This is the fourth in a series of articles on key foreign policy challenges for the next U.S. president. The articles will continue through the general election Nov. 5.

In a 2023 essay in the journal Foreign Affairs, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan described America’s current relationship with China as follows: “The United States and China are economically interdependent. The contest is truly global, but not zero-sum. The shared challenges the two sides face are unprecedented.”

It is not an exaggeration to state that despite the myriad crises presently engulfing the world, from the war in Ukraine to the continuation of decades-long bloodshed in the Middle East to nuclear saber-rattling in Northeast Asia, the single most consequential mid- to long-term challenge to Washington and its liberal-democratic allies is China. As the third-largest nation on earth dominating the eastern end of the Asian landmass, possessing 1.4 billion inhabitants, boasting a rich, ancient culture and owning the globe’s second largest economy, China is by most criteria a great country. 

The competition from Beijing, as Sullivan noted above, is global and is playing out across many of the core domains that comprise the international system - ideology, military, economic, access to natural resources and diplomacy.  

Starting with ideology, many in the West fixate on the communist aspect of the Chinese threat. This author opines that this concern is misplaced.  While China is a “communist” power, it does not share the Marxist ideological fervor that defined the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Beijing is not trying to convert any other country to communism, but it is trying to persuade potential allies that its autocratic form of governance, not democracy, represents the future of the global political system.  This is about centralized, one-party rule, not Marx and Lenin. 

Militarily, China’s rise, particularly in East Asia, poses a growing menace to the United States and its allies in the “first island chain,” the group of island nations (Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia) located along the eastern shore of the East China Sea and South China Sea.  These waters, which Beijing claims as Chinese lakes, are the most-likely source of near-term armed conflict between Washington and the Middle Kingdom, with the Taiwan Strait being ground zero. 

China is flexing its military might farther afield, however, as it now has an operational naval base in Djibouti on Africa’s east coast, near the critical southern entrance to the Red Sea. Beijing is also reportedly setting up bases for power projection in Central Asia and Cambodia, looking to gradually chip away at Washington’s heretofore global military supremacy. 

The security side of China’s foreign policy goes hand-in-hand with its economic expansion, highlighted most saliently by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Aiming to recreate the ancient Silk Road economic corridor, this infrastructure and investment program has, over the past 10 years, spread Chinese influence across Central Asia into the Middle East, Africa (hence the aforementioned Djibouti base) and even Latin America. 

While some of the program’s economic luster has dulled of late due to onerous debt traps, local resistance to dependence on Beijing and growing Western alternatives, China has used the BRI to gain new access to natural resources (lithium in South America, cobalt in Central Africa) essential for electric vehicles, solar panels and high-tech devices, many of which have military applications. Add to that China’s veritable stranglehold on the world’s production of rare earth minerals needed for those same products, and one begins to understand the headaches Beijing’s long-term control of these resources will cause Western leaders. 

Turning to the diplomatic and soft power front, the Middle Kingdom reinforces its economic and military programs with well-coordinated public and private messaging on the superiority of the Chinese way. Backed up by humanitarian outreach efforts -  underscored most recently by a visit to several African nations by the Chinese hospital ship (Peace Ark) – the efficacy of this communications strategy has resonated across a wide swath of Central Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, areas where there is still palpable resentment to the long shadow of Western colonialism.

Against this backdrop, the next resident of the White House, as well as his or her successors, will face a growing and long-term threat to America’s preeminent position on the world stage. With that in mind, it is no surprise that as recently as late August of this year, Sullivan was in Beijing for talks with the Chinese leadership on how to manage the relationship in as peaceful and mutually beneficial a way as possible. 

Rest assured, in order to avoid a potentially catastrophic confrontation between the two powers, more frequent and sustained engagement of this sort will hopefully be a common feature of the coming years. 

Robert Beck of Peterborough served for 30 years overseas with the United States government in embassies in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He now teaches foreign policy classes at Keene State College’s Cheshire Academy for Lifelong Learning.