Thinking Too Small: Why Washington Lacks Resolve to Win the New Cold War

America has a “Sputnik” problem in its competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and more specifically with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). For the past fifteen years, U.S. elected officials, scholars, and journalists have warned of various PRC advances in education, technology, and militarization, framing China’s advances as “Sputnik moments” that demanded a requisite American response. 

The problem, however, is not advancements on China’s part. What is missing is American focus, alarm, and resolve. When asked in February 2024 what a “generational wake-up call” for America could look like, Former Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger gave a disturbing answer: “I would have hoped that COVID would have been enough of a wake-up call, but we ended up just tearing each other apart during COVID rather than coalescing to a sense of national purpose. I’m waiting for that moment for us to coalesce.”[i] 

If a global pandemic caused by the CCP was an insufficient shock to shift the American psyche into waging a systems-level competition, what will it take? After all, Americans have been warning about one “Sputnik moment” after another with the CCP for years, but no one seems to be listening. But Americans did listen in 1957 after Sputnik launched—and responded with overwhelming unity and focus. 

America needs this same level of resolve today. The overriding challenge of American statecraft is mobilizing U.S. political leadership to rise to the challenge of deterring the CCP and disrupting its geopolitical strategy before a crisis drags Washington into war. The answer to our present-day failure lies in America’s historical success in the wake of World War II. 

Cold War Context 

When Americans think back to the 20th century, we tend to assume that the United States quickly recognized the existential threat the Soviet Union posed to the West and seamlessly transitioned from victory in 1945 to great power competition in 1946. History tells us quite the opposite. At the Tehran Conference in 1943, Winston Churchill privately complained to one of his ministers that, “Stalin has got the president in his pocket.”[ii] He was referring to Franklin Delano Rosevelt, who was counting on Joseph Stalin’s rationality and trustworthiness to keep the peace after the war’s conclusion.  

FDR’s trust in Stalin strained credulity. In 1942 correspondence with Churchill, the American president condescendingly informed the British prime minister, “I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.” To maintain Stalin’s apparent favor, FDR went so far as to circumvent his own State Department to deal directly with the Soviet generalissimo. No concession seemed beyond consideration for President Rosevelt: “I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return… he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of peace and democracy.”[iii] 

Unsurprisingly, Stalin exposed FDR’s hopes as delusions. The Soviet Union revealed its own expansionist ambitions even as they defeated the Nazis, from denying Allied troops access to German submarine technology in 1944 to reneging on commitments at the Yalta Conference to imposing Soviet-style elections in Poland in 1945.[iv] Months later, Stalin’s brutality was on full display. Merely associating with an American or a Briton merited arrest in Belgrade. In Bulgaria, Stalin ordered the killing of 20,000 people. He established a communist dictatorship in Hungary.[v] In overplaying his hand, Stalin shook America awake from its slumber. 

That history should inform our dealings with China. To be sure, elite CCP leaders have committed their fair share of strategic miscalculations. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Xi Jinping’s support for aggressive “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy unquestionably complicated Beijing’s strategic objectives with the United States and especially with Europe.[vi] 

Thus far, however, Xi and his predecessors have avoided Stalin’s mistake. By utilizing “gray zone” tactics and taking steps short of war, the CCP has found more creative ways beneath the threshold of war to change the territorial status quo in regions like the South China Sea. Under America’s nose, Chinese state-owned enterprises constructed and militarized artificial atolls within this international body of water through which one third of global shipping passes each year.[vii] Likewise, the BRI has allowed the PLA to project power abroad under the guise of economic cooperation, thus evading America’s cognitive motion detectors.[viii] Xi Jinping doesn’t need to play his hand perfectly; he merely needs to wait until the PRC is sufficiently strong and pre-positioned to present America with a fait accompli. Each day brings the world closer to that brink, as evidenced most clearly in the Taiwan strait. 

Responding to Beijing’s Anaconda Strategy[ix] 

In April 2025, China staged the latest in a series of large-scale military and coast guard exercises around Taiwan.[x] These drills were not mere shows of strength. They were practice sessions. Taiwanese Admiral Tang Hua told the Economist last fall that China’s military forces “are ready to blockade Taiwan at any time they want.” Tang said Beijing is “using an ‘anaconda strategy’ to squeeze the island.”[xi] China’s recent actions bear this out. From January to August 2024, the number of Chinese air incursions crossing the median line—the border in the middle of the Taiwan strait—jumped more than fivefold.[xii] China is angling to bait Taiwan into making a mistake that would give it a pretext to blockade the island. Strategically, Xi Jinping’s goals are broader: demoralize, isolate, and ultimately subsume Taiwan. 

