Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
A partial “decoupling” of U.S. and Chinese technology ecosystems is well underway. The U.S. government has been a primary driver in recent years, yet the United States still lacks a clear vision for what it hopes to achieve and a sound strategy for achieving it.
This debate, however, sidesteps the more important question about which administration has enacted more effective policies. A review of Biden’s early actions reveals that his administration is competing more effectively with Beijing and succeeding where Trump failed.
Intelligence can be one tool and discipline and set of information that is used to inform those assessments but it's frequently not the only or best tool.
The circumstances across the Taiwan Strait are very different, but it is worth considering that no one knows how much liberty the United States can take with its One China policy before Beijing will decide its red line has been crossed. Even Xi may not know himself.
Chinese citizens are getting attacked and killed in really high numbers inside of Pakistan right now.
They contribute to a policy drift that risks bringing about conflict, not strengthening deterrence.
So, there are key steps the United States needs to take on a strategy level and on a policy level. On a strategy level is where we really need to start. The US government and the Biden administration really need to come to their own internal sense of the purpose of this decoupling and a long term vision for success.
The success of the new U.S. investment strategy may ultimately depend on how a bill in Congress addresses these key components.
Although China is dangling economic incentives in front of the Taliban, it does so to extract security guarantees while seeking to ameliorate development challenges in Afghanistan for fear that poverty may drive instability.
Questions are emerging regarding the impact of the war on the future of Sino-European relations.