October 15, 2025

America’s Self-Loathing Is a Losing Hand

This article was originally published in The Washington Post.

Around 10 years ago, the United States began a historic shift in its grand strategy toward China, abandoning the belief that engaging Beijing would liberalize its regime and integrate it into a U.S.-led world order. It was a fragile but significant turn, the result of an accumulation of concerns that ideally would usher in a more effective U.S. strategy.

U.S. competition with China demands strength and clarity — not exhaustion and doubt.

And it did — in many ways, even more dramatically than expected. President Donald Trump forced a rethinking of China policy as no conventional leader could. Then came the Biden administration, which repudiated many Trump policies but kept his approach to China largely intact. This prompted a thousand headlines about Washington’s new hawkish bipartisan consensus on China and the likely dawn of a New Cold War.

Read the full article on The Washington Post.

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