Has the United States Gone Rogue?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Mike, great to have you here.

MICHAEL BECKLEY

It’s great to be with you, Dan. Thanks so much.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You’ve written a string of truly magisterial essays about geopolitics and the United States’ geopolitical position over the past several years in Foreign Affairs. They pretty consistently manage to pull off the tricky task of both addressing events of the moment while also stepping back and providing historical and theoretical perspective that changes how we think about events of the moment. So it’s a really uniquely worthwhile body of work, and people should go back and read all of it.

I’ve gone and done that over the past few days, and I’ve been struck that one through line in all of your work is the way you grapple with the nature of American power. It’s true in both the past and present, its prospects of the future, and also the challenges that U.S. power faces from competitors, especially China. As you watch President [Donald] Trump and the Trump 2.0 foreign policy that is shambolically and perhaps confusingly taking shape, how would you describe Trump’s understanding of American power, and what does it get right and wrong in your view?

MICHAEL BECKLEY

Well, you know Dan, I’ve lived in the New York area for many decades, and I think if you know real estate guys, his foreign policy seems to be a bit more intelligible. The idea of opening high with a big demand, something like a 145 percent tariffs, and then negotiating down from there, testing boundaries, and floating crazy ideas that just might stick, whether it’s annexing Canada or taking over Gaza and turning it into a casino and resort. And if it doesn’t stick, then it’s just a big joke, and at the end of the day, all press is good press. And especially no squatters—making sure that allies have to pay their fair share.

I think there’s these distinct Trumpian elements to U.S. foreign policy right now, but as I try to spell out in the piece, he’s not just a sole architect of this pivoted American foreign policy that I see going on. I think he’s also latched on to some long-term structural trends that have been driving the United States in a more independent direction.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to ask the same question of, I suppose, President [Joe] Biden, though perhaps Biden is emblematic of a certain kind of American political establishment view of American power. I’m struck by a line of yours in a recent piece that was called “The Age of American Unilateralism,” in which you wrote that, “The American-led liberal order has outlived its original purpose, growing into a maze of burdens and vulnerabilities.” Biden and those like him would probably still defend that order, and Biden certainly did when he was in office.

MICHAEL BECKLEY

Yeah, I think rhetorically, certainly the Biden administration was, but they had elements that I think differed very much so. For example, the high tariffs and investment in export controls on China. That’s a very different position from the previous strategy of trying to integrate China into the order. I think the Biden administration also put pressure on allies to bear more of the burden, especially after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. They obviously didn’t do it in nearly the same kind of hostile way that Trump has. But I also just see the Biden presidency as not necessarily an aberration, but as a pause before this turn toward a more unilateralist American position.

So I think people reacted to Trump in the first administration. There was a narrow victory for the Biden team. But as we’ve seen, Trump increased his vote share with many Americans. Foreign policy wasn’t the main driver of that, but I don’t think they were necessarily impressed by the Biden foreign policy record. Whether that’s fair or not remains to be seen. I see Biden as sort of a pause in this broader turn, but also if you look more closely, there were a number of parallels, and even in Foreign Affairs, there’s articles talking about the “Trump-Biden-Trump” policy, and I tend to view things very much in that line.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

We’ll come back to the Trump foreign policy later in this conversation, but I want to go back to a piece that you wrote right at the beginning of the year that was in our January/February issue. It was called “The Strange Triumph of a Broken America.” And it was in some ways a kind of net assessment of where U.S. global standing was at the end of 2024, but it rests on what you call “the paradox of American power”—that we have this incredibly dysfunctional period in our country domestically and politically.

[Former Defense Secretary Robert] Gates wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs a couple of years ago that was called “The Dysfunctional Superpower.” But your piece tried to look at this combination of domestic dysfunction and what has actually been a pretty successful few decades for the United States on the global stage if you look at its economic standing, its alliances, all these other measures that you go through in the piece.

What is the case that in this period that has not exactly been a golden age of American statecraft that the U.S. position has in fact done pretty well, and what is the paradox that underlies that in your view?

MICHAEL BECKLEY

Yeah, there are statistics on both sides of the ledger, though the ones that suggest the United States is doing well is just basic things like its share of the world economy, which is at currently 26 pecrent, which is the same as in the 1990s, I mean, it’s basically been the same since the late nineteenth century, with the exception of right after World War II, when it surged to 50 percent. If you look at per capita incomes, I mean, I remember growing up in the 1980s and 1990s when everyone thought Japan was going to eat America’s lunch and the Japanese incomes were 50 percent higher than American incomes. Now American incomes are 140 percent higher than Japan’s; if Japan were a U.S. state, it would be the poorest behind Mississippi. So just in terms of sheer wealth, the United States is doing relatively well, even if that wealth is not fairly distributed within the United States.

