This does not mean the United States must resign itself to accommodating China’s global wish list. On the contrary, the United States retains the ultimate competitive advantage in the superiority and proven track record of democracy and capitalism over the autocratic socialist model that Beijing is promoting. Unless America has lost confidence in itself and its inherent strengths and values, there is little reason to fear strategic competition with China over the long term. Nor should it fear the possibility of near-term coexistence with Beijing’s autocracy, with which the United States has already coexisted for more than seventy years. Moreover, Beijing’s insistence on the longevity of its governing model is still very much a gamble—and U.S. engagement with China may yet have an impact on that bet. The primary task ahead for the United States is to restore and renew its own model, and prepare to compete against Beijing’s within a new strategic framework—one in which the contest is not necessarily winner-take-all. In this regard, the Biden administration is correct to emphasize that “building back better” at home is the core prerequisite. The challenge from Beijing will be formidable as long as China has its act together and the United States does not.

In the meantime, the Biden administration should find a way to overcome the domestic political constraints that have hindered a more rational and constructive approach to dealing with Beijing. This means adopting a more accurate assessment of the nature of the challenge from China, and moving to supplement the competitive approach with more cooperative elements and dialogue. Blinken has declared that the U.S.-China relationship will be “competitive where it should be, collaborative where it can be, and adversarial where it must be.” But this formulation risks excluding areas where the relationship ultimately will need to be collaborative, and overlooking areas where it need not be adversarial.

The Biden-Xi meeting in November appears to have prompted some incremental steps in a collaborative direction: agreements to relax restrictions on journalist visas, reinvigorate cooperation on climate change, resume some trade and bilateral military talks, and consider strategic stability talks. Both leaders voiced a desire to expand diplomatic interactions. The official Chinese readout of the meeting quoted Xi as saying that the two sides should “fully harness the dialogue channels and mechanisms between their [various policy] teams,” and the White House readout said Biden and Xi “discussed ways for the two sides to continue discussions in a number of areas, with President Biden underscoring the importance of substantive and concrete conversations.” As former Assistant Secretary of State Danny Russel noted, the Biden-Xi meeting was an opportunity to shift U.S.-China relations “to a cooperative footing” and to “kick-start serious engagement, with all the probing, explaining, testing, negotiating and perhaps even compromising that diplomacy entails.” Russel added that the relationship is “in dire need of such diplomacy.”

Yet Washington seems apprehensive about following this path too eagerly, presumably because of the domestic political risks of appearing accommodative toward Beijing. The Biden administration emphatically set low expectations for “deliverables” or “breakthroughs” from the Biden-Xi meeting, and highlighted a determination to avoid getting drawn into “unproductive dialogues.” And it apparently remains reluctant to openly characterize its nascent rapprochement with Beijing as the resumption of either “cooperation” or “engagement”—instead continuing to underscore that the U.S. approach to China is focused on “managing the competition.” As noted above, this appears to reflect both a disinclination to publicly advocate any kind of accommodative approach to China, and an effort to keep the focus on Beijing as the source of tensions in the relationship. 

But Washington has contributed to those tensions, which have been exacerbated by U.S. exaggeration of the China threat as a consequence of American domestic maladies and unease. To sustain the post-summit momentum toward a less hostile and more constructive path for U.S.-China relations, the United States will need to confront its own share of accountability for bilateral mistrust, tackle the domestic problems that have reduced its competitiveness, and overcome its resistance to expanding the cooperative element of its relationship with Beijing. The competition will become all-consuming if both sides allow it to. Recognizing the need and the opportunities for cooperation, and actively pursuing it, could and should provide the real “guardrails” in the U.S.-China relationship. A confident and competent America can simultaneously rebuild its competitiveness against China while at the same time pursuing a better relationship with it.

IN DECEMBER 2020, Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi—who subsequently became two of the architects of the Biden administration’s China policy in the National Security Council—wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs about the need to refute “declinism,” which they defined as “the belief that the United States is sliding irreversibly from its preeminent status.” The United States is indeed sliding from its preeminent status, but this may yet be reversible. In any event, Campbell and Doshi rightly observed that “decline is less a condition than a choice” and that the United States historically has exhibited “an unusual capacity for self-correction.” That capacity for self-correction—America’s “resilience”—is arguably facing its most severe test in fifty years, both internally and from China. Campbell and Doshi asserted that “the need for the United States to rise to the China challenge” could be the catalyst for reversing both the perception and the reality of U.S. decline. If America fails to demonstrate the strength and unity of purpose to compete effectively with China, it will have only itself to blame.

Paul Heer is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the National Interest and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018).

Image: Reuters.