Appendix II: The Longer Telegram: Toward a New American China Strategy (Part IV)

In the area of strategic cooperation, continuing bilateral or multilateral strategic cooperation with China on issues that align with the interests of the United States and its allies still presents a range of policy challenges. Confronting these challenges is not about making Americans feel better or appeasing the Chinese government, but because, in these areas, U.S. interests are best pursued and advanced through cooperation with Beijing rather than confrontation. Under current circumstances, the areas of strategic cooperation with China will include negotiating a nuclear arms control agreement to bring China into the global arms control framework for the first time and prevent a new nuclear arms race; cooperating on the actual denuclearization of North Korea; negotiating bilateral agreements on cyber warfare and cyber espionage; negotiating bilateral agreements on the peaceful use of space; and negotiating future limitations on autonomous weapons systems controlled by artificial intelligence.

Strategic cooperation should also include working through the Group of Twenty (G20) to maintain global macroeconomic and financial stability to prevent future global crises and recessions; addressing climate change through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as bilateral and trilateral cooperation with major emitters such as India; global research projects on breakthrough climate technologies, including long-term solar energy storage, as part of a global research alliance; cooperation on future AI-based medical and pharmaceutical research to develop new countermeasures for major disease categories affecting both countries, including cancer; and collaboration on effective future global pandemic notification, management, vaccine development, and distribution.

Ideas and ideology remain important in politics and international relations. Long-term strategies to defeat competitors such as China are not just about power balances, though that is critical. How a country’s people view themselves, the evolving type of society under construction, the developing economy, and how local politics evolve to address domestic issues—all of this profoundly shapes the nation’s worldview.

The contest of ideas and ideology will continue. Xi Jinping has already challenged the United States and Western countries with his authoritarian capitalist model. The challenge for free democratic countries in North America, Europe, and elsewhere, which believe in open economies, just societies, and competitive political systems, is to maintain enduring confidence in the intrinsic effectiveness of the ideas on which they are founded.

The U.S. China strategy outlined in this document must be implemented comprehensively at the national, bilateral, regional, multilateral, and global levels. For decades, China has thought and acted on this scale. In this regard, allies are no longer optional but essential, because in specific countries, regions, or institutions, allies often achieve goals that the United States cannot achieve alone. The United States should always remember that, aside from North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia, China has no true allies, which places Beijing at a considerable strategic disadvantage relative to the United States on a global scale. Allies are a major advantage for the United States.

This principle of international alliances requires unprecedented coordination in U.S. national and international policy. It will require rebuilding the U.S. foreign service and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). It will require the combined efforts of the State Department, Department of Defense, Treasury Department, Department of Commerce, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, USAID, and intelligence agencies. This means that the future National Security Advisor (supported by the best senior staff) will need to be solely responsible for the comprehensive coordination and ultimate execution of the United States’ long-term China strategy.

There is no reason to believe that such a China strategy is impossible to implement. If this strategy is successfully executed, Xi Jinping could be replaced by more traditional Communist Party leaders. As previously mentioned, strong opposition to him personally and to his current strategic path has already emerged. From a longer-term perspective, the Chinese people themselves are likely beginning to question and challenge the Party’s century-long proposition that China’s ancient civilization is destined for an authoritarian future. Of course, this latter question is ultimately for the Chinese people to answer, not an issue for U.S. strategy. By contrast, the ambition of the U.S. strategy for the coming decades should be to prompt the CCP leadership to change its strategic course, regardless of whether Xi remains in power.

Ultimately, the primary challenge the United States faces is not one of military, economic, or technological capability. It is a challenge of confidence in itself. A subtle yet corrosive force has been at work in the American national psyche for some time, fostering doubt about the country’s future and encouraging the notion that America’s best days may already be behind it. U.S. adversaries have also recognized this.

Objectively, such feelings of despair are unfounded. As a young nation, the United States’ capacity for innovation is unmatched. The values it represents have stood the test of time. Here and now, national leaders must once again rise to the challenge—not only to provide vision, mission, and purpose for the country; not only to formulate strategy and make it effective; but to restore Americans’ faith in their nation, in its ability to exercise global leadership in the century to come. In doing so, the United States will inevitably lead its friends and allies to once again have confidence in America.