China Threat: AEI Proposals for U.S. Policy

As the new House GOP majority established a select committee on China and began to call witnesses this week, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) announced the launch of its New China Playbook, a program examining how the U.S. can gain a strategic edge over Beijing in this moment of renewed great-power competition.

The project is spearheaded by AEI senior fellows Dan Blumenthal, Zack Cooper, and Derek Scissors and overseen by Kori Schake (AEI’s director of foreign- and defense-policy studies, who in recent years has become controversial in some conservative circles). To start, Blumenthal, Cooper, and Scissors each issued recommendations to potential 2024 presidential candidates on how to best counter Chinese revisionism. On the military front, Blumenthal encourages the adoption of a comprehensive counter-coercion strategy — that is, a strategy to block China’s attempts to coerce Taiwan into “reunification” through nonmilitary (whether political or clandestine) means. Cooper advocates ditching strategic ambiguity on whether America would come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of a Chinese invasion in favor of a policy of “dynamic deterrence.” He also calls for bolstering military preparedness and deepening bilateral and multilateral trade relationships in the Pacific, something the Biden administration has often neglected to do. On the economic front, Scissors urges circumscribing Chinese involvement in key supply chains, requiring the disclosure of stolen intellectual property so that authorities know when China is illegally profiting off it, and fully enforcing export controls on critical technologies.

About the Author

Bobby Miller

Bobby Miller is an ISI Fellow at National Review and a graduate student at Georgetown University.

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As the new House GOP majority established a select committee on China and began to call witnesses this week, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) announced the launch of its New China Playbook, a program examining how the U.S. can gain a strategic edge over Beijing in this moment of renewed great-power competition.

The project is spearheaded by AEI senior fellows Dan Blumenthal, Zack Cooper, and Derek Scissors and overseen by Kori Schake (AEI’s director of foreign- and defense-policy studies, who in recent years has become controversial in some conservative circles). To start, Blumenthal, Cooper, and Scissors each issued recommendations to potential 2024 presidential candidates on how to best counter Chinese revisionism. On the military front, Blumenthal encourages the adoption of a comprehensive counter-coercion strategy — that is, a strategy to block China’s attempts to coerce Taiwan into “reunification” through nonmilitary (whether political or clandestine) means. Cooper advocates ditching strategic ambiguity on whether America would come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of a Chinese invasion in favor of a policy of “dynamic deterrence.” He also calls for bolstering military preparedness and deepening bilateral and multilateral trade relationships in the Pacific, something the Biden administration has often neglected to do. On the economic front, Scissors urges circumscribing Chinese involvement in key supply chains, requiring the disclosure of stolen intellectual property so that authorities know when China is illegally profiting off it, and fully enforcing export controls on critical technologies.