't go home again. It would be a tragedy--and worse, a wasted opportunity--if we allowed misplaced nostalgia for the world before Trump to determine the future of U.S. foreign policy, pushing us back to an imagined past, rather than forward into a changing world. Donald Trump has railed against the conventional wisdoms of U.S. foreign policy. He has smashed much of the post-Cold War consensus on foreign policy, forcing Washington's foreign policy elites to question-or at least attempt to explain and justify-their approach to the world. Joe Biden's promised "restoration" of pre-Trump U.S. foreign policy will undoubtedly serve to repair some of the damage that Donald Trump has done to the country, but it also has the potential to undermine that change, taking us back to an untenable foreign policy status quo.

Donald Trump's foreign policy legacy is deeper than the surface-level controversies might suggest. Certainly, his tenure saw wild swings in policy, and repeated, embarrassing attempts to conduct foreign policy by tweet. He failed to do many of the things he promised: he didn't pull out of Iraq, Syria, or Afghanistan; his trade war with China largely backfired; he didn't improve relations with Russia; and his maximum pressure campaign on Iran brought it closer to a nuclear weapon. But Trump's presidency also has two bigger long-term implications. First, he empowered a breed of hawkish, Jacksonian nationalism within the GOP that will likely endure long after he himself is gone. From conservative think tanks to the Trump National Security Strategy, the GOP has almost-uniformly shifted away from the nation-building and freedom agenda of neoconservatives towards an America First view of the world. Shorn of Trump's own personal eccentricities, that view will be far more coherent, if not necessarily more palatable. Second, Trump's term in office also served to undermine a variety of foreign policy orthodoxies. From globalization and trade to allied burden-sharing and the war on terror, Trump forced America's foreign policy elites to re-examine their assumptions about the world, and to confront the ways that it has changed since 1991. In a crude way, Trump identified many of the problems with America's post-Cold War foreign policy consensus, though he himself proved unable to resolve most of them. Unfortunately, Biden is promising the opposite. His campaign slogan was "Build Back Better," and the candidate and his surrogates repeatedly emphasized their desire to return to a "more normal" foreign policy, one characterized by multilateralism and American "leadership" in the world. Though the vague phrasing may be common to all presidential campaigns, the sentiment is clear: Biden hopes to "restore" American foreign policy to the way it was before Trump, reassuring allies and reasserting America's dominant role on the world stage. Many of his top advisors are almost certain to seek a return to the bipartisan liberal internationalist status quo that has characterized U.S. foreign policy since 1991. This would be a mistake.

Certainly, a return to normal would be welcome in some areas. Joe Biden is unlikely to tweet threats at other world leaders, and his administration's policies are likely to be more coherent and better communicated. Even a return to the status quo would be better than the Trump administration in a variety of areas, from global pandemic cooperation to Iran policy. But simply returning to the status quo in U.S. foreign policy is also a waste of the opportunities offered by the end of the Trump era. Trump smashed through some of the norms that bound prior presidents; negotiating with North Korea without preconditions, for example. And he worsened or brought to light many of the existing problems with America's foreign policy. His aggressive use of sanctions dramatically increased awareness of the long-running problem of sanctions overuse, for example. His choice to lay waste to the State Department sparked a discussion about the unbalanced nature of U.S. foreign policy funding in recent years, and the way it emphasizes military spending over funding for diplomacy, aid, or other tools of foreign policy.

If Biden takes us backwards--to the preTrump era--rather than forwards to a new consensus, he will squander the opportunity to fix these problems. Take allied burden-sharing, for example. It has been a problem for decades, but it took Trump's brash public denunciations to finally make it a public issue. If Biden simply returns to the status quo of politely asked for increases in spending, it is unlikely to improve. Instead, he should maintain pressure on...