How lucky for President Joe Biden that, just as he’s announced a wide-ranging review of U.S. China policy (after he and his supposedly fellow foreign policy mavens spent the entire presidential campaign lambasting Donald Trump’s initiatives and clearly conveying that they knew exactly how to fix these alleged blunders), a wavelet of advice has appeared offering answers, at least at the broad-brush level.

How unfortunate for the United States, though, that so little of this advice has any prospect of advancing and defending American interests vis-a-vis China, much less improving on the Trump efforts to neutralize the China threat. In fact, if Biden follows his longstanding Beijing-coddling instincts and generally heeds the authors, then the United States is bound to become more vulnerable and more beholden to the People’s Republic than ever.

Two blueprints for the president to follow have emerged in recent weeks: a memo from an anonymous author who clearly views him or herself as a latter-day George Kennan; and a collective effort from a “China Strategy Group” dominated by Silicon Valley figures (and co-chaired by Google co-founder Eric Schmidt).

As a Kennan admirer (but not worshipper), I was especially intrigued by the first China strategy paper, despite its pretentiously Kennan-evoking title, The Longer Telegram. Unfortunately, if Kennan himself read it, he'd probably be hard-pressed to decide whether to laugh or cry.

The most eye-catching proposal made by the author (who also apes the desire for anonymity Kennan displayed in the famous 1947 Sources of Soviet Conduct article, which was published in Foreign Affairs as X: urging that rather than focus on broadly changing China’s totalitarian system of government and control over the economy, or targeting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in particular as Public Enemy Number One, U.S. policy recognize Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his inner circle as the dominant game-changer that has turned the People’s Republic and its practices from a “manageable” challenge into today’s mortal danger not only to the United States but to the entire world.

I agree that prompting Chinese reform of any kind is a fool’s quest—a prime reason that I regard substantially decoupling America’s economy from China’s as the best way to ensure that the nation can handle whatever problems Beijing creates. It was also heartening to see the anonymous author recognize that dealing with China successfully will be that much harder for Washington if it keeps going out of its way to demonize Russia, which has clearly become a Democratic Party staple.

But concentrating U.S.-China policy “through the principal lens of Xi himself” and seeking to capitalize on “significant” opposition within the CCP to “Xi’s leadership and its vast ambitions” in order to “return [China] to its pre-2013 path—i.e., the pre-Xi strategic status quo” suffers from at least two glaringly obvious flaws.

The first is the anonymous author’s belief that however numerous China’s challenges to U.S. interests before Xi gained control, “they were manageable and did not represent a serious violation of the US-led international order.” In fact, even the author him/herself doesn’t seem to believe this.

If he or she did, then why admit that the current Chinese challenge, “to some extent, has been gradually emerging over the last two decades”? And that that “China has long had an integrated internal strategy for handling the United States.” And that pursuing its goals “nationally, bilaterally, regionally, multilaterally, and globally . . . has been China’s approach for decades.” And that “what links” today’s China threat and that posed by the Soviet Union, in particular, during the early Cold War is that “the CCP, like the former CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], is an avowedly Leninist party with a profoundly Marxist worldview”?

Have Xi’s ambitions magnified the threat? Of course. But—as the anonymous author also admits—not because Chinese leaders’ goals have fundamentally changed, but because growing economic and therefore military strength have brought them within reach.

In the author’s own words, “China has undergone a dramatic economic rise in recent decades, and it is using its economic power to engage in coercive practices and to become the center of global innovation . . . China is transforming its economic heft into military strength, modernizing its military and developing capabilities to counter the United States’ ability to project power in the western Pacific.”

And although China has generated much of this impressive progress through its own devices, it’s also indisputable that its closely related economic, technological, and military advances stem from the United States and other free world resources. This knowhow flooded into China precisely when the bipartisan Washington consensus viewed any possible dangers emanating from Beijing as “manageable.” In other words, whether knowingly or not, the anonymous author is effectively arguing for a return to the policies that helped create the problem he’s (correctly) identified. Also, since he or she is described as “a former senior government official with deep expertise and experience dealing with China,” chances are the author had more than a minor hand in crafting this failed approach.