And then also, the United States is a different kind of great power because it’s really a hub of a lot of other areas. It exercises structural power, so it has 70-something alliances around the world, and so countries have their militaries and their security tied to the United States. The dollar’s role, obviously, gives the U.S. Treasury Department the ability to impose crippling sanctions. The United States accounts for something like 45 percent of the arms market, which means other countries have to get their weapons and are kind of locked into this ecosystem from the United States. And as the largest energy producer, the United States controls a vital commodity, and it has really the only navy that can patrol sea lanes far from its borders.

So the United States has all of these forms of structural power that, in many cases, have actually gotten stronger in some ways, with alliances expanding, the United States going from a major importer of energy to the dominant producer in the world, and the dollar’s role basically staying right where it is. So there’s a whole range of areas where the United States, I would say, its latent power—the resources it could mobilize and deploy for foreign policy purposes—are massive. We can get into some of the weaknesses, because I think in terms of the mobilization of those resources, there are severe weaknesses that are endemic to the U.S. system, in fact.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In some ways, as you describe it, that paradox also explains some of the failures of American statecraft. You have this phrase in the essay, “hollow internationalism,” and you point out that the size and wealth and diversity and “small l” liberal nature of U.S. society drives us to be globally active, but at the same time, our geography and wealth and the structural factors you were going through give us a sense of detachment and distance. And that leads to what I think you would see as some of the failures of U.S. foreign policy over the last couple decades.

MICHAEL BECKLEY

Yeah, so the United States has these enduring advantages. Just geographically, a continental-sized territory that’s packed with resources and two coastlines that link the United States to the richest parts of Eurasia. You have relatively decentralized institutions that allow for a big private sector to flourish and to boom. And because the United States is such an attractive place, you have high demand for immigrants trying to get into the country, so the United States has been able to renew its population over and over again.

But those same features also make a coherent foreign policy difficult because for one thing, you have so many different interest groups that are placing demands, essentially, on the government to do this or have a policy on everything. You have immense polarization and partisanship, which means half the team is rowing in one way and half the team is rowing the other way and there’s no coherence behind the foreign policy. And you have an openness to trade and to immigration, at least in recent history, that means there’s tremendous churn in American society, with new people coming in, openness to trade, and industries either being outsourced or propping up, and a lot of creative destruction going on.

And so as a result, you often get, as you phrased it, hollow internationalism, where the United States will have a policy on everything and, in fact, will make high demands of other countries, but then really struggle to mobilize either the military, diplomatic, and economic resources to try to actually see those things through. And so you get a lot of cheap talk. Instead of building up the big stick and talking softly, the United States often does the opposite. Whether it’s saying we’re going to defend Taiwan, as President Biden did, but then having relatively low levels of military spending and only two military bases within 500 miles of Taiwan, and many other examples where the United States has really stuck its neck out without the resources to back it up.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So within that piece, “The Strange Triumph of a Broken America,” you took stock of where things stood before Trump started, and as you noted that despite all of the changes over the last few decades, quoting you here, “current trends are solidifying a unipolar world with the United States as the sole superpower, surrounded by declining great powers and a periphery of middle powers, developing countries, and failing states.” So that’s where we were at the beginning of this year.

I think it’s probably safe to say, without getting overly partisan about this, that we’re seeing a new degree of dysfunction in our own political system and society, with the added layers of disruption and destruction from the administration and Elon Musk and DOGE and everything else. Are you worried about some of the structural sources of that power, the sources of that triumph in some sense, as you look at the way that our own politics are changing over these last months?

MICHAEL BECKLEY

Absolutely. So, there’s many examples. Immigration, for example. If the United States cuts itself off from immigration, it’s going to be just like every other great power, where eventually its workforce is going to be contracting severely. I mean, basically the only reason the United States is the only great power projected to have a growing working age population throughout this century is because of immigration. So the United States could easily slash that Achilles heel through a series of xenophobic policies.

Just in terms of absolute wealth, I mean, the United States is something like four to five percent of global population. It commands 26 percent of global GDP. The only way you get that is by presiding over a maritime system of trade so that you can reap all of those gains and work with allies and trade partners to have positive sum wealth, instead of the old model of, “let’s just conquer people or try to absorb them,” which destroys value. So the United States could make itself much worse off in material terms.

And then something that especially America’s adversaries are very aware of—my main focus is China, and the Chinese are always talking about how the United States has this allied advantage. The fact that so many countries, and especially that first island chain in East Asia, are aligned with the United States, host American troops, integrate their militaries with the United States. Obviously if you’re slapping tariffs on friend and foe alike and basically telling allies they have to pay up or get out, that also will sever one of those critical tools of American influence.

