China Dominates the Situation Room But Not the Campaign Trail

Good evening! Tonight, my colleague David Sanger, a White House and national security correspondent, is here with a look at what we are not hearing on the campaign trail about the nation’s biggest geopolitical challenge: China.

Ask President Biden — or just about anyone in the national security firmament of the United States — about America’s most potent geopolitical challenge over the next few decades, and you are bound to get a near-unanimous answer: China.

The argument is familiar. The United States has never before faced a competitor who challenges it on so many fronts. Xi Jinping’s China is America’s only real technological competitor, in everything from artificial intelligence to semiconductors, electric cars to biological sciences. The country has more than doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal in the past few years, and a new partnership it has formed with Russia could upend every assumption about how America defends itself.

Then there’s the economy. If, a few years ago, American economists worried about China’s rapid rise, today they worry about its slowdown, and the overhang of industrial production that is flooding the world with excess goods, with potentially disastrous consequences.

There’s also the very real risk of war over Taiwan. There’s TikTok. The list goes on.

Yet when the issue comes up on the campaign trail at all, it’s framed chiefly as an economic threat. Thornier discussions of China’s role as a broad strategic competitor, with ambitions that are already forcing the United States to change how it prepares its workers, shapes its investments and restructures its defenses, have fallen largely by the wayside.

China has fallen victim to what I call Situation Room-Campaign Trail disequilibrium. It works something like this: If there is a topic that is fixating Washington policymakers, it’s usually a good bet no one is talking about it, except in platitudes, on the campaign trail.

This week was a prime example. While the campaign roared along, President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was in Beijing, meeting with President Xi on a range of urgent issues, including China’s support of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Chips, human rights and climate

You might think that China would be the exception to the Situation Room rule. It touches everything, from how we shop at Walmart to the warming of the earth. Progressives could be expected to concern themselves both with its human rights record and its status as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Some conservatives arguing for bigger defense budgets pay close attention to the growth of China’s navy, and its 2021 tests of hypersonic missiles that took the Pentagon by surprise. They make a case for letting Europe worry about the war in Ukraine, so the United States can focus on China.

But China has yet to emerge as the subject of sustained — and substantive — debate in the presidential campaign.

It’s easy to dismiss this by saying that foreign policy rarely gets a serious airing in presidential elections, unless Americans are actively deployed in a conflict abroad. But it’s emerged as a key theme in multiple elections.

In 2016, Trump turned “America First” into his rallying cry, echoing a term used by an isolationist, stay-out-of-war political pressure group in the 1940 election. (When my colleague Maggie Haberman and I first asked Trump about the phrase in an interview in early 2016, he said he hadn’t heard of it; days later, he was using it.)

The Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960 were dominated by the questions of nuclear strategy and how to curb the influence of the Soviet Union. And Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was propelled by the human and strategic disaster of the Iraq War.

Falling back on easy talking points

Vice President Kamala Harris mentioned China just once when she accepted the Democratic presidential nomination last week, saying she wanted to ensure “that America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century and that we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership.” She then moved on to Russia.

For his part, Trump no longer talks at his rallies about the great trade deals he thinks he is going to strike with Xi, as he often did while in office. Instead, he blames Beijing for the coronavirus pandemic and then promises to impose steep tariffs on Chinese goods.

Harris has criticized those ideas as a “national sales tax” that would cost middle-class consumers billions and fuel inflation. But the Biden administration has not only kept Trump-era tariffs in place, it has also proposed new ones, including a 100 percent tax on Chinese-made electric vehicles. So far, the Harris campaign hasn’t said what kind of tariffs she would support.

The argument about tariffs is a critical economic one. But the strategic questions of dealing with China go far beyond what you can order — or how much you pay — when you shop online.

Nukes, satellites and dominance

Almost as soon as the next president is sworn in, questions about countering China’s military buildup — in space and cyberspace, on the seas and in the nuclear missile silos that have suddenly appeared in the Chinese desert — will sweep through those Situation Room meetings.

First and foremost will be the implications of the new relationship between Beijing and Moscow. Just before he exited the presidential race, Biden acknowledged for the first time, in response to my question at a news conference, that the administration had adopted a strategy of trying to interrupt the partnership of its two biggest adversaries, much as Nixon and Kissinger attempted 50 years ago. Harris has been around for internal debates about that strategy, but we know little about her thinking on the subject.

Quietly, Mr. Biden also changed the guidance on nuclear strategy, to focus more on a Chinese arsenal that the Pentagon thinks is headed to 1,500 weapons. That sounds like an invitation for rekindling Cold War-era debates.

The one subject no candidate wants to touch, of course, is TikTok. Trump threatened to ban it in the last year of his presidency; he has now flipped his position. Harris hasn’t said yet whether she thinks the Chinese-owned app, which her campaign is using furiously to attract younger voters, is a blessing or a national security threat.

But Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo had it about right when she was asked last year whether the Biden administration was ready to ban it in an effort to keep Chinese influences off American phones.

“The politician in me,” she said drolly, “thinks you’re going to literally lose every voter under 35, forever.”

THE CATCH-UP

It’s the Trump campaign vs. the U.S. Army

In 2024, politics news never stops. From time to time, I’ll use this space to catch you up on a major theme of the week. First up: how Trump’s effort to focus on military issues went off the rails.

Donald Trump sought to focus his presidential campaign on the military this week, hoping to remind voters of the nation’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan three years ago and present himself as a steadying force by contrast.

That is not exactly how it has gone.

Instead, a confrontation between his campaign staff and an Arlington National Cemetery official on Monday has taken over the headlines, blotting out his message and reigniting longstanding criticisms about his perceived insensitivity toward fallen soldiers.

Here’s what has happened, if you’re just catching up.

The Army on Thursday said a campaign aide “abruptly pushed aside” a cemetery employee who was trying to enforce a federal law prohibiting filming for political purposes in a restricted part of the cemetery while Trump was there on Monday.

Trump had visited that area, known as Section 60, on Monday with a group including the family members of two U.S. Marines who were killed in a suicide bombing at Abbey Gate three years ago, when American forces were leaving Afghanistan. One of Trump’s campaign aides posted a photo from the visit on X; footage from the visit was also shared on TikTok.

My colleague Jonathan Weisman wrote about how the dispute evoked longstanding accusations that Trump is disrespectful toward the military — a frequent Democratic attack that hasn’t stopped many veterans from supporting him.

It also highlights a deeper dilemma for Trump, Weisman wrote: Trump is using the isolationist playbook he honed in 2016 over opposition to America’s post-9/11 conflicts. But he hasn’t exactly updated it to reflect the fact that he’s running in the first presidential election in 24 years to unfold without the United States being involved in a ground war.

Read more here.

— Jess Bidgood