The second fatal flaw in The Longer Telegram is its assumption that American foreign policymakers understand enough “about the fault lines of internal Chinese politics” to manipulate them into bringing back those allegedly manageable pre-Xi leaders. To which anyone with even the skimpiest knowledge of American diplomacy should be responding, “Remember Iran.”

For since that country’s 1979 revolution replaced a generally pro-American monarch with a zealously anti-American Shiite Islamic theocracy, U.S. leaders have tried repeatedly to find influential moderates that would help reshape the new regime’s behavior. Because the United States knew so little about the internal politics and fault lines of this leadership, all these efforts have failed. Does the anonymous author really believe that Washington’s knowledge of China’s even more secretive leadership is any better?

The Atlantic Council, the globalist Washington, DC think tank that published The Longer Telegram, calls it “one of the most insightful and rigorous examinations to date of Chinese geopolitical strategy and how an informed American strategy would address the challenges of China’s own strategic ambitions.”

Actually, its signature recommendation is so internally contradictory and naive that I don’t blame the author for wanting to stay anonymous.

The second recent China blueprint, from the Silicon Valley-dominated “China Strategy Group" can be read more profitably by the president, because popping up here and there are some insights that are genuinely valuable especially since they come from analysts once strongly supportive of what they themselves call the pre-Trump strategy of “near-unbounded integration.”

Principally, the group, which notably is co-chaired by Google co-founder Eric Schmidt, calls for recognizing that “some degree of [U.S.-China] disentangling is both inevitable and preferable. In fact, trends in both countries—and many of the tools at our disposal—inherently and necessarily push toward some degree of bifurcation.” In other words, it’s endorsed a limited version of what’s now commonly called economic and technological decoupling.

In addition, it argues that both this decoupling, along with tariffs that it acknowledges may be needed to push back against certain Chinese offenses and provocations, should be pursued even though they will entail costs—a refreshing and crucially important departure from the long-time pre- and post-Trump consensus in the mainstream American political, business and policy communities that any increased consumer or producer price, or loss of even a smidgeon of market share in China resulting from retaliation from Beijing, proves conclusively the folly of placing any significant curbs on doing business with the People’s Republic.

Finally, the group points out that efforts to rebuild domestic supply chains to reduce reliance on China for critical goods must involve “more than a focus on the end products. Safeguarding key technologies requires the United States to define and secure the entire ecosystem of production, from fabrication to supply to talent to cutting-edge innovation.” In other words, Washington can’t simply seek to become self-sufficient, or largely so, in face masks or ventilators or semiconductors. It needs to become self-sufficient or largely so in all the materials, parts, and components required to make these products.

Yet many of these important insights (and useful recommendations for restructuring the U.S. government to foster the competition with China more effectively) are kneecapped by equivocation and a resulting failure to understand that sometimes policy scalpels cut too finely, and some policy needles are too small to be threaded—especially considering the “all of society” drive China’s totalitarian system is making to gain global technology leadership, and the dangers to America’s “security, prosperity, and way of life” Chinese success would create.

For example, the group emphasizes that decoupling policy mustn’t invite “escalatory cycles of confrontation, retaliation, or unintended conflict” or overlook those areas “where cooperation, collaboration, and exchange with China is in our interest, as severing ties and closing off the United States to the ideas, people, technologies, and supply chains necessary to compete effectively will undermine U.S. innovation.” At the same time, the authors acknowledge that China will respond to any further U.S. decoupling moves “more aggressively” precisely because “China’s leaders understand U.S. dependency as an important source of leverage.”

So although in principle this omelet can be made without breaking many eggs, Beijing won’t be cooperating. And the circle can’t be squared with clever phrase-making like “navigating the asymmetric competition” that looks satisfactorily reassuring on paper and in speeches to conferences but that need to survive the body blows that will inevitably be delivered by reality.

