The West Should Stay Focused on Geoeconomic Rivalry With China

As China leveraged its state capitalist model to become a global superpower, it increasingly challenged the market-oriented basis of the liberal economic order founded by the United States and its allies 75 years ago. When this competition between the Chinese and Western economic systems gained steam in the 2010s, the main battlefield of international relations also began to shift from the classical realm of security to the normally “civilian” fields of trade, investment, technology and finance—in other words, from geopolitics to geoeconomics.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, military force is front and center once again, even before the United States and its European and Asian allies have been able to cement a common strategy toward China’s economic rise. So is the age of geoeconomics, in which the balance of power is determined by the systemic economic rivalry between China and the West, over before it ever began? Three developments would seem to lend credence to this idea.