Break Off This China Engagement

When he meets Chinese general secretary Xi later today in the San Francisco Bay Area, President Biden might bring about the culmination of a yearlong foreign-policy shift: America’s return to an approach to China guided primarily by diplomatic engagement rather than competition.

By 2020, both parties seemed to have learned from bitter experience that the Chinese Communist Party is a threat to the United States. The Biden administration continues to pay lip service to the new consensus, saying that it is merely trying to manage the competition and deliberately avoiding the word “engagement.” And Biden has taken some useful steps, including the administration’s crackdown on China’s access to advanced chips and its work to build up U.S.-led alliances across the world.