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Former National Security Council official Rush Doshi blasted the Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs on China and warned that the United States is losing ground in global competition at a Harvard Institute of Politics forum on Wednesday.
“If you look at the Trump administration’s approach, there is a belief that, if you just raise the tariffs, China’s own internal contradictions, weaknesses, and its so-called reliance on U.S. markets will drive it into the ground,” Doshi said.
“It’s never going to be like that,” he added.
While Doshi disagreed with the current tariffs on China, he said that there should be strategic efforts to diminish Chinese power and control in global markets.
“That does not mean we shouldn’t have tariffs,” Doshi said. “It just means we should understand the scale and competence of our opponent.”
Doshi, who helped draft the Biden administration’s China strategy and served as Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan on the NSC, said the United States faced a pivotal moment at the start of the Biden administration in the early 2020s.
“This decade was going to be a decisive decade in the competition with China,” he said.
“What that meant practically was that America could fall behind China technologically, become dependent on China economically, and could be defeated by China militarily,” Doshi added.
During the conversation moderated by Rana Mitter, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, Doshi characterized China’s foreign policy as a calculated, long-term “grand strategy” aimed at reshaping the international order, rather than a series of reactionary moves.
“China’s strategy has evolved through a series of successive shocks,” Doshi said, citing Tiananmen Square, the Gulf War, and the fall of the Soviet Union.
According to Doshi, Chinese leaders have concluded “American power was on the descent.”
“Brexit, the election of Trump, and the Covid-19 pandemic — these three events solidified in the minds of communists and Leninists and nationalists: the East is rising, and the West is falling,” he said.
Doshi said that economically, China has been “building the foundations for Chinese economic leadership within Asia,” while pursuing avenues that position the country to “be more favorable towards autocracy.”
While China begins to align itself with regimes in Russia, Iran, and North Korea, creating a new authoritarian bloc, Doshi emphasized the need for the U.S. to form new international alliances with nation’s that share common values.
“The fundamental idea behind allied scale is humility,” he said. “To get where we want to go we are going to need help.”
Doshi said to build effective alliances at scale the United States must go “radically further,” than the Biden administration’s attempts through AUKUS, a trilateral security partnership among the U.S., United Kingdom and Australia, and the Quad, a security alliance between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States.
“We have to fundamentally reimagine our alliances,” he said. “They have been to be platforms for pooling the capacity of the free world.”
Under the blanked global tariffs that the Trump administration put in place Doshi said it is easy to believe that the United States is “further away from that vision than ever before.” But he remains optimistic that the White House will enter into good faith negotiations with other countries and repair ties.
“I don’t think the story is over,” he said. “It just might be beginning.”
