Just days before the White House released the United States’ new National Security Strategy in October, President Joe Biden’s administration announced sweeping export restrictions aimed at stopping China from advancing technologically.
“The world is changing,” the National Security Strategy observes — and the U.S. is evidently responding by all but declaring economic war on China, using trade as its primary weapon.
Yet this development received scant mainstream media coverage. As Edward Luce of the Financial Times notes, “a superpower declared war on a great power and nobody noticed.” This is perhaps not surprising, given the fickleness of the news cycle and the competing spectacles of Twitter layoffs and cryptocurrency meltdowns. But the new U.S. policy toward China will be far more consequential than either of those stories.