So, we’ll have to see how all this all plays out, but there’s no deterministic element here. These are tools, a good hands that the United States has, but it can easily squander it by playing it poorly.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Before we dig in on alliances, I guess the other parts of the destruction or disruption that we’ve seen in the last few months really pertains to the tools of American power. And you could talk about USAID and humanitarian assistance, you could look at changes to the State Department.

Do you see that as a meaningful weakening of American global influence or reinforcement of this hollow internationalism, or is that a kind of overly gauzy, sentimental view of how American power works in the world? You could say that those are good things for the United States to do, but is that less central to American power than some of the advocates of those kinds of activity would suggest?

MICHAEL BECKLEY

So I think in an absolute sense, it is a weakening of American influence, because I just think bombs and bullets are blunt tools and costly tools of influence. You’ve had secretaries of defense say, “Look, if you slash the State Department’s budget, I’m going to need a lot more ammunition,” because that basically means you’re going to let states fail that might otherwise have been propped up. You’re going to let conflicts escalate that could have been bought off through aid and development projects. And you’re just not going to have the diplomatic levers to pull if there is a crisis and you need to make a phone call. So by severing those, you’re basically saying, well, we’re just going to see what happens, and then come in with the military and do missile strikes and drone strikes, I guess, to try to get our way out of this problem.

But I think this is going to be a constant theme—that as bad as things could get for the United States with this more unilateral and roguish turn, I think it’s actually going to be much worse for most of the other countries in the world, because the United States has this relatively safe piece of territory and tons of resources and leads in many industries. And so even if the rest of the world burns, the United States will do worse in an absolute sense, but relative to other countries that critically depend on open sea lanes, basically for survival, it’s going to be in a much worse kind of state.

So that’s ultimately what I worry about, is the broader community in which Americans live—even if America could do better in a relative sense just by trying to wring out every ounce of wealth and power from other countries and then cut any kind of fluff like foreign aid or diplomacy and soft power.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You also note in the recent piece about unilateralism that the United States just depends so much less on trade and the global economy than almost any other big country does.

MICHAEL BECKLEY

Yeah, so trade is something like 11 percent of GDP, and a third of that is with Canada and Mexico. And frankly, that’s in the current system, but if we were to enter a much more mercantilist, autarkic international system, the United States could also re-set up a bunch of industries that it’s just chosen, for reasons of labor arbitrage or whatever, to have in other countries and to trade.

But the United States could really pull up the drawbridge in big ways, especially if it integrates with the rest of North America, which has more than 500 million people living in it. It has tons of natural resources. You have different levels of economic development between the United States and Mexico that allow for gains from trade, and you have Canada, which controls this vast Arctic space that’s opening up. So it really is a major hub, and if the United States were to consolidate that, it could be a fortress economy that will be poorer overall than in a wonderful globalized world, but it would be a relatively safe fortress if the world goes in a much more dangerous direction.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So you don’t seem like a huge advocate of the unilateral turn, and I would say that many others in the foreign policy world would probably be even harsher about it than you are. Why is it such a core feature of American foreign policy, in your view, across multiple administrations? What are the drivers of this unilateralist turn after several decades of a much more global liberal internationalist view of American power?

MICHAEL BECKLEY

Well, I think the first point is that the United States is a young and constantly evolving nation. Even 150 years ago, the United States didn’t even fully control the territory that it owns of its homeland. It was still fighting wars against Native nations, and it had just recently booted out European powers. And so it’s constantly evolving.

And so this liberal order—this very bizarre situation where the United States has signed security defense pacts with dozens of countries, where the United States is supposed to keep its market open so that other countries can sell into it, where the U.S. Navy is patrolling sea lanes or launching missile strikes against the Houthis or whoever else threatens that, and where the United States maintains the dollar as the reserve currency and basically limits certain privileges that it otherwise might have—that’s a very unusual thing for any country to do.

And if you look at U.S. history, I mean, really prior to 1945, the United States had no alliances other than the one it signed with France in the revolution that it reneged on pretty quickly. It had the highest tariffs in the world. It avoided international institutions. It wasn’t isolationist—it was marching its way across the continent, but it was often aloof from the rest of the world, just because it had basically a good thing going in the continental United States. And so that element will always be there in American foreign policy.

And then the other factor is just, Trump makes many good points. As a populist, he is actually very good at highlighting critical problems. And so I think just objectively, the liberal order, this flourishing order of capitalist economies, was very much forged to destroy Soviet communism and to make sure that you don’t have Japanese and German rearmament. I think it succeeded spectacularly well, but now success often creates new problems. So we pacify Germany and Japan, that’s great, but now they can’t really bear major security burdens because they’ve slashed defense spending for so many years.

