Analysis 

Is the Biden Administration Going Soft on China?

A policy shift toward economic engagement with Beijing seems to be underway in the White House.

By Danielle Pletka, a distinguished senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. 

A closeup photo shows Xi and Biden standing next to each other and smiling at each other with a Chinese flag in the background.

Chinese President Xi Jinping (left) and U.S. President Joe Biden meet on the sidelines of the G‑20 summit in Nusa Dua, a resort area on the Indonesian island of Bali, on Nov. 14, 2022. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

May 25, 2023, 11:39 AM

The need to counter China has been a welcome area of bipartisan consensus in a Washington riven over everything from nuclear modernization to chicken nuggets. But the bipartisan concordat on China is ending, foundering over politics, ideology, and economic expediency. And the biggest beneficiary? The People’s Republic of China. 

The need to counter China has been a welcome area of bipartisan consensus in a Washington riven over everything from nuclear modernization to chicken nuggets. But the bipartisan concordat on China is ending, foundering over politics, ideology, and economic expediency. And the biggest beneficiary? The People’s Republic of China.
The break has been coming for some months, a product of myriad, disparate fears among Democrats—a progressive backlash to the alleged “drumbeat to war”; claims that standing up to China is fostering anti-Asian sentiment in the public at large; a desire to draw a contrast with increasing Republican bellicosity; and an appeal to younger generations more skeptical of the need to confront rising powers. And if that’s not enough, don’t forget the possible recession headed America’s way—not the ideal moment for economic conflict—as well as ever-present business lobbying insisting that national security not interfere with corporate profits.
Then there’s the fretting of the liberal commentariat: Jon Bateman argued in a December Politico piece that “The Fevered Anti-China Attitude in Washington Is Going to Backfire.” The New York Times’s Tom Friedman warned, “If it is not the goal of U.S. foreign policy to topple the Communist regime in China, the United States needs to make that crystal clear.” In the pages of the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria cautioned that “Washington has succumbed to dangerous groupthink on China.” And éminence grise Graham Allison has returned repeatedly to his Thucydides trap warning of 2015, reupping it in 2022 to liken then‑U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan to Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s visit to Sarajevo (a visit that nominally sparked World War I).
Needless to say, the musings of Washington’s chattering classes are not always dispositive indicators of a policy shift. But I have been told by several insiders that the White House is keenly attuned to these criticisms from Biden stalwarts in the press. And thus, a shift.
U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan all but announced the new policy in a recent speech, explaining: “We are for de-risking and diversifying, not decoupling. We’ll keep investing in our own capacities, and in secure, resilient supply chains. We’ll keep pushing for a level playing field for our workers and companies and defending against abuses.” In other words, for the Biden administration, at least nominally, attention is going to shift first and foremost to cultivating the economic relationship with Beijing, with a little industrial policy thrown in for good measure.

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Nicholas Burns testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing on his nomination to be ambassador to China in Washington on Oct. 20, 2021.

Nicholas Burns testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing on his nomination to be ambassador to China in Washington on Oct. 20, 2021.

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