America’s Indo-Pacific challenge

Competing with China is the foremost external policy challenge for the new US administration of President Joe Biden. More precisely, the problem is how to manage China’s power and assertiveness in a state of what incoming National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell have called “competitive coexistence”1—in other words, how to prevent China’s dominance without war. This will involve a global struggle, including domestic dimensions of American resilience, renewal, and resistance to foreign interference. But one geographic space is especially important: the Indo-Pacific.