We integrated Russia and China partially into this order. That seemed like a win. Maybe they had evolved to become responsible stakeholders. But now we know they basically were a Trojan horse, and used their access to the liberal order to loot the system in various ways to build up their power. The United States sponsored all these international institutions, and the number of countries just tripled since 1945, because a country like Singapore or South Korea or Saudi Arabia can really only thrive when you have an open global liberal order. So you have all these countries popping up, which just means a lot more veto points in the international institutions, so places like the UN have basically become stalemated, or they’re just arenas for anti-American posturing.

And then the domestic factor. The vast majority of job growth, of innovation, of wealth creation has gone to the richest 20 percent of ZIP codes in the United States, whereas most of the rest of the country has been much more stagnant. And it’s really set up this urban-rural divide, which is also becoming a political schism within the United States. So these are all problems of success. They are all a result of succeeding in defeating the previous adversaries and making the world more stable, but now they have led to new problems that need to be solved.

So I agree with the idea of reforming the system. I just worry that we’re going to end up going in a different direction that’s basically a toddler version of unilateralism—just smash, grab, take, just think totally short term. It’s like the guy that only takes care of his house, and has no thought that the broader community that his house is living in actually has an effect directly on his own livelihood. That could be the kind of route that is the worst case scenario if we keep going in these ways.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

But without endorsing the Trump alternative or Trump vision of a replacement, it does seem clear to you—I should note we’re having this conversation just a few days after the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, of VE Day—that the order that grew out of U.S. victory in World War II, the liberal international order as we call it in our pages frequently, is gone. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, you think that order is finished.

MICHAEL BECKLEY

I don’t think it’s gone completely, in the sense that you could have a reconstituted West, and I don’t mean West in a geographic sense, I mean in an institutional and values sense. So you see basically the first island chain in East Asia, central and western Europe, Australia, North America. These areas all share fundamental values, and I think you could see a positive situation where that hub gets re-upped, basically. You have a re-globalization among allies.

You just had this renegotiated trade deal with Britain, for example. So if that kind of thing re-takes place and you have more secure supply chains among these Western economies, you have fairer burden sharing and more of a military buildup among allies that have been free riding for a long time, you could have a robust Western alliance that’s sort of like the core of what was the liberal order, but you askew a lot of the globalist—“Let’s try to bring everyone into the tent. Let’s expand the institutions as much as possible. Let’s just have free trade everywhere, and not actually try to play to make sure that we’re getting a fair end of the deal.”

I think that is probably gone, done and dusted forever. Not just because of the current political moment, but because some of the longer term trends, the demographic trends, the technological trends, are also pushing countries to break up a lot of these existing institutions that built up over the course of the last 80 years.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You wrote a great piece in 2022 called “Enemies of My Enemy,” and it very much picks up on the point you made historically a bit earlier about the order, or the post–World War II order really, really being about challenging the Soviet Union. You write in this new piece, you note that, “The strongest orders in modern history. . . were not inclusive organizations working for the greater good of humanity. Rather, they were alliances built by great powers to wage security competition against their main rivals.”

As we apply that logic now that suggests that a bloc of countries, the reconstituted West as you just put it, will come together to counter China—when you talk to people in the Trump administration, they would say, “Look, we can beat up on our allies quite a bit. We can tariff our allies and economic partners and renegotiate new deals with them, and they’re still ultimately going to side with us against Chinese power because the interests are so clear.”

How do you see that dynamic playing out under Trump? Do you still see the logic of countering China, balancing against China, so powerful that it will outweigh a lot of American foreign policies that allies might not like, but they’re going to have to accept?

MICHAEL BECKLEY

I would make two points. One is, your coalition is going to be smaller if you just rely on the hostility of your adversaries to scare people into being on your side. If you’re the lesser of two evils, people are only going to side with you just out of grudging necessity. So yes, the Taiwanese may have few choices, the Ukrainians may have few choices, Japan may have few choices. But a lot of other countries that you’re going to rely on that are not directly on the front line can hedge or maybe even bandwagon with the other side if the deal is good enough. And certainly Beijing has many cards to play to try to buy off partners from the United States so that they’re at least neutral, if they don't side with Beijing.

The other aspect is, what type of coalition do you want to build? Because if you just come in as a rogue superpower and just assume countries will eventually join your side because they hate China and Russia so much, they might do so in ways that also are not great for you. So if they don’t trust you, like if you’re Japan or South Korea, you may start seriously thinking about a nuclear weapon, because at the end of the day, you need some kind of recourse in case the Americans don’t show up. Same thing for Germany and other western European powers. And so the ideal coalition would be one where you’re all working together, you’re not duplicating each other’s capabilities, there’s a division of labor just based on where you’re located and the type of capabilities you can bring to bear.

