‘Personnel is policy’: These are not the leaders we need to counter China

“Personnel is policy” is one of Washington’s truisms. The personnel chosen by the Biden administration — most recently, its nomination of Kurt Campbell to be deputy secretary of state — demonstrates a consistency in choosing those who favor engagement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

As an assistant U.S. secretary of state in the Obama administration, Campbell reportedly was instrumental in the 2012 Scarborough Shoal standoff between the Philippines and China. The incident led to a U.S. abandonment of the Philippines’ position that ultimately caused Manila to yield sovereign territory and provided China with another victory in its territorial expansion in the South China Sea. Today, national security adviser Jake Sullivan is doing no better; he has sustained Washington’s failed and dangerous policy of engagement with Beijing.

This summer witnessed the embarrassment of a cavalcade of Biden administration senior officials traveling to China or other locations to convey the Biden administration’s desire to appease the CCP’s demands.

Fundamentally, when it comes to the threat China poses, the American people and U.S. national security interests have been poorly served by the Biden administration. The United States needs personnel and policies that recognize the stark reality of the Sino-American confrontation. The U.S. is fighting a cold war with China that Beijing commenced in 1949, when the CCP seized control.

In 2019, this new cold war took on a grave intensity when Chinese state media — essentially overseen by Chinese leader Xi Jinping — called for a “people’s war” against the United States. In fact, the Sino-American cold war has already lasted for decades. Unlike with the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the U.S. has not mobilized and, instead, has rather consistently minimized the China threat. This behavior is indicative of a condition of international politics that we term “threat deflation” — one state consistently underestimates the nature and scope of the threat it faces from an adversary.

Unfortunately for the American people and U.S. national security, the archetype of threat deflation has been the United States’ relationship with China since the end of the Cold War with the Soviets. Successive U.S. presidents, except for the Trump administration, consistently underestimated China’s communist regime, to a large degree because of the influence of personnel who support the “pro-China engagement” school of thought, which has dominated the opinion of elites within the American national security community. To reverse this trend, America needs someone like Harry Truman, decisive and straight-talking; unfortunately, at the moment, we have Joe Biden (who is scheduled to meet with Xi Jinping this month, as a sidebar to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, summit in San Francisco).

Personnel do matter in government, as does the leadership of great presidents who respond with vigor and unrelenting focus to a threat.

However, U.S. national security institutions, Congress, and some think tanks have failed to learn the lesson of cold war history as well. The U.S. reacts to peer competitive threats most vigorously in the wake of an attack or major crisis, which compels accurate threat identification. Notably, this has been absent in the current cold war. Against the Soviets, it was only after the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan that the U.S. began a sufficient response to Soviet expansion and coercive diplomacy. The Truman administration’s “all azimuths” response to the Soviet challenge provided the strategic foundation for the U.S. and its allies to fight a long struggle — and win.

Yet, the current cold war differs from the one against the Soviets in two major respects that hurt the United States. The first is that U.S. officials at the highest levels of government and national security institutions, along with some think-tank denizens, some in the media, academics, Wall Street and business leaders do not perceive — or they underestimate — the nature and scope of China’s aggression. This lack of strategic awareness is augmented by the CCP’s active, energetic efforts — which far exceed those of the Soviet Union — to promote threat deflation among the intelligentsia, and thus suppress any focused response necessary for American national security.