A striking feature of left-of-center intellectual debates over the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Bidenomics’ flagship bill that aims to channel $500 billion in financing and incentives toward domestic renewable-energy projects, is the growing recognition that the legislation has at least as much, or perhaps more, to do with geopolitics as it does with climate policy. More specifically, a number of commentators committed to a peaceful, multilateral approach to a global energy transition have raised concerns that the IRA — in its effort to reorient global green supply chains toward the U.S. — is the Biden administration’s latest escalatory step in what has become an increasingly dangerous competition between the U.S. and China. According to these voices, Washington’s ongoing effort to buttress American economic hegemony via green industrial policy is a reckless one-way ratchet toward armed conflict.

That national-security adviser Jake Sullivan, rather than a domestic-policy adviser, served as the IRA’s chief spokesman especially dismayed these critics, proving that the IRA is not so much a “new Washington consensus” on decarbonization as a fashionable method for defending foreign policy as usual.

As Sullivan put it in a speech at the Brookings Institution in April, “this strategy will build a fairer, more durable global economic order” not solely for America but “for the benefit of ourselves and for people everywhere.” For example, by generating green consumer demand in the U.S. with the IRA’s $7,500 federal electric-vehicle (EV) credit, and by linking that credit to “friend-shoring” sourcing requirements (40 percent of critical minerals must come from countries with a U.S. free-trade agreement), Sullivan hopes to convert American purchasing power into geopolitical capital by incentivizing foreign supply-side participation in a U.S.-led economic order.

The clear loser in this arrangement? China, which hopes to control the global EV export market and its critical mineral supply chains through its Belt and Road Initiative. Though the administration soft-pedals the Sino–American friction endemic to the IRA, it’s hard to see its design as anything other than a “greened” bid to maintain American economic hegemony.

In April 2023, J. W. Mason in Jacobin noted the “frightening anti-China rhetoric that’s a ubiquitous part of the case for public investment.” The historian Grey Anderson put it more sharply for New Left Review in June. The IRA’s ambition, he wrote, for “reshoring production on the US mainland, bagging lithium mines, and sponsoring construction of microchip factories” is nothing less than a “militarized bid to outflank China.” The “anti-China orientation” of Sullivan’s approach is, in his view, “not an unfortunate by-product of the green ‘transition,’ but its motivating purpose.”

The use of the word “militarized” is crucial, as it connects geo-economic competition (which can, and ideally should, be peaceful) to the prospect of armed conflict. Indeed, many China doves can be forgiven for not seeing any distinction between the two in the Biden administration’s pursuit of “integrated deterrence” in the Indo-Pacific. Anderson described the IRA as a stratagem nested within “an expansive strategic outlook, classed by Pentagon war-planners under the watchword ‘denial.’” In D.C., such an approach, he added, has become “like containment, its proximate predecessor, . . . a labile concept.”

If denial has indeed become conceptually malleable, that is only because its definition has become distorted over time, to the detriment of constructive discussion of its merits. Sometimes specifics amount to semantics. But in this case, they don’t. Anderson rightly cited Elbridge Colby as the leading exponent of denial correctly understood. Colby has argued consistently and at length that denial’s optimal definition is a narrow, negative one: designed to deny China’s ability to achieve hegemony over Asia by military means.

Strictly speaking, a strategy of deterrence by denial is about preventing a war in the Pacific, particularly over Taiwan, by first achieving a favorable balance of allied military power that will enable conditions for détente.

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Correctly defined, deterrence by denial is emphatically not a tool for advancing progressive social-policy objectives, importing preferred environmental policies into the Department of Defense, or, most alarmingly, strangling the growth of the Chinese economy. In fact, even implicitly including any of the above in its definition risks undermining the efficacy of deterrence by denial, by slowing its timely implementation. Worst of all, defining it too broadly would likely induce in Beijing, paradoxically, the very sort of dangerous military behavior that denial aims to prevent.

