What the Biden-Trump Debate Said about the Relationship between the US and China*

Different visions of how Washington should relate to Beijing will dictate how peaceful and free the world will be.

It’s been some days since the debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, but while the United States and the world is busy debating if the current president is too old to serve four more years, I would prefer to view the encounter through a different lens: what the two parties are saying about China. I believe the different visions of what Washington should do about Beijing will certainly dictate how peaceful and free the world will be in the coming years.

Trump may have anticipated a dispute that many thought inevitable, but it was Biden who structured a hard-line state policy on China. At the end of four year, this administration has established basic pillars on which it sees the relationship with Beijing: competition and intense dialogue plus cooperation in areas of mutual interest. It’s a game that perhaps doesn’t resonate with Xi Jinping for whom competition continues to be synonymous with hostility, but still, it is a strategy.

Overall, Trump and his henchmen continue to indicate they don’t intend to follow that plan. During the debate, Trump again insisted he would force China to further reduce the commercial deficit with the U.S., but advocated an increasingly popular idea among conservatives that it is necessary to negotiate with Xi from a position of strength.

The idea is that a dispute with China must be designed for success, not just managed. This idea is not exclusive to the Republicans, but it has found the most advocates within the party. That was especially so after former Chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party Rep. Mike Gallagher and Trump’s former Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger wrote an article for Foreign Affairs titled “No Substitute for Victory: America’s Competition With China Must Be Won, Not Managed.” Gallagher and Pottinger argue that Washington has to embrace the idea of a confrontation without limits with Beijing and analyze the relationship through lenses that are more ideological than pragmatic.

It is an empty and blind theory that supports unrealistic comparisons. This, because China is no Soviet Union. The great Cold War power would have been a formidable military force with the firepower to extinguish humanity, but its economy was never as robust as America’s.

China currently has a gross domestic product equal to 60% of the United States’. From the perspective of parity of purchasing power, it is already the largest economy in the world and although it is slowing down, everyone expects it to overtake the United States in a few decades. Beijing does not have the same number of nuclear arms as Moscow had during the Cold War, but it has enough (about 484, say independent analysts). And Beijing has something more: a much more dynamic economy, technological innovation, industrial capacity, human capital and commercial connections that its Soviet neighbors never dreamed of.

Embracing the idea of victory is a dumb strategy and part of the assumption that the U.S. has primacy on the truth in international relations. It doesn’t, as we know. The dispute with China is not something to win, and the Chinese aren’t going anywhere, unless one of the two countries initiates an unprecedented war with disastrous consequences for both.

Washington must continue to confront Beijing on questions that I consider to be fair, such as disrespecting multilateral institutions, human rights and unjust trade practices, not because it is an example of any of this, but because the U.S. is the only country capable of making such demands from an equal standpoint. In the meantime, let’s hope the U.S. and China don’t find themselves caught in the trap of seeing who is the stronger.

*Editor’s note: The original Portuguese version of this article is available through a paid subscription.