China Dominates the Situation Room But Not the Campaign Trail

Good evening! Tonight, my colleague David Sanger, a White House and national security correspondent, is here with a look at what we are not hearing on the campaign trail about the nation’s biggest geopolitical challenge: China.

Ask President Biden — or just about anyone in the national security firmament of the United States — about America’s most potent geopolitical challenge over the next few decades, and you are bound to get a near-unanimous answer: China.

The argument is familiar. The United States has never before faced a competitor who challenges it on so many fronts. Xi Jinping’s China is America’s only real technological competitor, in everything from artificial intelligence to semiconductors, electric cars to biological sciences. The country has more than doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal in the past few years, and a new partnership it has formed with Russia could upend every assumption about how America defends itself.

Then there’s the economy. If, a few years ago, American economists worried about China’s rapid rise, today they worry about its slowdown, and the overhang of industrial production that is flooding the world with excess goods, with potentially disastrous consequences.

There’s also the very real risk of war over Taiwan. There’s TikTok. The list goes on.

Yet when the issue comes up on the campaign trail at all, it’s framed chiefly as an economic threat. Thornier discussions of China’s role as a broad strategic competitor, with ambitions that are already forcing the United States to change how it prepares its workers, shapes its investments and restructures its defenses, have fallen largely by the wayside.

China has fallen victim to what I call Situation Room-Campaign Trail disequilibrium. It works