Rush Doshi

The argument about China usually splits into two camps. One says Beijing has a coherent, decades-long plan to replace the United States as the world’s leading power. The other says we are pattern-matching onto noise — projecting strategic genius onto a government that mostly improvises and reacts. Rush Doshi’s contribution was to stop speculating and go to the source. For The Long Game, he assembled a corpus of Communist Party congress reports, leaders’ memoirs, internal speeches, and documents collected from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, built a hierarchy ranking which texts actually carry authority, and read the Party’s strategy in the language it writes it in.

What he found was a plan — not a conspiracy, but a deliberate, sequenced strategy pursued across three leaders and three decades. The book was influential enough that its author was hired to help counter the strategy he had documented, serving on the Biden National Security Council as the deputy in charge of China and Taiwan. Few works of contemporary strategy have travelled so directly from the page to the situation room.

Scholar, Then Practitioner, Then Scholar Again¶

Doshi took his undergraduate degree at Princeton and his doctorate at Harvard, with a Fulbright year in China and fluent Mandarin — the methodological foundation of everything he does. Before government he was a fellow at the Brookings Institution and at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. From 2021 to 2024 he served on the National Security Council as Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan, helping stand up the NSC’s first dedicated China directorate and, for a stretch, acting as the lead coordinator of the AUKUS submarine negotiations. He is now the C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations, and teaches at Georgetown.

His signature is method. Doshi insists on reading the Party in its own words rather than inferring its intentions from its actions, and on weighting documents by their authority — a Party congress report counts for more than a think-tank op-ed. At CFR he is institutionalising this approach through an open-source effort to acquire, digitise, and translate Chinese-language material at scale, filling a gap left when the US government wound down much of its own open-source translation work over a decade ago. The bet is simple: most analysts cannot read what Beijing actually says, so whoever does has an edge.

Blunt, Build, Expand¶

The Long Game’s architecture is its three-phase strategy, and its cleverest move is to tie each phase to a shock that reset Beijing’s perception of the United States.

The first phase, blunting (roughly 1989–2008), was born of a triple trauma: Tiananmen, the display of American military dominance in the Gulf War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Suddenly the United States looked less like a partner than a threat. Beijing’s response, captured in Deng Xiaoping’s dictum to “hide capabilities and bide time,” was to quietly reduce American leverage over China — pursuing naval denial rather than control, joining regional bodies to constrain American freedom of action, and seeking the trade status that would limit Washington’s financial grip.

The second phase, building (roughly 2008–2016), was triggered by the global financial crisis, which Beijing read as evidence that American power was waning faster than expected. Now China began constructing the foundations of regional hegemony: moving from sea denial toward sea control, launching the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and elevating a Sino-centric vision of regional order.

The third phase, expanding (from around 2016–17), was set off by Brexit and Trump’s first election, which Xi Jinping distilled into the slogan that the world was undergoing “great changes unseen in a century” — code for accelerating Western decline. The regional playbook went global: the Belt and Road Initiative, bids to lead international institutions, military reach beyond Asia.

The elegance of the framework is that it maps onto leadership eras — blunting under Deng and Jiang, building under Hu, expanding under Xi — which lets Doshi argue the strategy is institutional and trans-leader, not the personal project of one man. China, in his telling, seeks to displace American “forms of control” — military, political, economic — without ever matching the United States ship-for-ship or dollar-for-dollar. It is asymmetric displacement, and it is the clearest answer yet offered to the question the Thucydides Trap only poses.

From the Book to the Situation Room¶

Inside the Biden NSC, Doshi’s thinking helped shape the strategy summarised as “invest, align, compete” — invest at home through industrial policy, align with allies through the Quad and AUKUS and the trilaterals, and compete directly through export controls and investment screening. A central aim, consistent with his book, was to puncture Beijing’s narrative of irreversible American decline — the very perception his framework identifies as the engine of China’s expanding phase.

He is the most articulate defender of managed competition: rivalry with guardrails, aimed not at victory or collapse but at a durable, livable equilibrium. He has argued that the goal of US–China policy should be a “steady state” rather than an “end state,” and described the 2023 Biden–Xi summit as an effort to put a floor under the relationship. That puts him on one side of the sharpest fault line in the current debate — against the school, associated with Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher, that argues America should aim to win the contest outright by pressuring the Party until its system fails. Doshi’s rebuttal is realist to the core: a power convinced its rival seeks total victory has no reason to show restraint, and betting a strategy on an adversary’s collapse is reckless.

