Making Sense of the China Problem

Despite the common wisdom that vice presidents do little to shape an administration’s agenda, analysts have been unable to resist a close review of Sen. JD Vance’s record since his nomination. Perhaps, the thinking goes, a generational pick like this not only signals the president’s thought and succession plan but confirms the reorientation of the Republican Party. With this nomination, today may look a little more like tomorrow. 

Vance’s foreign policy views have received special attention, much of it negative, with particular scrutiny paid to his comments about the Ukraine war and his office’s efforts to account for the arms and money spent in the conflict. But as that fight drags on, the senator’s skepticism at every stage looks only more prescient. After all, as a recent Reuters investigation confirms, claims that America has hollowed out her defense industrial base and cannot produce the weapons needed in Eastern Europe are not criticisms of this administration, or “isolationist” fear mongering, but statements of fact. In the near-term, you cannot spend your way out of a deficit of time and production capacity: You have to prioritize. 

To Vance, that means focusing on home, most of all. But in foreign policy, prioritizing means taking a long, hard look at Asia. At a time when there is less American military might to go around, it is in the Indo-Pacific that we may have the most to do. As he told me in an interview last year for The American Conservative, “we really are living increasingly in a bipolar world,” divided along economic and military lines between American and Chinese spheres of influence. It is a rivalry that “will dominate the next, at least, twenty or thirty years.” 

The China-America relationship has dominated the last twenty years or so, too, since China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. It was, however, difficult for many in Washington to recognize that reality until Donald Trump and the China Shock paper—which detailed the consequences for the Rust Belt of direct competition with Chinese manufacturing—made it obvious in 2016. And despite many attempted pivots to Asia, it is only since the COVID pandemic that China’s role as the premier U.S. challenge has become common wisdom.

While Vance has changed his mind, notoriously now, on a number of political questions since graduating law school, the problem China poses is not one of them. “My feel on the Asia pivot is broadly the same as it was ten years ago,” Vance said in our TAC interview. “I was worried about the trade stuff ten years ago; I was worried about the effect it had on the American middle class; I was worried about the sort of reverse Opium War where China manufactures fentanyl, sends it into our country, and it devastates American communities, jobs, families.”

The Obama line was a “pivot to Asia,” not to China, though the latter might have provided more mental clarity. Nearly two-thirds of the world population live in Asia, and it is the world’s largest market area. Japan and India are top-five world economies. As Elbridge Colby argued at the National Conservatism conference and in these pages recently, the danger of sharing a bipolar world with China lies in China dominating the Asian sphere—a sphere large enough to, united, overawe U.S. interests. The hope, then, for those who seek peace and American prosperity is not revisionism in Asia, but the status quo: growth for all its rising powers, but no one dominating the Indo-Pacific. 

But with new common wisdom comes old common folly—the mobbish mindlessness of bipartisan enthusiasms. “I’m growing a little alarmed with the posture of you know, some of the China hawkishness,” Vance said last year:

There are basically two strands of what I call the “neoconservative hawkishness” on China, one which I agree with, one which I don’t. The one that I agree with is a sort of straightforwardly economically nationalist argument, that even though it may cost a couple basis points of GDP, we should be making more of our stuff. Okay. So in that way the neoconservatives sort of adopted, you know, the Pat Buchanan, Steve Bannon view. And I think that’s a great thing.

But not everyone calling for a focus on China sees the economic dimension of the rivalry the same. “I think the right view is: China should not make our stuff, and we should try to avoid war with China. And the absolutely stupidest view is: China should make all of our stuff, and we should go to war with them,” Vance told me, a line he had probably used before and has used many times since. “And there is a strain of American neoconservatism that I think has adopted the very dumb version of the argument. And, of course, look, we may eventually be forced to fight a war with China. But if we are, God forbid, we need to be more self-sufficient economically.” The classical adage has it that if you want peace, prepare for war. And a corollary might be: If you want wealth, be prepared for war, too.

The framework Vance often uses to talk about approaches to the U.S.-China rivalry is a simple two-by-two matrix defined by, essentially, a trade war and a shooting war. So, two of the options for decision-makers in D.C. are, as just mentioned: China should not make all of America’s stuff, and America should avoid war with China (yes trade war, no shooting war); and, China should make America’s stuff, and America should go to war with China (no trade war, yes shooting war).

That second, “absolutely stupidest view” is held, de facto, by the most zombified of the neoconservative Zombie Reaganites, who in their Cold War nostalgia remain committed to combining free trade absolutism with crusades for democracy. Think backbenchers calling for more U.S. troops on Taiwan, and defense spending increases alongside tax cuts, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The other options in the matrix are the WWIII preparers—yes trade war, yes shooting war—and the libertarians: no trade war, no shooting war.

This descriptive rubric helps us distinguish between camps that, as Vance suggested in our interview, sometimes sound quite similar. Indeed, three out of four quadrants are some kind of China hawk, reflecting the new common wisdom. But while the senator highlighted the gulf between his focus on trade and a new anti-CCP neoconservatism itching to fight more nuclear-armed communists, the bigger source of potential confusion—and tensions within the so-called New Right—is the small but meaningful gap between the Vance position and what I have called the WWIII preparers. To be reductive, the WWIII preparers want to decouple from China and invest here at home because they expect a shooting war to be inevitable, or even worth it. Meanwhile, Vance is worried about the defense industrial base because the process of rebalancing trade with China and rebuilding America may heighten tensions to the point of open conflict. Xi Jinping has, after all, repeatedly claimed that the U.S. seeks to prevent Chinese development.

There are lots of ways to describe the U.S.-China rivalry, whether in terms of a Thucydides trap, or opposition to socialism with Chinese characteristics, or reaction to the century of humiliation. Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the New Right talk about the China problem primarily in terms of economic nationalism, especially trade and manufacturing. Because America runs an enormous trade deficit, and China runs an enormous surplus, and because these imbalances mirror each other, connected via savings rates, capital accounts, and government debt, Chy-na also acts as a metonym for the costs of globalization and globalism.

If America First means anything, it means China should not make all our stuff—the trade war will continue. The real question that a Vice President Vance and the rest of the White House team in a second Trump administration will face is how then to build up America’s defense production capacity—si vis pacem, para bellum—without setting the world on fire.