Xi Jinping sees the United States as the primary obstacle to China’s ultimate ambitions: communism’s victory over capitalism, the forced “re-unification” of Taiwan, and China’s return to the center of the global stage. However, Xi is also a pragmatist. Recognizing the U.S. remains a formidable power that still benefits China’s economy, he prefers to avoid direct military confrontation.

What does that mean for U.S. policy? Let’s start with what it doesn’t mean. Our two countries are not enemies, and we are not at war. Hundreds of thousands of citizens from both countries travel, study and work in each other’s territory.

Despite higher tariffs, bilateral commerce totaled nearly half a trillion dollars last year, making China the third-largest U.S. trading partner. We have collaborated before on climate, the financial crisis and Iran, and should do so again on those issues and others, like AI safety.

China is absolutely a competitor across arenas vital to the American people. This friction stems mainly from Xi’s drive to build Chinese power and influence relative to America’s. Xi’s strategy is to pull so far ahead of Washington that he can achieve his core goals without risking a war.

His priority is to dominate global supply chains of key manufacturing industries, from steel and shipbuilding to EVs, pharmaceuticals and the AI stack. China’s massive, decades-long support for favored industries has incurred huge costs for China’s struggling economy and inflicted severe harm on factories and workers in the U.S. and other nations. However, it has paid clear geopolitical dividends. Beijing laid bare this leverage by successfully using control over rare earth magnets to force the Trump administration to back off its 2025 tariff tsunami on Chinese imports and its export controls on advanced semiconductors.

In the security realm, China continues to deploy mounting pressure — militarily and otherwise — on U.S. partners and allies in the Western Pacific, and most especially Taiwan, the Philippines and Japan. While carefully avoiding open conflict, Beijing is pushing the bounds of gray-zone provocation to wear down governments it doesn’t like in Taipei, Manila and Tokyo, and intimidate others. All the while, it tries to prove that the U.S. cannot be relied on to back its friends when push comes to shove.

Xi’s China is also trying to reshape international organizations to make them more amenable to authoritarianism, in clear opposition to the democratic values embodied in the U.N. Charter. Simultaneously, Beijing is passing sweeping laws claiming unprecedented extraterritorial authority to target dissidents and other labeled “hostile” elements anywhere around the world, including inside America.

To deal with such a serious competitor — one fully prepared to throw sharp elbows and low blows — Washington must quickly implement a clear, dual-pronged strategy.

First, the U.S. must prioritize strengthening itself at home, the opposite of what the Trump administration is doing. We must maintain the moral high ground and political resiliency that come from a properly functioning democracy, not lower ourselves to banana republic standards of corruption and coercion. We must support, not attack, our world-beating universities and research institutions. And we must reopen our doors to the international talent that has long been essential to American entrepreneurialism and innovation. Otherwise, it will be hard to prevail over China at the technological cutting edge.

Second, the U.S. needs to systematically rebuild trust with the allies and partners that Trump has insulted and bullied for the last two years. Under Xi, China is not an invincible giant, but it is not a pygmy either. The U.S. will be far more effective in pushing back Chinese industrial overcapacity, resisting regional intimidation, and blocking attempts to reshape international norms if it works in lockstep with its like-minded teammates. Dithering on Taiwan arms sales, downgrading military exercises with South Korea while praising North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and directing hostile tariff and immigration policies against even our closest partners do nothing but undermine our competitiveness.

In fact, continuing too far down the current path of undermining U.S. strength at home while alienating friends abroad could easily embolden Beijing to overreach. It may even accelerate Xi’s timeline for Taiwan “re-unification,” regional domination, Free World de-industrialization and global preeminence. That trajectory risks inducing a dangerous miscalculation, turning a tense competition into an open conflict with devastating global consequences.

The stronger we are and the more aligned we are with our friends, the more likely we are to remain competitors instead of enemies.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Jonathan Fritz is a senior fellow for China policy at the Center for American Progress. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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