This article was written by IWP alumnus Nathan Hitchen (’19).
If the United States is to take the initiative in its great power competition with China, we should study America’s last victorious grand strategy. The Reagan administration moved the Cold War to its endgame by taking the initiative through measures short of warfare, and that era’s technology competition holds lessons relevant for a strategy of geoeconomics today. At stake in the Sino-American rivalry is who gets to tilt the table of the twenty-first century and slide trillions of dollars of prosperity and international political influence toward a center of gravity in Beijing or Washington.