Seen in this light, what these left-of-center critics are noticing is not the Biden administration’s faithful application of a denial strategy but a distortion of it. To lift a phrase, this White House has persistently “defined denial down,” expanding its remit in a politicized effort to satisfy the Democratic Party’s current coalition. The historian Adam Tooze suggested as much in June, writing in Chartbook, on Substack:

To bolster their political coalition, to conduct an innovative new policy on a wafer-thin majority, to pursue their deeply held commitment to American leadership, the Biden economic technocrats turn to national security, to the Pentagon and the think tanks of the Beltway as natural partners.
There is a big green state in the United States, the biggest the world has ever seen, with an annual budget rising towards $1 trillion, but it wears fatigues and its preferred shades of green are camouflage and khaki.

Criticism of this tendency — a tendency that has come to resemble doctrine for this administration — is correct and necessary, whether from the left or the right. From a purely electoral point of view, the administration’s behavior might be rational. But from a pragmatic geopolitical one, it courts unnecessary risks. This is for three main reasons.

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First, an overbroad denial strategy would undermine the necessary project of building domestic support for a strict focus on military denial.

The American public has grown skeptical of armed conflict abroad. Layering extraneous goals over core defense objectives erodes political will and focus. Further, defining denial down sends confusing signals to service members and government officials tasked with implementing policy in bureaucracies that require clear, consistent, and narrowly defined directives.

The foreign-policy elite and political class have adopted a posture of great-power competition toward China, but that consensus is contested and often superficial. The best way of achieving true consensus on China policy is to make the parsimonious case for military denial.

Frankly put: Americans’ primary interest in Asia is to maintain our commercial access to the world’s largest and fastest-growing market. The greatest threat to that interest is China’s ability to coercively attain regional hegemony. A regionally dominant China would exert a controlling influence on Americans’ economic prosperity and security and, as a result, on our freedoms. Strictly defined military denial is the simplest and most cost-efficient way to neutralize that threat, and it therefore has the best chance of forging political consensus.

Second, defining denial down diminishes American credibility among allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, weakening any nascent anti-hegemonic coalition by raising questions about the solidity of our security commitments.

The best assurance the U.S. can convey to these critical countries is to take clear and focused action to restore military balance to the region. Bank-shot logic counseling a “race to the top” on global labor and environmental standards meant to build “capacity, resilience, and inclusiveness” does nothing to directly address these countries’ most dire concern: doubt that the U.S. has the means and will to underwrite their national security. Further, the focus on social policy disincentivizes and distracts regional allies and partners from investing in their own defense capabilities. The appearance of a disorganized and unprepared defensive coalition would naturally invite hostility.

Third, defining denial down broadcasts a needlessly provocative signal of American intentions to Beijing. Inflammatory rhetoric about “democracies versus autocracies,” the labeling of Xi as a “dictator,” and calls for “regime change” as the goal of our China policy risk turning great-power competition into an existential struggle. To foster this perception in Beijing is to suggest that Washington’s clear intent is to strangle Chinese economic growth. Such a threat could push Xi’s aging regime (which has explicitly linked reunification with Taiwan to the “rejuvenation” of the Chinese nation) to take a gamble on the island in an effort to “break out” of its geopolitical constraints as quickly as possible.

By contrast, a strict strategy of denial would communicate Washington’s intent to reach a decent peace with Beijing: an equilibrium in which economic and diplomatic competition can occur below the level of armed conflict, accounting for the continued — and expected — growth of China as a global economic power.

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In trying to have it all with (to repurpose Ezra Klein’s phrase) an “everything bagel” strategy of denial, the Biden administration risks fragmenting the attention that must be focused on the region’s key variable: the military balance. Rather than engage in the necessary political work of ruthlessly setting priorities, this White House has opted for a China policy that means (at least to its core constituencies) all things to all people. Americans of all political stripes should reject this approach as overbuilt and irresponsible, accepting no substitute for a true strategy of denial — the kind of narrow, disciplined defense strategy that suits the current moment.