That is much more efficient and effective, especially at the deterrence stage, because it shows a united front to Russia and China so that hopefully they don’t try to conquer any more of their neighbors in the first place, rather than cobbling together a wartime coalition because deterrence failed, and one that is based much more on a mad scramble [where] everyone’s just arming themselves as quickly as possible and possibly even going nuclear to deal with the new crisis atmosphere that’s been created from that deterrence failure.

So they’re probably right at the most base level of balance of power politics, just given countries’ proximity to China and Russia. But there’s a vast difference between the type and size of coalitions that could be constructed with a much more constructive U.S. foreign policy.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you’ve watched other countries adjusting to the second term Trump administration in the last few months, where do you see meaningful hedging or bandwagoning? Where do you expect to see it in the months ahead? I realize it’s very early, and what the EU-China relationship looks like in six months is very hard to say, but as you’ve watched what we’ve seen so far and look ahead, what do you imagine will make a difference?

MICHAEL BECKLEY

Yeah so, I mean, you’re seeing Europe try to build up their military capabilities. You also saw a welcoming of Chinese diplomats to maybe probe the idea of reopening trade talks. And so there is some limited hedging there. But I think it’s less that any country will completely side with Beijing, for example, but it’s more that they’re just not going to participate.

If the United States needs to impose sanctions because there’s some kind of crisis, and they need to impose sanctions on China, are eastern European powers going to do that if the United States has just completely snubbed them and threatened to pull out of NATO, and is basically just pulling out when there’s the largest war going on on the continent since World War II? I’m not so sure.

And this is why folks who basically just want to pull everything that the United States has out of Europe and focus solely on Asia, I think, are missing the idea that the pivot to Asia also needs to run through Europe, because you want to marshal every element of comprehensive national power to deploy against Beijing, and ideally not have to rely solely on the military instrument. And the only way you do that is by getting all these very wealthy, powerful countries on your side diplomatically and from an economic perspective, so that you can then do collective bargaining with Beijing. So I think it’s just the lack of proactive measures to help with that mission that will be the major casualty of the sort of hedging that we are likely to see if the United States basically has no time and provides no support for many of its allies.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So when you listen to what may be the most coherent kind of ideological current of the administration’s foreign policy, which is really the prioritizers, the people who think we need to dramatically cut down on commitments in Europe and the Middle East or elsewhere so that we can focus on Asia—hear this from JD Vance, you hear it from Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, who’s been driving this message for a long time—you see that as a misunderstanding of strategy and how it’s going to play out over the next few years.

MICHAEL BECKLEY

I see it as an overwhelming focus on fighting a war, or trying to basically marshal up to get ready to fight a war with China, and just saying, “This is going to happen soon. We’ve got to just put as many military assets. . .” Even if they’re not directly relevant, like Stinger missiles—is that going to really be decisive in the Western Pacific? Probably not. And I think it misses that ideally we want to avoid the war, and there’s other aspects to this negotiation. We are trying to reorient supply chains away from China, or get China to back down on some of its mercantilist policies. You need to do that by marshaling a big community of rich Western economies all together saying, “Look, if you don’t change certain of these trade-distorting measures, we’re going to basically cut you out of these supply chains.”

So you have to work with them on the economic aspect, and same thing with the diplomacy and the deterrence—showing that basically sanctions, and possibly even multilateral military cooperation, are preloaded into the situation. That requires doing this diplomacy with allies from multiple different regions. I mean, if there’s a massive war with China, presumably the United States is going to want to try to cut China off from oil and energy. Making sure that you’re working with allies in the Middle East and Europe, I think would be critical to that kind of theater-widening strategy.

And the United States is a maritime power. If you’re a maritime power, you don’t want to engage the continental power at their strongest point just solely with the military instrument. You want to open up new fronts and overstretch their forces, and frankly try to rent partners who are going to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you on the ground. All of that requires moving beyond what I see as a myopic focus on transferring some missiles from one area to another or making sure that a carrier battle group is not stuck in the Mediterranean, and really focusing on the long-term coalition-building before the war breaks out.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let’s linger for a bit on decision making in Beijing because so much of your academic and analytical work has focused on China over the years. As you’ve watched the Chinese leadership’s response to Trump over the last few months, what has struck you in their moves so far, and do you see a coherent strategy behind it? Do you see a theory of the case in Beijing as they try to make sense of Trump?

MICHAEL BECKLEY

They’re trying to spin it like a big win that Chairman Xi [Jinping] stood up to the United States and the United States came crawling back. I actually see it as the opposite. The Chinese very much realize that they depend heavily on exports. Their whole economic model is using subsidies to prop up manufacturing industries and then dump them internationally. And so if the United States is going to slap 145 percent tariffs on them and basically embargo China, that’s going to be absolutely devastating for China’s economy at a very difficult moment when it’s already dealing with demographic issues, with massive debt, with the meltdown of the property sector, which has erased trillions of dollars from the wealth of the Chinese people. So I think they need some economic reprieve because they’re gearing up to try to accomplish big geopolitical objectives.

