A failure to connect competitive means to clear ends in China policy will allow U.S. policy to drift towards competition for competition's sake and fall into a dangerous cycle of confrontation.

In 2019, Sullivan and Kurt Campbell wrote in Foreign Affairs calling for the U.S. to establish 'favorable terms of coexistence' with Beijing across military, economic, and political issues, rejecting transformation-based approaches.

Steve Hadley is one of Jake Sullivan's predecessors as National Security Advisor and has spent much of his life wrestling with U.S.-China policy questions.

The current consensus in Washington views China as a very significant threat; complacency about China is no longer widespread, but this consensus view carries a risk of groupthink where policymakers underplay the fundamental internal challenges China faces (corruption, demographics, inequality) and instead focus narrowly on the threat China poses, creating a distorted threat assessment.

Before China's WTO accession in 2001, China was already receiving the same market access as every other country through annual votes for Most Favored Nation (MFN) status, so they were already exporting to the US market at comparable rates; WTO membership therefore did not primarily grant them market access that they did not already have.

The reform trajectory that Chinese leadership appeared to commit to after WTO accession did not go as far, did not go as fast, and was not as linear as many Western observers expected and were led to believe by Chinese leadership; this divergence occurred first under Hu Jintao and then very much under Xi Jinping.

Xi Jinping's policies reversed the reform trajectory—specifically, he reasserted party integration back into the private sector, created a chilling effect on foreign investment, and IP theft and market-squeezing practices by Chinese state competitors drove away the business community as the 'ballast' in the US-China relationship, leaving only military and political hawks without a counterweight advocating for engagement.

China does not have an explicitly articulated vision for a new world order that it wants to replace the US-led system with; instead, Xi Jinping's four rejuvenation objectives were purely domestic political in focus, and China says it wants to participate in and benefit from the existing world order rather than fundamentally replace it.

No country has benefited more from the open rules-based globalist system that the US helped put in place after World War II than China, which achieved economic success through the benign international environment that allowed it to export-led growth.

Every country pursues its national interests first, but some countries historically define those interests in an 'enlightened way' where they see value in providing global public goods and are willing to make sacrifices or compromises; thus far, China has been able to avoid providing such global public goods and defines its interests narrowly.

Over the last five months (since the Trump administration began), the US has driven Europe away by imposing tariffs on European goods, causing Europe to seek a 'third way' between full US alignment and accommodation with China, thereby undoing the security alignment that China's Ukraine stance had previously created.

Export controls on semiconductor technology have been quite successful in constraining China's technological advancement; the evidence is China's neuralgic (highly sensitive and reactive) response to export controls—they are China's top grievance, more concerning to China than tariffs—indicating that export controls are having significant effect.

The question of whether a 6-month or 2-year technology lead matters is unresolved; it depends on whether a short technological lead can be converted into something that fundamentally transforms the world, or whether it only provides bragging rights while the adversary eventually catches up.

The US should pursue a strategy of staying ahead of China through denying them cutting-edge technology access AND through continued investment in US innovation and making sure the US is 'running as fast as we possibly can'—a combination of offensive (innovation) and defensive (restriction) measures.

If Trump made a transactional deal on Taiwan, it would likely involve the US accepting that Taiwan is not worth defending US lives for, extracting 50% of TSMC's manufacturing capacity as compensation, which Xi would 'take in a heartbeat'—a deal where Trump exchanges strategic asset for economic value.

The best case scenario is 'selective decoupling'—not complete economic separation but addressing specific unacceptable dependencies (critical minerals, semiconductors, rare earths) and coming to agreement on what a sustainable economic relationship should look like, while the extent of decoupling in strategic sectors remains undefined.

The US ambassador to Afghanistan recounts that the Chinese ambassador explicitly told him 'Please don't pull your troops out of Afghanistan too quickly. We need them to protect our mines,' revealing that China was willing to see US forces deployed to secure Chinese economic interests.

PEPFAR was an incredibly successful program that created significant US goodwill across Africa, was not very expensive, and China could displace that goodwill by simply taking it over for approximately $8 billion per year—yet China chooses not to, revealing preference for influence without responsibility.

The consensus view in Washington has shifted from a few years ago when there was disagreement between those who thought China was '12 feet tall' and those who thought it was '2 feet tall,' with the vast majority now viewing China as a very significant threat, which creates a risk of groupthink where the policy realm tends to underplay China's internal structural challenges in favor of focusing on the threat China poses.

China viewed WTO accession as a mechanism to force difficult economic reform internally (including making tens of millions of Chinese unemployed as they restructured state-owned enterprises) and to lock itself into a commitment to stay on a path of economic liberalization, not merely to gain market access.