Xi is making a calculated bet: if Washington did not stop him from redrawing the map in the South China Sea, then it will not stop him from subsuming Taiwan—as long as he escalates incrementally. The Trump Administration needs to use gray-zone tactics to interdict Xi’s strategy in real time, deter further escalation, and compel Beijing to cease its aggression. Thus far, real fears about military escalation have made Washington policymakers hesitant to make such moves. They are right to urge caution. Symmetrical escalation would implicate the U.S. military and could spiral into a conflict neither America nor Taiwan wants. 

But there is another way to think about deterrence. Instead of climbing up the escalation ladder and risking a military confrontation, the Trump Administration could impose costs in nonmilitary arenas. Consider student visas, which CCP elites cherish for their children and which Xi values for espionage purposes. President Trump could present Xi Jinping with a choice: for every sea or naval incursion the PLA commits against Taiwan, Washington will reduce the number of eligible Chinese student visas by 100. Doing so would make Beijing pay for its aggression and yield information about Xi’s value calculus. 

Thinking Too Small 

Unfortunately, Washington currently lacks sufficient resolve and strategic focus to gain the advantage in Taiwan, let alone the broader relationship with Beijing. A month before his second inauguration, Trump echoed Roosevelt’s optimism about Stalin when he pronounced that “China and the United States can together solve all of the world’s problems.” To be sure, the president appears intent on winning the race for key emerging technologies like AI. But the current administration is hamstrung by the president’s approach to foreign policy. 

Trump is seeking now what he sought in his first term: a trade deal. Like all deals, both sides come to an agreement via negotiation and horse trading. That is a normal part of diplomacy, even amid a cold war. Unfortunately, the administration is trading away policies that are too important to be leveraged as bargaining chips. Instead of utilizing student visas to escalate horizontally in the Taiwan Strait, the Trump Administration used them for defensive reasons: to secure export guarantees from Beijing on rare earth mineral exports for the next six months. That deal favors Beijing. America has long needed to scrutinize PRC nationals studying in U.S. universities, particularly in sensitive fields like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Good strategy dictates trading away equities of little value to us. Instead, the Trump Administration will allow the CCP to continue gaming our student visa system so American automotive companies can continue importing rare earth magnets for motors, brakes, and steering mechanisms through December. 

Viewing the broader policy agenda with China through trade narrows the strategic aperture such that every equity is a potential bargaining chip for a deal. If trade were the overarching domain of the U.S.-China relationship, this would be acceptable. But trade is a subset of the broader cold war playing out between Washington and Beijing. The Trump Administration needs to think bigger: if the president wants to win a trade war, he will need to wage a broader cold war. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration is doing the opposite. 

Casualties of Domestic Politics[xiii] 

On January 20, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14166,[xiv] which illegally paused the enforcement of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, passed the previous summer during the Biden presidency.[xv] That was a bad decision because TikTok is the CCP’s most deadly weapon of disinformation within America. Most recently, TikTok artificially boosted content from Chinese manufacturers to induce sympathy among U.S. users for the Chinese victims of Trump’s trade war with Beijing. Nevertheless, the Trump Administration persists in preserving the CCP’s ability to wield this weapon of mass disinformation.[xvi] 

Trump also signed an executive order on January 20 that mandated a 90-day pause on all foreign assistance, pending a review—impacting funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and countless NGOs whose ideals are opposed to those of the CCP.[xvii] The administration’s argument to justify this step was alarming: “The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy … destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations to and among countries.”[xviii] The word “harmonious” echoes the CCP’s own propaganda about “harmonious development,” “peaceful coexistence,” and “a common destiny for all mankind.” Even more troubling is the administration’s misguided war against NED. In February, Elon Musk made arguments against the organization that were lifted from Chinese state media.[xix] The following month, the administration announced that the U.S. Agency for Global Media—and, by extension, Radio Free Asia (RFA)—was “unnecessary” and announced their effective defunding. The CCP wasted little time in dancing on RFA’s grave.[xx] 

These incidents are the latest data points in a broader trend.[xxi] For all the talk of a bipartisan China policy in Washington, America’s efforts to counter the CCP are increasingly becoming a casualty of U.S. domestic politics. This trend will continue as long as the administration views Beijing through a prism of trade. America requires transcendent leadership to recognize that CCP “gray zone” tactics are not an invitation to think small, but a challenge to think big. Washington needs to seize control of the competitive agenda with Beijing and pursue a strategy of escalating to ultimately deescalate on favorable terms. It will not be a matter of tariffs or trade deals, but rather a protracted cold war to leverage our advantages and exploit CCP weaknesses, of which there are many.[xxii]