Xi has made pretty clear that it’s just a question of when, not if China tries to unify Taiwan. He’s staked out claims in the East and South China Seas. He’s been picking a fight with India. And so the last thing that Xi needs to deal with is also an economic crisis that had really rapid effects on the Chinese economy. You saw exports to the United States plummet, you saw factories closing all over the place in China and surging unemployment. So I think they needed some reprieve from that economic pain. It’s not a concession in the sense that they’re going to give up. And in fact, this is why I’m very pessimistic about the U.S.-China relationship going forward, that they have these conflicting interests that just are not going to get fundamentally resolved, and this trade truce does not resolve that. But I think they wanted some reprieve because their economy is in a delicate state, and because they’re trying to focus on gearing up for these broader geopolitical objectives.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You know, it’s become very mainstream in the foreign policy conversation and economic analyses to focus on “peak China” thesis, the idea that China’s growth has slowed considerably. This has become clear to everyone since the end of zero COVID and the disappointing post-COVID economic recovery in China.

You were very focused on Chinese decline, or at least plateauing, I think before everyone was talking about it. You wrote a piece in 2018 in Foreign Affairs arguing that China would not challenge U.S. hegemony in a meaningful way, and then over the next few years, you and Hal Brands wrote a series of pieces about peak China.

But part of that thesis was that Chinese slower growth, and Chinese difficulties on the economic front especially, would not lead it to become more conciliatory but would lead it to become more dangerous. Do you see elements of that in the response to Trump? Do you see ways in which that prediction that you and Hal made over the last few years has been playing out in Chinese foreign policy and then U.S. interactions with China?

MICHAEL BECKLEY

Yeah, I think it accentuates the existing trends that were going on in China. You’ve really seen this since I started back in the 2008 financial crisis, when the Chinese realized the old model of just selling into open Western markets was not going to cut it anymore, and they were going to have to both carve out new markets, they were probably going to have to prepare for a period of conflict with the West. And so even in the last couple of years of the Hu Jintao administration, you started to see China really starting to build up its military power, basically the precursor to the Belt and Road Initiative.

All of these things that we associate with Chinese assertiveness have been building for many years at this point. And when Hal and I, both together and separately, looked at historical cases, this is what you often see. Great powers don’t give up their major ambitions very easily. I mean, Germany and Japan had to have theirs beaten out of them, effectively, in World War II. The British and the French clung to their empires long after they were becoming a huge drain. The Soviet Union continued to double military spending even as it stagnated.

And so I think we’re seeing both from Russia and China today this unwillingness to countenance just folding in to what they view as an American dominated system, and an unwillingness to slip into second rank status, and therefore an emphasis on building up coercive tools of state power so that you can drive a hard bargain economically because you control critical choke points in the global economy. And then to redraw the map of Eurasia. I mean, both of these countries, in some ways they’re very different than the Soviet Union, which was occupying what Stephen Kotkin has called borders of victory after World War II. And that gave it a huge stake in the status quo, because they needed to manage this massive empire that they’d basically taken over during World War II.

For China and Russia, they’re recovering from the Soviet collapse and from the century of humiliation, and they believe there are territories that belong to them they don’t currently control. And they’re just not willing to just say, “Well, we gave it a good try. Our economy is slowing. We’re just going to fold into the existing order.” No. “We’re going to push ahead on the military and economic coercive front to try to make this a reality, and hopefully reset those long-term economic trends in addition to accomplishing geopolitical objectives through this big push.”

So we’ve seen this happen throughout history. Unfortunately, I think both China and Russia today fit the bill of these classic peaking powers today.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Is anything that has happened in Washington in the last few months changing that assessment of the balance between the United States and China? I mean, whether that’s the ways in which the United States is kneecapping itself, whether on immigration or on investment in basic science, or all the ingredients of our own innovation and tech ecosystem, or the ways that Xi is using this as an opportunity to push through certain kinds of economic reforms and changes that he had resisted for a long time. Has that changed your sense of China’s trajectory at all?

MICHAEL BECKLEY

Yeah, especially relative to the United States. Because what I worry about—I mean, this was kind of the point that Hal and I made, which is, in the long term, if present trends continue, we’re looking pretty good. But we may all be dead in the short term because China is moving fast and can really mobilize tremendous resources. They’re pumping out missiles and combat aircraft and warships at five to six times the American rate. I would recommend readers look at Barry Naughton’s work on China’s industrial policy, how they’ve been building up, spending trillions propping up these strategic industries, spending twice as much as any other country, even as a share of its giant economy, and has carved out dominant positions in critical choke points, whether it’s run-of-the-mill computer chips or rare earths or all these different industries that you hear so much about.

