The Biden administration fundamentally reshaped how the United States competes with China by placing technology at the center of great-power rivalry, treating semiconductor and artificial intelligence leadership as the decisive arena rather than a secondary concern. A new Carnegie Endowment analysis reveals how the White House translated this strategic vision into operational reality across four years, creating institutional structures and diplomatic guardrails designed to outlast any single administration. Why Did Biden Make Technology the Core of China Competition? When Joe Biden took office in January 2021, U.S.-China relations had deteriorated significantly. The previous administration had sharpened awareness of the China challenge but left behind an underdeveloped national strategy and limited institutional capacity to execute it. Biden officials inherited a relationship in free fall, with mutual trust eroded and strategic communication nearly nonexistent. Rather than pursuing dominance, which both sides recognized would be catastrophically costly, Biden's team adopted a framework for "competitive coexistence." This meant preserving U.S. advantages while avoiding war. The administration accepted that China and the Chinese Communist Party were permanent features of the geopolitical landscape and that neither nation could meaningfully defeat the other without unacceptable costs. Technology became the center of gravity for this strategy. The Biden team systematized earlier efforts by deploying export controls, industrial policy, and alliance coordination to protect U.S. leadership in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and advanced manufacturing. For the first time in decades, technological advantage was treated as the decisive arena of great-power rivalry, representing one of the administration's most consequential legacies. How Did the Administration Operationalize Its China Strategy? The gap between strategy and execution proved to be the real challenge. The Biden team had to translate a vision developed in White House policy halls into operational plans through a sprawling interagency apparatus, coordinate with allies, and respond to a Chinese government navigating its own internal pressures and strategic choices. The resulting implementation encompassed both significant achievements and missed opportunities. The administration pursued three interconnected approaches: - Export Controls and Industrial Policy: The White House deployed systematic export controls on advanced semiconductors and AI-related technologies, paired with domestic industrial policy investments to strengthen U.S. manufacturing capacity and reduce dependence on foreign supply chains. - Alliance Coordination: Security ties with Japan, Australia, India, and the Philippines deepened, with improved military coordination and shared technology standards designed to create a competitive advantage through allied networks rather than unilateral dominance. - Strategic Diplomacy: Rather than treating dialogue as a concession, the administration used sustained diplomacy, especially in its second half, to reduce misperception and manage risk through restored strategic communications channels and resumed military-to-military contacts. This dual-track approach proved essential. The administration paired vigorous competition on technology, military posture, and economic resilience with deliberate restraint. Without the diplomatic track, the competitive strategy would have been more dangerous and less stable. What Institutional Lessons Emerged From Implementation? The most meaningful challenge documented in the Carnegie analysis was not one of tools, resources, or even political goals, though all of these mattered enormously. Instead, the enormous importance of institutional design and policy practice loomed largest. The central question became: How can a democracy develop and sustain a long-term strategy toward a rival power across administrations, budget cycles, election years, and under the relentless pressure of unavoidable crises ? The Biden team grappled with this fundamental problem of American statecraft. They set out to impose greater coherence, discipline, and durability on the U.S. approach to China competition. This institutional focus proved significant because it meant the strategy could potentially survive transitions between administrations. Indeed, the framework has endured even in the second Trump administration, albeit with some adjustments, suggesting that the institutional architecture created some durability. The administration also emphasized caution about market opening, judging the domestic costs to outweigh the alliance-building benefits. This reflected a recognition that technology competition required protecting domestic industrial capacity and workforce interests, not simply pursuing traditional free-trade alliance benefits. How Does This Compare to Cold War Strategic Competition? The Carnegie analysis draws an instructive parallel to the Cold War. Just as the fictional Captain Kirk and the Romulan commander in the 1966 Star Trek episode "Balance of Terror" maintained a fragile peace through patterns of behavior, feints, and restraint, the U.S.-China relationship requires similar dynamics. Neither superpower wanted war, both feared appearing weak, and the neutral zone between them was upheld by mutual interest in maintaining fragile peace even as the two powers competed. Sixty years later, that fictional standoff holds lessons for the evolving competitive dynamic between the United States and China. Declarations of "competition, not conflict" alone rarely prevent a slide from rivalry to war. What maintains or frays a fragile peace are decisions: executive judgments necessarily made with incomplete information or reached under uncertainty, by actors on both sides decoding ambiguous signals as much as they are sending them. The Biden administration's approach produced tangible gains in this regard. Strategic communications channels were restored, military-to-military contacts resumed, and improved crisis management mechanisms were established. The administration also secured renewed Chinese cooperation on fentanyl enforcement, demonstrating that competition and cooperation could coexist within a managed framework. What Does This Mean for Future U.S.-China Relations? The Biden team's most important insight was that the United States must navigate a reality of competition with Beijing and continuing entanglement with China that will play an outsized role in defining the international order for decades or longer. The crew of the Enterprise survived their encounter with the Romulans without triggering a wider war not because they were more powerful, but because they understood their competitor and kept attention firmly trained on their larger objective. The institutional design and policy practices developed during the Biden administration offer a template for how democracies can sustain long-term strategies toward rival powers. The emphasis on technology competition paired with diplomatic restraint, alliance coordination, and institutional durability suggests that great-power rivalry need not inevitably escalate to conflict if managed through deliberate structures and practices. The most consequential legacy may not be any single policy decision but rather the framework itself: the recognition that technology is the decisive arena of competition, that alliances amplify advantage, that diplomacy reduces miscalculation risk, and that institutional design matters more than any individual administration's preferences. As the U.S.-China relationship continues to evolve, this structural approach to managing competition while avoiding catastrophic conflict will likely shape American statecraft for years to come.