The Scale Problem¶

Since leaving government, Doshi’s work has converged on a single argument: America is now more likely to underestimate China than to overestimate it, and the answer is allied scale. In a widely discussed 2025 essay with Kurt Campbell, he argued that US strategic discourse swings uselessly between “America in decline” and “America ascendant,” when the truth is that China can be simultaneously troubled at home and formidable abroad.

China’s decisive advantage, in this telling, is manufacturing scale — its dominance of shipbuilding, steel, batteries, electric vehicles, solar panels, processed rare earths, and the industrial base that underwrites military power. America cannot out-produce China alone. But the United States and its allies together comfortably outscale it — and so the central task of American strategy becomes converting that theoretical combined weight into real, pooled capacity: allied shipbuilding, deeper technology-sharing, treating alliances as platforms for production rather than just security guarantees. It is a realist’s answer to a structural problem, and it doubles as a critique of both parties — of Biden for tolerating allied free-riding, and of Trump-era coercion for fracturing the very alliance system that is America’s only scale advantage.

The Galápagos Warning¶

Doshi’s scale argument carries a geographic edge that the realists who founded geopolitics would recognise. If the United States retreats from Eurasia — pulling back to the Western Hemisphere and treating the world’s largest landmass as someone else’s problem — then China, he warns, could organise the Eurasian “world island” around itself, reconstituting global trade and technology on Beijing’s terms and leaving America prosperous but strategically marooned, a kind of Galápagos: rich, isolated, and irrelevant to the evolution happening everywhere else. It is Mackinder’s nightmare updated for an age of supply chains rather than railways.

The instruments of that contest, in his recent writing, are increasingly economic and technological. He reads China’s retaliatory export controls on processed rare earths as Beijing’s own version of the American playbook — the weaponization of a chokepoint, turned back on its inventor. And he treats artificial intelligence as the live test of the scale thesis: the United States leads in frontier models, capital, and talent, but a technological lead cannot be converted into durable advantage without the manufacturing and energy base to deploy it at scale — which is precisely where China’s industrial weight tells, and precisely why allied coordination, not American effort alone, is the hinge of the whole argument. It is a realist’s diagnosis: ideas and intentions matter less than the distribution of material capability, and the side that can build at scale sets the terms.

The Critics¶

The scholarly pushback on The Long Game is serious and clusters on one point: the risk of reading too much coherence into the Party. Critics invoke the old warning that observers tend to see rivals as more centralised and disciplined than they really are, and argue that the dominant model of Chinese politics — fragmented, factional, improvised — sits awkwardly with Doshi’s tidy three-phase design. The China scholar Wang Jisi has questioned whether Beijing has a unified grand strategy at all, noting it has never published one. Others, like Peter Mattis, praise the book’s rigor while faulting specific calls and its light treatment of internal Party politics.

The fair verdict is that Doshi built the strongest possible case for intentionality, sourced from the Party’s own words — and that the case is contestable precisely because authoritarian intentions always are. Even his critics tend to call it the most important recent book on Chinese strategy.

Why He Matters¶

Doshi changed the terms of the China debate by replacing speculation with evidence, and then proved the evidence mattered by carrying it into government. His framework — asymmetric displacement across three phases — is now the default lens through which Washington reads Beijing, and his current argument about allied scale may prove the more durable contribution. Whether managed competition can hold, or whether the relationship slides toward the confrontation he warns against, is the open question of great-power competition — and Doshi has done more than anyone to define its terms.

Sources & Further Reading¶

• “The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order” (2021) — the foundational text; the three-phase strategy read from Party documents. (See Recommended Reading below.)

• “Underestimating China: Why America Needs a New Strategy of Allied Scale” by Kurt Campbell & Rush Doshi, Foreign Affairs (2025) — his flagship recent essay on scale and alliances.

• “What Does America Want From China?” Foreign Affairs — Doshi’s defence of managed competition against the “victory” school of Pottinger and Gallagher.

• Peter Mattis, “A Thorough Explanation of China’s Long-Term Strategy,” War on the Rocks — the most substantive expert review, admiring and critical in equal measure.

• The CFR China Strategy Initiative — Doshi’s current platform, including his open-source effort to translate Chinese strategic writing at scale.