And so the United States right now under the Trump administration seems to be focused so much on the tariff and trade aspect, while potentially gutting some of the major domestic investments in long-term science and research and development, and especially in the ability to build out and produce lots of critical pieces of hardware to mine and refine rare earths that empower so many other industries, to build ships in case there is a big maritime confrontation with China.

And so I worry that the United States, despite having tremendous latent power, is further undermining its ability to mobilize that power. And if we get stuck in, suddenly, a huge crisis with China, that’s going to give them a huge short-term advantage over the United States.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Does that in some ways make things more stable? If I’m sitting in Beijing looking at this, I see China’s long-term prospects as perhaps a bit better than I did six months ago—maybe that makes me a little less likely to recommend precipitous action in the near term.

MICHAEL BECKLEY

I worry about the opposite. I think it makes them look at the United States as both hostile but also vulnerable. And this looks similar to me to how the Imperial Japanese looked at the United States. So the United States made very clear they were against Japanese expansion in East Asia, but then didn’t build any fortifications in the Western Pacific, really slashed naval spending and just kind of focused inward. And so the Japanese said, “You know what? I think if we punch these Americans hard enough, they may fold like a house of cards, or we can at least pull off a fait accompli and really build out our power and expand our empire in East Asia.”

I worry for the Chinese, they’re looking at a United States that currently can’t build a lot of ships, that has very low munitions stockpiles, that is critically dependent on rare earths, where they control 90 percent of the refining, and so would run out of all kinds of components and the ability to reconstitute its forces. But then they look at the longer term trends and they say, “Our population is projected to collapse in half sometime between 2060 and 2100. This is going to hit us just in the next ten years, where we’re going to lose 70 million working age adults and gain 120 million senior citizens. The property sector, which was about 30 percent of our GDP, is melting down, and we have massive debt. So it seems like we have the short-term advantage. The long-term seems much more unsure, and we don’t want to let these trends play out. So this seems like an opportune moment.”

And just most importantly, I mean, Xi Jinping just doesn’t also seem like the most modest leader in the world. He’s getting up there in age in his early seventies, and so I think he’s also thinking about his legacy and what he wants to leave behind, and I’m not sure he wants to go down in history as the guy that presided over the stagnation of China’s economy and missing this potential historical moment.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

After a couple of years in which most observers have, I think, shared the sense that you were making the case for five or six years ago that China has stagnated economically and otherwise, I think the debate started to turn a little bit. In our pages recently, Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi, two of the senior China policymakers in the Biden administration, made the case that we are underestimating China, that China has greater strengths than we think. I think you and Kurt and Rush would probably agree on many of the policy recommendations, but the diagnosis is different. What do you think that argument that we’re underestimating China is missing?

MICHAEL BECKLEY

I actually see them as compatible. And it’s similar to what I was pointing out a second ago, namely that their argument, as far as I take it, is that China’s really good at scale, so they can mass produce things, which means the United States now depends on China for a lot of high-volume manufactured goods, whether it’s the rare earths or low-cost electronics or base chemicals or certain pharmaceuticals that are all just embedded in daily life and industrial supply chains. And so I think that can be true, because China has orchestrated that through its Made in China 2025 program, through its massive subsidies. But it can also be true that China relies on the United States for a lot of high-value, irreplaceable inputs—advanced semiconductors or aerospace or precision manufacturing tools, as well as frankly just food and energy security, because they’re the top food and energy importer in the world, and the United States could potentially threaten that.

So in other words, both of these things can be true; that China presents this huge challenge to the United States because it can mobilize resources on a massive scale, especially in the short term, whereas the United States as a divided democracy really doesn’t get serious about mobilizing for national purposes unless it gets punched in the face or confronts a potentially devastating security crisis. And so that’s the exact imbalance that I worry so much about, because it means that China has shot out to this lead in certain critical areas. It means that China could potentially countenance the idea that the Americans just won’t be able to recover.

This could be very different than in World War II, where the United States had a couple of years to mobilize its resources. Now the Chinese are thinking, “If we can do a smash-and-grab operation over Taiwan, and by the way we’ve seeded a lot of malware in American critical infrastructure, that could further disrupt their ability to mobilize if there is a crisis.” That’s the kind of short-term, long-term imbalance that I worry so much about, and I think is basically consistent with both of those takes, even though they’re often portrayed as competing arguments in foreign policy journals.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You’ve argued persuasively that there’s not any kind of permanent accommodation between China and the United States, at least not in the medium term. You made that point in a piece a few years ago called “Delusions of Détente” in our pages, where you talked about the United States and China being enduring rivals and why that’s likely to persist.

