Defining China–US Strategic Competition: Partisan Realignment and the Domestic Political Logic of Change in American Strategy toward China, 2009–2020

Abstract

The Grand Strategy of the United States, including its strategy toward China, has always been the product of the interaction of geopolitics and domestic politics. After the Cold War, with the end of the bipolar structure of the international system and the increasing polarization of domestic politics in the United States, the impact of geopolitics on the formulation of the foreign policy of the United States has been weakened to some degree, while the spillover effect of domestic politics has weighed more heavily than before. This change could be explained in the way that while two opposing trends of Partisan Realignment began to emerge in the post-financial crisis era in the United States, the elites from both Democratic and Republican Parties had often focused on the preferences of their core political coalition as basis in foreign policy making, in order to further their own respective political interests. In regard to the American strategy toward China, with the deepening of the structural contradictions between China and the United States as well as changes in their respective external strategic choices, geopolitics became the primary logic in the formulation of American strategy toward China since 2009, thus the “strategic competition” has become the dominant mode of bilateral relations. In the view of Washington, China and the United States have formed a competitive relationship in the areas relating to the core interests of the United States, such as economy, security, values and the dominance of the existing international order. However, the questions of reality, such as how to compete with China and how to decide the priorities of their own core interests, are defined by demands of core political coalitions represented by the elites from both Democratic and Republican Parties in the context of a new round of Partisan Realignment. From Obama to Trump, different domestic political logics made the focus of American strategy toward China shifted from “institution–values” competition based on globalism to “economy–security” competition based on nationalism. Therefore, the changes in American domestic politics will present an important channel through which the orientation of American strategy toward China would be clearly observed in the future.