【英文】外交关系委员会报告：东亚大国竞争（44页）

With the arrival of the Joe Biden administration and the evolution— once again—of a U.S. grand strategy under a new president, a familiar  question emerges: after Donald Trump, what idea (or set of ideas) will  drive national security policy? The Trump administration replaced the  “global war on terror” with “great power competition” as the organizing principle of U.S. national security policy and framed U.S.-China  relations as a “strategic competition.”1  Beijing assumed such centrality  because Trump largely discounted threats from Moscow and because  Beijing’s external activism and use of coercion grew in scope and frequency. The Biden administration’s early statements and actions indicate it has accepted the frame of strategic competition with China— “extreme competition” in the words of President Biden—but that the  policy expressions within this framework will difer substantially from  its predecessors. 

The trajectory of U.S. strategy and policy toward China is perhaps  the most salient issue for the geopolitics of East Asia in the coming  decades. This region, more than any other, not only is the crucible for  U.S.-China competition but will also be the recipient of the resulting  dynamics. U.S.-China relations thus will have a defning infuence on  the distribution of power across East Asia at the very time that the  region becomes the center of global politics, as Europe was during  the Cold War. It has become a truism to note that no one in Asia wants  to choose between Washington and Beijing and no one wants Beijing  to dominate. Asia’s geopolitical reality will be the space between  these views. Yet the region’s lingering questions about American  commitment and capability will muddle the choices for Asian  policymakers, as do projections of China’s growth and infuence.