But you’ve also, in various places, accepted that diplomacy and real strategic interactions are a meaningful part of this and a necessary part of American foreign policy. How do you think about the equilibrium between the United States and China? What would the best-case relationship look like that would prevent some of these catastrophic outcomes that you’ve been describing today?

MICHAEL BECKLEY

Well, I think in the short term, it’s a cold war. And I know when people hear the phrase “cold war,” they think, this is going to be terrible, this is purely a pejorative thing. But what are the alternatives to that? You’ve got hot war or you have capitulation, and as I see it, the United States and China—they don’t misunderstand where each other are coming from.

In fact, I think the reason there’s so much animosity is because they clearly understand what the other side’s interests are and that there’s just a bunch of zero-sum interests in the United States and China relationship. Whether it’s Taiwan, where it’s governed from, or who controls or what controls the South China Sea, or whether Russia should be propped up or ground down, or whether democracy should be spread or squelched. There are so many different areas where the two countries just have a fundamental and real clash of interest.

And you throw in what political scientists call the credible commitment problem, namely that if concessions that are big enough to reassure the other side also give them a huge strategic advantage, and you have no way to know whether they’re going to exploit that or not. So the Chinese want the United States to stop selling arms to Taiwan, but if the United States does that, then the military balance is going to shift in Beijing’s favor. Likewise, if China stops helping Russia, they have to worry about the potential collapse of the Russian regime and then the West being able to focus its enmity on Beijing.

So there’s just all of these sticking points between the United States and China, and so from my perspective, I think the best-case scenario is a Cold War-style standoff where the two sides are basically glaring at each other, you see more de-risking in critical industries, even as trade continues to flow—toys and t-shirts and things like that. And there are some potential fringe benefits to that cold war, because you get sort of a space race dynamic where both sides are trying to compete to make huge innovations in things like [artificial intelligence] or biotechnology, or in climate energy efficiency and renewable energy. And so maybe they push each other to be better versions of themselves.

And it still doesn’t rule out transnational cooperation on major global issues. So the United States and the Soviets had a cold war, but they still cooperated to help eradicate smallpox. So I think frankly, from a realistic perspective, that’s probably the best we can do. Because I don’t see either the United States or China abandoning a lot of these interests that are really bringing them into conflict.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me try to stick with that optimistic thread before we close, just to end on a relatively hopeful note. In the most recent article you wrote, and this has been, I think, a theme of various pieces you’ve done for us, you of course warn of the consequences of unilateralism or this rogue superpower status over the long term, but you also do see opportunity for the construction of something better, or a new system that would bring in some of the elements of the old order but also address some of its weaknesses. What do you see that process of construction looking like? If you were going to set about sketching a vision for that new order, what would the key dimensions of it be?

MICHAEL BECKLEY

In an ideal world, it would put much more emphasis on democracy. Not democracy promotion, trying to topple regimes and impose democratic regimes, but it’s an emphasis of, let’s first of all get together with countries that share liberal democratic values, and let’s strengthen our economic relationships, let’s strengthen our military relationships, and make that the beating heart of our coalition to then go out into the world and hopefully eventually encourage other countries to join but if not, then at least we have a powerful base to secure ourselves and to renew ourselves at home.

I think when you read the newspaper today, it’s a lot of doom and gloom, and all of that is certainly true. I look at U.S. history, though, and the United States tends to really only invest heavily in itself when it is confronted with these kinds of crises. And so there’s an optimistic tale that this will galvanize major American investments in infrastructure, in education, in innovation and research and development. And so I can see the current crisis instigating that type of investment. I think in terms of [geography], it starts with that North American beating heart and then includes the first island chain in East Asia, western Europe, and hopefully into central Europe, and then you can deal with other countries on a more case by case basis.

So I really think that this current crisis will allow for the emergence of something more positive, but it requires the United States to recognize, one, that it’s not hopeless—that the United States still has tremendous strengths, and that the West in general is enormously powerful. Two, that authoritarian regimes feel that as well, which is why they are moving so rapidly to try to push back and redraw borders and reorient the system and band together. And three, that if you have a united front, you’re much more likely to get deterrents than to just wait and see what happens, and then try to recoup things and hope that you can mobilize afterwards to deal with the problem.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I imagine when you talk about that North American foundation, you do not mean territorial conquest of or integration of Canada and Mexico into the United States.

MICHAEL BECKLEY

Maybe hold off on conquering neighbors for now. That seems like a bad way to go.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Fair enough, we will end on that note. Mike, there’s so much in the series of pieces you’ve done for Foreign Affairs. They’re wonderful reads even now, even the ones from a few years ago, so I suggest that people go back to those. Thanks for all of those, as well as for doing this today.

MICHAEL BECKLEY

Thanks Dan, it’s really a great honor to be here.