How to Ride A Wild Dragon

"A National Security Council memo to President Trump, drafted in late 2016, laid out the facts very clearly: "China's aspiration is manifestly not to settle for a balance of power with the United States, [it is] to achieve hegemony over its neighbors and the Western Pacific." Moreover, this "goal of hemispheric supremacy isn't the whim of President Xi Jinping," since 2012 the head of the Chinese Communist Party. "It stems from Party aspirations going back decades; Xi is merely accelerating the timeline."

While a few foreign-policy experts had long been alarmed by the CCP's bid for primacy, it took the advent of the Trump administration, unconstrained by the conventional wisdom of the Sinocracy, to get Washington to counter Mr. Xi's stepped-up ambitions. Josh Rogin's superbly researched "Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century" is the first book-length dive into that newborn competition.

The book's main theme is that, even with all of its serious downsides, Trumpian chaos and a relentless disregard for "how things are done" actually enabled his national-security policy team to innovate. One outcome of this creativity was a new whole-of-government approach that brought in Attorney General William Barr and FBI director Christopher Wray. Both led efforts to uncover a vast CCP network of political influence, espionage, and technology theft in the U.S.

Indeed, a new American focus on the CCP's campaigns of internal subversion might be the Trump administration's most enduring policy innovation. Alongside Beijing's military modernization and oft-flexed diplomatic muscle, China has also been spreading its influence inside the U.S. and throughout the West to weaken resolve and co-opt elites. Mr. Rogin, a columnist for the Global Opinions section of the Washington Post, reports that China "hawks" on Team Trump enlisted foreign experts such as Australia's John Garnaut, who had helped confront the CCP's malign influence in his own country, to educate Washington about how to deal with similar threats.

In what could be the plot of a thriller, Mr. Rogin traces Washington's efforts to engage the CCP threat. The FBI and the Department of Justice began criminal investigations and prosecutions of U.S.-based scientists recruited by China to collect sensitive information. Meanwhile, working with a network of American academics, the Trump administration confronted the CCP's influence on U.S. college campuses. In turn, Beijing gave no quarter, trying (unsuccessfully) to intimidate then U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley into silence on the Uyghurs of Xinjiang and threatening U.S. businesses with sanctions if they supported Taiwan or Hong Kong.

Though the China hawks were influential, so were the business "doves" around Mr. Trump who tried to derail the confrontational approach. 

As Mr. Rogin shows, Beijing has powerful friends. While Sino-American economic interdependence is exaggerated, there is no shortage of Americans who have made billions doing business with CCP bigwigs. Beijing has long relied on them to shape U.S. policy.

Mr. Rogin details the efforts of corporate titans to bend U.S. China policy in a friendlier direction. They opened separate channels to Beijing and delivered soothing messages to Mr. Xi. President Trump himself could never decide whether he wanted a big deal with Mr. Xi -- or whether China should pay for its economic malfeasance. And the results of this inner conflict were, unsurprisingly, messy. On the one hand, the Trump administration challenged Beijing's lawless maritime claims in the South China Sea, embraced Taiwan and sanctioned the Shenzhen-based tech giant Huawei. The president also imposed harsh tariffs on China -- a move Washington insiders dismissed as insanity but which turned out to be a powerful political weapon. The Biden administration has not yet removed them.

On the other hand, Mr. Trump rhetorically blessed some of the most egregious Chinese human-rights abuses, was personally indifferent to the fate of Taiwan, and made promises to the Chinese on technology-sanctions relief that undermined his own trade policy. And toward the end of his presidency, it looked like Mr. Trump had finally sided with the doves, agreeing to a weak trade deal. But then came the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mr. Rogin's research on the murky origins of the "Wuhan virus" is darkly fascinating. He recounts the Chinese coverup of the disease, its spread within China, its suspected origins and much more. Indeed, we now know that China's behavior exacerbated the pandemic crisis and cost untold numbers of lives. For many, including Mr. Trump, Beijing's behavior crystallized the nature of the threat posed by the CCP. The doves were shoved aside and in his last year of power, Mr. Trump let his hawks have their way. The administration sanctioned China's human-rights abusers and economic outlaws, cracked down on CCP front groups operating in the U.S., and accelerated military challenges to Beijing provocations.

Trump-era China hawks changed the course of Sino-American relations and left Team Biden with a hard-nosed China policy. But even so, American private investment is still funding Chinese technology companies, and Beijing is still manipulating international organizations to serve its interests, growing its military power, and using its diplomatic and economic leverage to squeeze the U.S. out of Asia.

So far Mr. Biden has decided to maintain a hard line. But preventing China from gaining hegemony over Asia even as it tries to co-opt U.S. political, cultural and business leaders has become a bureaucratic and diplomatic street fight. Beijing increasingly sees relations with the U.S. as a zero-sum game. It regards any opening for "cooperation" -- on climate policy or Iran, for example -- as a chance to distract Washington from confronting its malfeasance. As Mr. Rogin observes, China has long been grasping for geopolitical dominance and the U.S. is late to the fight. The Trump hawks believed that Washington "still has a vote" in whether China becomes hegemonic. But time is short. Mr. Biden must ignore the distracting allure of a big market and illusory offers of help on vexing global problems and continue the work of diminishing Beijing's power and influence." [1]

1. How to Ride A Wild Dragon
Blumenthal, Dan. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]12 May 2021: A.17.