The group’s approach to Chinese investment in the United States (whether in the form of creating new businesses or taking over or contributing capital to existing firms) illustrates the other big drawback of granular approaches when it comes to China. It ignores how any Chinese entity big enough to play in any foreign market, and especially America’s, is under Beijing’s thumb in every important respect.

As a result, there’s no point in taking the time and expending the resources to follow the group’s recommendations to figure out which Chinese tech platforms (whose importance it emphasizes) are and are not violating American privacy standards or conducting misinformation campaigns dangerous to democracy, or censoring content Chinese authorities don’t like, or helping suppress human rights in China or anywhere else, or stealing valuable data, or helping terrorists and criminals launder money; or whether these activities matter enough to merit official U.S. attention, or whether troublesome practices can be negotiated away through talks with Beijing on technical and other fixes.

In this instance, Washington should stay out of the black holes of setting priorities, and especially monitoring and enforcing agreements, and, in fact, prohibiting all Chinese entities from owning U.S. hard assets. The latter step would add the benefit of shielding participants in America’s economy from competition with subsidized, market-distorting outfits from China. At the very least, Chinese entities should be required to prove that they’re not controlled or subsidized in any way by Beijing, or engaged in the above malign activities, before gaining entry.

In addition, despite the group’s understanding that the manufacturing ecosystems, not just final products, need to be rebuilt and nurtured to ensure supply chain security, it appears to underestimate just how widely these relationships extend. After all, most of the numerous inputs to goods like mechanical ventilators (like controls, power sources, monitors, and alarm systems) depend on big and complex supply chain and manufacturing ecosystems themselves.

Further, just as before the pandemic, few expected face masks and surgical gloves to become products vitally important to the nation’s well-being. Thus, the list of critical goods is likely to change and grow over time as new threats emerge. As a result, the group is correct in warning that “any product or service could be termed essential to national security in an extreme hypothetical.” But what’s the basis for confidence that many products or services can safely be ruled out, and that such hypotheticals will always remain extreme?

At least as important, like the Biden administration, the group’s determination not to ruffle too many international feathers has also clearly led it to back the notion that the definition of “Made in America” for supply chain purposes should actually mean “Also Made in Lots of Other Countries” that it considers to be trusted suppliers. Unfortunately, many of the countries classified imposed export controls on critical medical goods during the pandemic’s first wave last spring. That is, when cooperation was most needed, they built walls—meaning that their trustworthiness isn’t exactly ironclad.

And as then-president-elect Biden learned when the European Union rebuffed his entreaty to consult with Washington before signing an investment agreement with China, the allies remain determined to fence sit in the U.S.-China technology competition. The group acknowledges that the list of anti-China partners “may include all of the [European Union], though in some cases EU position/member states’ positions are too ambiguous today with respect to China for inclusion in all instances, and members may need to be considered on an individual basis.” But simply stating this position and its EU-splitting ambitions is enough to make clear its absurdity—especially since the EU country most reluctant to cooperate against China is economic kingpin Germany.

None of this is to say that trade with (as opposed to investment in hard assets from) China should be cut off completely, or that international cooperation can be of no use to the United States in its struggle versus the People’s Republic. In particular, (and due largely to recklessly indiscriminate free trade policies), America urgently needs products and know-how now dominated by foreign producers (notably Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing industry, and Japanese and Dutch suppliers of key microchip production equipment and materials). And if other countries are willing to cooperate with Washington on various China containing initiatives at acceptable prices, more help is indeed better than less. But the United States will never safeguard its interests adequately unless it recognizes that multilateralism can’t be an end in and of itself. It must also come to realize that against monumental threats, axes are usually more effective than scalpels.

Alan Tonelson is the Founder of RealityChek, a blog on economics and national security, and a columnist for IndustryToday.com. In 2016, he advised both the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigns on international trade issues.

Image: Reuters