Opinion | Biden’s China policy tweak is welcome, but it’s still based on a fantasy

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s speech last month praising the Biden administration’s China policy was remarkable not because it offered outstanding strategic vision, but rather because of the lack of it.

Under Biden’s China policy, the bilateral relationship became a contest of “democracy vs autocracy”. More than a way to define the nature of great power relations in the 21st century, it became a framework for policymaking. This misguided approach has actually restrained policy options, as it means great-power politics is handled with ideological rigidity.

In his speech, Sullivan reasserted that China is the “only state with both the intent to reshape the international order and the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it”. Moreover, Beijing sought to “catch up and surpass” the US in hi-tech. It is “working to make the world more dependent on China” and “taking steps to adapt the international system to accommodate its own system and preferences”, he said.

Yet, notably, Sullivan did not frame US-China relations as “democracy vs communist autocracy”. This is in sharp contrast to the US-China dialogue that took place in Anchorage in 2021, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken sought to legitimise America’s right to interfere with what China considered its internal affairs, by stating that China’s actions, “including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks on the US and economic coercion towards our allies … threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability”.

More than three years later, and this approach has achieved little with China. Now, with two wars raging, in Ukraine and Gaza, there has been a rude awakening within the Biden team that its “democracy vs autocracy” strategy has all but collapsed. It has dawned on many in the administration that war is not determined by the nature of the regime.