Joe Biden is determined that China should not displace America

AMERICA MUST focus on “blunting Chinese power and order and building the foundations for US power and order”. That, at least, is the message of a recent book by Rush Doshi, until recently a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, DC. “The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order” argues that China has worked for years to undermine America’s geopolitical dominance and shape a more illiberal world order that better protects and serves China’s interests. It concludes that these efforts need to be repaid in kind.

This is a striking rebuke to decades of American foreign-policy thinking focused on “engagement” with China. The rebuke gains extra weight from the fact that Mr Doshi is now a China director on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, where he works under Kurt Campbell, his mentor and a leading architect of the administration’s China strategy.