KURT M. CAMPBELL is Chair and CEO of the Asia Group. He is 2018–19 Kissinger Fellow
at the McCain Institute and was U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific
Aairs from 2009 to 2013.
JAKE SULLIVAN is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Interna-
tional Peace. He served as National Security Adviser to the U.S. Vice President in 2013–14
and as Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State in 2011–13.96 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
Competition Without
Catastrophe
How America Can Both Challenge and
Coexist With China
Kurt M. Campbell and Jake Sullivan
T
he United States is in the midst o the most consequential
rethinking o its foreign policy since the end o the Cold
War. Although Washington remains bitterly divided on most
issues, there is a growing consensus that the era o engagement with
China has come to an unceremonious close. The debate now is over
what comes next.
Like many debates throughout the history o U.S. foreign policy,
this one has elements o both productive innovation and destructive
demagoguery. Most observers can agree that, as the Trump adminis-
tration’s National Security Strategy put it in 2018, “strategic competi-
tion” should animate the United States’ approach to Beijing going
forward. But foreign policy frameworks beginning with the word
“strategic” often raise more questions than they answer. “Strategic
patience” reÇects uncertainty about what to do and when. “Strategic
ambiguity” reÇects uncertainty about what to signal. And in this case,
“strategic competition” reÇects uncertainty about what that competi-
tion is over and what it means to win.
The rapid coalescence o a new consensus has left these essential ques-
tions about U.S.-Chinese competition unanswered. What, exactly, is the
United States competing for? And what might a plausible desired out-
come o this competition look like? A failure to connect competitiveReturn to Table of Contents