How The U.S. Failed To Meet the China Challenge

WSJ Opinion: Free Expression

Gerard Baker, Editor at Large, The Wall Street Journal

Society & Culture, News

4.6 • 591 Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2024

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s a rare subject of bipartisan agreement that China is the greatest strategic challenge facing the U.S., perhaps the greatest it has ever faced. And yet, despite a decade of admirations of both parties acknowledging the threat, we are woefully under-prepared for it. What can the next President learn from the mistakes of the recent past and how might he remedy them? On this episode of the Free Expression podcast, Richard Fontaine and Robert Blackwill, foreign policy commentators and co-authors of a new book, “Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power” talk with Gerry Baker about what went wrong and how the next ad ministration must fix it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:17.1	From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.
0:20.2	This is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.
0:24.6	Hello and welcome to the Free Expression podcast from the Wall Street Journal.
0:28.2	I'm Jerry Baker, editor at large of the journal.
0:30.3	If you're not already subscribing, please do sign up wherever you do your podcast listening.
0:34.7	This week, it's a rare source of bipartisan agreement. China is the
0:39.5	greatest strategic challenge the US faces, perhaps the greatest it has ever faced. But it's also
0:45.2	widely acknowledged that we are not doing anything like enough to deal with the challenge.
0:49.8	This, despite the fact that successive administrations have claimed to want to reorient US policy away
0:55.9	from our old Cold War approach and towards the new priorities arising in the Asia Pacific.
1:02.8	Well, my guest this week are co-authors of a book on US Grand Strategy who argue that despite
1:07.5	acknowledging the scale of these challenges, both Democratic and Republican presidents
1:11.8	alike in the last few years have missed opportunities to do something about it. In their book,
1:17.9	The Lost Decade, the U.S. pivot to Asia and the rise of Chinese power, Robert Blackwell and
1:23.0	Richard Fontaine traced the shift in U.S. policy, at least rhetorical policy, towards the Asia
1:28.7	Pacific. It began, they say, with Barack Obama's so-called pivot to Asia. In 2011, Donald Trump
	...

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