Analysis & Opinions

The U.S. position in the global value chain puts it at a disadvantage, and Washington's confrontational policies are making things worse.

Joseph Nye writes that if the United States maintains its alliances, invests in itself, and avoids unnecessary provocations, it can reduce the probability of falling into either a cold war or a hot war with China. But to formulate an effective strategy, it will have to eschew familiar but misleading historical analogies.

China has at least a 70% dependence on the U.S. and its allies for more than 400 items, ranging from luxury goods to raw materials needed for Chinese industries, a new analysis of trade data has found. (...) The analysis, set to publish Wednesday in the International Security academic journal, uses data from the United Nations Comtrade database, which tracks official global trade statistics. China’s high-dependency exposure was calculated by bundling together trade activity from the U.S. and more than a dozen allies across a range of categories.

Stephen Walt analyzes the priority that the United States should place on competing with China by asking and answering five questions.

The geopolitical implications of solar displacing oil as the world’s major source of energy are enormous. Why has the Middle East been a central arena in the “great game” for the past century? Because countries there have been the major suppliers of the oil and gas that powered 20th-century economies. If, over the next decade, photovoltaic cells that capture energy from the sun were to replace a substantial part of the demand for oil and gas, who will the biggest losers be? And even more consequentially: who will be the biggest winner?

Graham Allison is interviewed about U.S.-China relations by the Global Macro Research Team for a Goldman Sachs publication.

The Economist’s recent cover story declaring that the US economy is “leaving its peers ever further in the dust” is still making waves in Washington. The inconvenient truth, however, is that The Economist reaches this stunning conclusion by excluding the US’s only true peer: China. 

The incursion in January of a Chinese spy balloon into U.S. airspace seemed to many observers like a bad miscalculation by Beijing. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had been scheduled to travel to China the following month, but the balloon incident led to the scrapping of the much-anticipated visit. Chinese leader Xi Jinping almost certainly would have preferred to see diplomacy proceed as planned. It is likely that he would not have sanctioned this operation had he known its consequences. If he believed that the United States would simply overlook the incursion, he was clearly mistaken.

Stephen Walt outlines how Washington and Beijing could stop the war in Ukraine.

U.S. export controls on China’s semiconductor industry are just the opening salvos in a series of unprecedented export controls on China planned by the Biden administration. After controls on semiconductors, the Commerce Department is moving on to the next emerging technology it worries China could weaponize—quantum computing.